Streaming Media - 2008 Industry Sourcebook - (Page 30) industry update RawFlow advertisements. At the time of the partnership, Broadband noted its comScore MediaMetrix score of 40 million monthly unique users and 800 million video streams per month. “The explosive growth of online video has prompted content creators and advertisers to look to this medium as the next frontier in entertainment,” said Broadband Enterprises CEO Matt Wasserlauf. “[Our] distribution and ad serving capabilities, combined with GoFish’s original video programming, create an extremely compelling platform with which to capitalize on this medium as the next frontier in entertainment.” In March, Wizzard Software announced it had acquired the podcasting company Webmayhem, Inc., which was doing business as Liberated Syndication. The goal, according to Wizzard, was to “create the largest podcasting distribution network in the world,” which is no small feat as the companies (and podcasting in general) have only been around for a few years. At the time of acquisition, Liberated delivered almost 2 million audio and video shows per day for a customer base of nearly 6,000 independent and commercial content producers. The content, which Liberated dubbed as “radio- and televisionstyle internet shows,” included almost one-third of the top 25 podcasts in all iTunes categories, including Tiki Bar TV, IndieFeed, and Keith & the Girl, as well as various 2008 presidential candidates and companies such as National Public Radio. Wizzard intends to monetize podcasting content with a blend of speech technologies, which aid in automated advertisement selection, and geographical targeting capabilities. Another aggregator, of sorts, also made news in 2007 as Sling Media’s Slingbox concept first drew the ire of Major League Baseball with its Clip+Slip clip-sharing technology, then was 30 STREAMING MEDIA INDUSTRY SOURCEBOOK 2008 scooped up by Echostar, owner of the Dish Network, in a move that will put Sling technology into Echostar boxes while also dividing Sling’s entertainment division and Dish into a separate company from the technology-focused main company. Sling Media’s box allows viewers to watch their local television content regardless of where they are—more of a placeshifting than the timeshifting made possible by VCRs and DVRs. Even the big technology companies are getting into media entertainment delivery: Level 3, Cisco, Ericsson, and others have identified the streaming and online media entertainment market as a key growth segment. Akamai, which has been around this space for a while, has made key acquisitions to accelerate media delivery, and even AT&T has announced an interest, as it did several times during the videoconferencing and early internet protocol television (IPTV) boom. That latter announcement makes some industry pundits suspect. “It took Level 3 acquiring the CDN assets of SAVVIS and 12 months of buildout just to get a basic offering out the door,” said Streaming Media’s Dan Rayburn on his Business of Video blog. “If AT&T does not acquire anyone, how long would it take them to be at even 30% of the capacity Akamai is at today? They can’t do that in a year. And what about streaming support? Whatever limited CDN service AT&T has today, it does not support delivery via streaming, live or on-demand, has no support for Flash, no content management system, no video reporting etc … all things Akamai and others have today.” Finally—and this thrills my heart—one of the pirates of the industry was able to do a keynote at Streaming Media West. Ashwin Navin, CEO of BitTorrent, Inc., provided the opening keynote in San Jose, talking about BitTorrent DNA, the company’s file swarming/file segmentation delivery system. Even the outlaws are going legit. In conclusion, 2007’s bang and whimper are indicative of the continued shift to new mediums, as well as the replication of new media on traditional broadcast technologies such as TV, cable, and even pay-per-view. From consumer-generated content to big media’s tentative but determined embrace of the web as a delivery medium, streaming media continues to move forward. And, while U.S. broadband deployment continues to lag behind that of many other first-world countries, the continued advancements in codecs and the consumer’s insatiable appetite for creating and consuming content combined in 2007 to show a glimpse of the path forward for streaming and rich media. bio Tim Siglin (writer@braintrustdigital.com) writes and consults on digital media business models and "go to market" strategies. He is chairman of Braintrust Digital, a digital media production company, and co-founder of consulting firm Transitions, Inc. Comments? Contact us at letters@streamingmedia.com, or check the masthead for other ways to contact us.
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.