As someone who works for a media company, the biggest problem developers run into is cultural. Media companies think they are only about media and media partnerships and not about the entire ecosystem that delivers that media. Sadly, this means the technology responsible for storing, maintaining, delivering, and reporting on the media is often under-staffed, under-funded, and under-prioritized. They can hire all the engineers they want, but unless they're willing to listen to them and consider the entire system, that's not going to make headways on their needs.
It's not about hiring engineers, it's about looking 10-15 years ahead. At this stage, 5 years ahead would be an improvement, because most older companies seem to live quarter-to-quarter or year-to-year in their projections.<p>I'm shocked that more companies aren't trying the Google approach: load a whole bunch of ideas in a shotgun and fire them at the wall. Keep the ones that stick as betas and eventually full products, and dump failures. It's not that Google has a better ability to predict the turn of the industry, it's that they've got ten thousand projects in various stages of development from "engineer's sketchpad" to Google Labs, so whenever some new trend peeks over the horizon, their app is already half-done.
Good idea in the abstract, but whatever makes anyone think they'd listen to the engineers they'd hired?<p>The history of disruptive technology (which the Internet for media partly is, see <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology</a>) suggests that media companies pretty much are just going to die.