Digitizing niche media: A fireside chat with serial entrepreneur Stephen Rhind-Tutt
When you think of technology and media in the past 30 years you most likely think of mainstream industries like music, television, movies, and newspapers transformed by devices, the cloud, and cheaper storage prices. Technology companies like Netflix, Apple, Google, and Spotify have dominated headlines and invested billions of dollars into making media easy-to-access and ubiquitous. But have you thought about other content like theater, poetry, and even comic strips and how technology is transforming them as well? You might not see headlines or read articles about technology digitizing these niche areas, but that doesn’t mean they have sat on the sidelines while their mainstream counterparts benefited from huge investments and attention.
Enter Stephen Rhind-Tutt, a serial entrepreneur who has been made a career out of using technology to help bring academic content and minority voices to the bigger audiences since the late 90’s.
While technology companies focused on disrupting a few massive industries, Stephen saw the opportunity to also help bring other types of content to the masses by digitizing them, first with CD’s then with hard disks and finally on the web. His story is truly fascinating and gives us a look into the world of technologists who help save primary sources across multiple media.
Niles recently sat down with Stephen to learn more about his early career, interest in academia, and what he is currently working on.
