ABC and HP team up to join the digital revolution and produce...a newspaper?

The capacity of technology to upheave media companies and legacy hardware manufacturers is being felt all too painfully, so it was only a matter of time before two of the giants paired up to unearth a solution.Print, radio, and television companies have been severely penalised for the slow adoption of digital technologies, watching revenues and audiences drift online where content is freely distributed in real-time.Meanwhile manufacturers of commodity technologies (such as printers) are struggling to find ways to stand out from the crowd and inspire consumers who demand cool, simple products, that are also cheap and high-quality.It’s a natural fit then, that the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has teamed up with printer manufacturer HP to use breathe new life into their existing assets in order to reach new consumers and retain existing ones.HP is attempting to iPhonify the printer by providing an ecosystem where developers can create unique applications for web-connected printers. Meanwhile, ABC wants to use digital technologies to better exploit the value of its vast journalist and production resources.The partnership has seen a new application developed by HP, which allows the ABC to automatically push out the latest news headlines direct to a printer.The result is a newsletter-style page featuring pictures and text from online stories, which looks exactly like the front page of ABC.net.au/news, according to ABC digital content development general manager Robert Hutchinson.

For the ABC, this is just the latest in a string of technology trials to engage new audiences, he said.“The ABC often does a lot of partnering with early concepts, we were a launch partner on iTunes, and with many of the telcos for original portal services,” he said.“We're interested in seeing how audiences react with our content and how it can be presented, learning from those experiences, and see how we can turn into the next big idea.”It’s still very early days and the ABC is yet to receive usage statistics from HP - or if it’s being used at all - but already the news printing experiment has provided some insights into another hot area of technology: tablets.It might seem quite unlikely that a printer app could inform the development of tablet software but Mr Hutchinson said the exercise has already taught him about how online news stories can be automatically formatted to fit neatly in a rectangle shape, such as a tablet.“Its fascinating to see the ABC in print. It makes us think about the possibilities and how that might translate to the tablet environment.”In the short- term, he believes that internet-enabled printers can compete with tablets and other screens as a vehicle to deliver content to new audiences, such as commuters printing off articles to read on the train, or children having news stories printed off to study in school.“In reality a lot of people don’t have tablets and that will take several years to become a mainstream consumer device,” he said.“The printer is often in the periphery but it has the potential to reach a massive user base as these new printers get rolled out.”