Streaming Media - April/May 2008 - (Page 58)

blasts from the past 2005 NOV. 29 BBC TURNS TO P2P FOR VOD This is the story of how one of the West’s most respected content brands turned to technology first pioneered by pirates to offer what could be one of the most far-reaching commitments by a major broadcaster to on-demand TV. Maybe. The “maybe” comes in the form of a constantly reiterated tone of caution emanating from the organization in question, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), regarding the scope of the proposed service, MyBBCPlayer. —Gary Flood DEC. 6 ADOBE COMPLETES MACROMEDIA ACQUISITION The BBC was an early adopter of P2P delivery, using the technology to deliver content to its MyBBCPlayer starting in 2005. When Adobe announced its plans to acquire Macromedia prior to NAB 2005, speculation immediately began regarding which tools from Macromedia and Adobe would survive and which would see end-of-life announcements. After Adobe announced completion of the Macromedia acquisition on Dec. 3, the combined company wasted little time answering the question. The initial results are a bit surprising: a Design Bundle, which includes Adobe Creative Suite 2 (CS2) and Macromedia Flash Professional 8; a Video Bundle, which will be released in 2006 and is expected to combine Adobe Premiere and Macromedia Flash Professional 8; and a Web Bundle. Adobe’s Web Bundle is the most ambitious of the three bundles, combining the full Adobe Creative Suite 2 (CS2) Premium suite of products with the full Macromedia Studio 8 suite. —TS 2006 FEB. 22 MOBILE DTV ALLIANCE FORMED TO PROMOTE BEST PRACTICES FOR DVB-H STANDARD On Jan. 23, 2006, six leading companies in the mobile market joined together to form the Mobile Digital Television (DTV) Alliance in order to encourage the development and deployment of the Digital Video Broadcast-Handheld (DVB-H) standard in the U.S. —Geoff Daily APRIL 11 ABC TAKES HIT SHOWS ONLINE—FOR FREE Starting in May, ABC will present free, on-demand streams of some of the network’s most popular shows. The streams, which will be available the day after the shows appear on broadcast TV, will feature ads that cannot be skipped by viewers. In a press release Monday, the Disney-ABC Television Group called the planned offering a “two-month-long experiment.” —ESR MAY 15 STREAMING IN THE EUROPEAN B2B SPACE: THE NEXT BIG OPPORTUNITY Streaming media has made huge progress in the last 5 years, becoming an established distribution platform for consumer content. As AOL chairman and CEO Jonathan Miller said in January, “In Europe, 61% (of users) use their computers to watch video.” The BBC’s launch of a cross-section of programming onto a streaming platform over the last 12 months has also greatly enhanced the perceived acceptability of streaming as a method of distribution. But streaming has not as yet become a true mass-market proposition. There is still, however, significant development required in the European market to turn it into a real platform of choice for business-to-business (B2B) communications. —Jake Ward ABC started a trend in April 2006 when it began offering many of its shows online for free within 24 hours of their original TV broadcast. JULY 26 LIMELIGHT NETWORKS AND PANTHER EXPRESS EACH ANNOUNCE MAJOR FUNDING ROUNDS Six million dollars here. $130 million there. What’s a few bucks among venture capitalists? While we might not be seeing a repeat of the money-throwing days that preceded the dot-com bust (and thank goodness for that), two announcements this week should serve as proof that digital video is now fulfilling the promise that so many of us have seen in it for years. Limelight Networks just completed a $130 million equity financing round it just completed with Goldman Sachs Capital Partners. That’s one of the largest venture capital investments in any sector during 2006, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ MoneyTree Report. Also announced this week was the Limelight Networks raised completion of a $6 million round of private equity financing by Greylock Partners $130 million from in Panther Express, a relative upstart in the CDN world. The company was founded Goldman Sachs in in 2005 by Kevin Ryan and Dwight Merriman, former CEO and CTO of DoubleClick, 2006, then went public in 2007. respectively. —ESR 58 STREAMING MEDIA April/May 2008

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Streaming Media - April/May 2008 Table of Contents Beyond the Bottom Line Technology and Business Trends by the Numbers (Not So) Instant Karma MSN Autos Revs Up Video Production Dow Finds the Right Streaming Chemistry Why Video Is Changing the World A Decade of StreamingMedia.com What's Your Digital Media Strategy? Blasts From the Past: A Decade (Almost) of StreamingMedia.com Headlines Analyze That A League of Their Own: Streaming Media All-Stars Where Are They Now? Wanted: Sexy HDTV That Connects to the Internet and Services All DVRs Anystream Agility Inlet Technologies Spinnaker S3000

Streaming Media - April/May 2008

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