The 2009 Streaming Media Dream Team
Stefan Richter, Editor Flashcomgur.com; Founder, muchosmedia.com
Previous job titles:
"I have previously worked for monster.com, and held the position of VP of Application development at POPview. But I soon realised that employment did not give me the freedom to explore and be creative as much as I'd liked, and I haven't looked back since starting my own business a few years ago."
Proudest achievements:
"That's a tricky question. I still get a kick out of it when I see my applications being used by a large group of people, and if the feedback is very positive. I've heard that life's too short for bad software, and I try to do my bit to make working with web applications a little less frustrating."
Next big thing:
"Real-time enabled web applications. I've recently launched Scribblar.com, an online collaboration platform that turns out to be very popular with teachers and tutors. I believe that the web will turn much more towards real-time enabled applications, and the benefits of that will be huge. Twitter comes close to real-time, and I believe we will see a lot of innovation in that space over the coming years."
Biggest trend in online video:
"Live video, no doubt. Not only are we now able to offer a compelling live experience, but we can also get end users involved. It is possible to have feedback loops to the event, be it via text chat, webcam feeds or audio. I do wonder why these capabilities have not been exploited to greater effect. I know I'm repeating myself, but real-time features are what viewers will soon expect, and it's what they've started asking for already. The time of a contextually detached video window somewhere on a web page are over."
Biggest challenge facing the industry:
"Common standards. Video on the web is a bit of a mess: codecs, platforms, protocols, ad formats, statistics, measuring of ROI. Everyone is building a little tower inside their own sandboxes and we need initiatives that bring all the big players together and decide on some common standards, or at least some best practices."
Dom Robinson, Co-founder & CTO, Global-MIX
Previous job titles:
"D2 Consulting (for many years my freelance webcasting and consulting business). I started in 1996 totally freelance, then started m3u.com in 1997 and was part time CTO there until it was taken over by Global-MIX in 2008. Around 2001 I started what became Global-MIX and worked part time for that, part time for m3u.com and the rest of the time I provided my services as a consulting engineer to many clients (see below). I have only ever worked as a streaming engineer/webcaster since I left school (apart from a dark period trying to make it in the music industry!)"
Proudest achievements:
• Putting out my first stream in 1996 on a project with Netscape from the Ministry of Sound
• Streaming live Drum and Bass over a 9.6Kbps GSM cell phone link to an HP Journada as a demo of the Internet as a communications medium to the Number 10 Downing Street communications team in 1998 and subsequently providing the Prime Minister’s Office consultancy on use of Streaming for communications
• Streaming Orbital at Glastonbury Festival
• Putting Fatboy Slim and the Big Beat Boutique online regularly from 1999 through to 2006
• Being awarded Top 30 Under 30 status in 2001 by New Media Age
• Being asked by BT to design a live video distribution service for BT Vision 2004.
• Founding Global-MIX to ‘multicast enable the Internet’
• Helping to architect the American Emergency Network as a consultant
• Hitting 100m streams per month on Global-MIX and registering a patent enabling Flash, Java and Silverlight (and other RIAs) to support multicast
• Most importantly celebrating 10 years of marriage (despite the fact she’s absolutely sick of the word ‘streaming’ now!!) and subsequently having my daughter!
Next big thing:
"Interoperability architectures for CDNs, H.264 satellite backhaul systems, and multi-format presentation layer integration, deploying our patent and delivering multicast over non-multicast IP networks."
Biggest trend in online video:
• Migration from ‘application’ to ‘Rich Internet Application’
• Adoption of RTSP and H.264 widely (broadly converging broadcast and IP)
• Telco acquisition of and consolidation in CDN space
Biggest challenge facing the industry:
• Technically: Slow migration to Multicast aware IPv6 in the home. [Only two years till the IPv4 space is saturated, guys;-) ] The backbone of good linear distribution is Multicast and good linear distribution = scalable TV on the Internet.
• Commercially: Ad and sponsorship revenues not coming through to finance the creatives and rights holders while providing free content to a market that demands it free.
• Usability: I still think the screen is a very ‘flat’ space. I’m looking forward to the resurgence of interest in 3D in the context of the IP technologies.
Anthony Rose, Controller, Vision & Online Media Group, BBC
Previous job title:
• CTO, Altnet/Kazaa
Proudest achievement:
• Being part of the team that launched BBC iPlayer at Xmas 2007
Next big thing:
• Adding social interaction around BBC iPlayer programmes and across the BBC web site
Biggest trend in online video:
• Adaptive bitrate streaming - i.e. encoding content in a range of bitrates from 500Kbps through to HD, and dynamically serving each user the best format that they can consume over their internet connection at that moment.
Biggest challenge facing the industry:
Too many ideas, too few resources, too little time!
Stef van der Ziel, CEO, Jet Stream/StreamZilla
Previous job titles:
• Manager, Multimedia Services, Essent
• Creative Director/Executive Producer, IPRECOM
Proudest achievements:
• We have a very good reputation and loyal customers.
• I built a successful, still growing and immediately profitable company from scratch without loans or investors.
• We are innovative, not just with technology but also with ease of use and marketing.
Next big thing:
• Democratizing CDN technology. One should not need a dozen of specialists and a mega budget to deploy and operate a CDN. We can license our CDN technology to anyone who owns an IP network. With a bunch of regular servers and our software, a regular IT engineer can design, deploy and manage a professional, full-featured CDN. I believe it is a breakthrough in the CDN industry.
• Getting CDN services more transparent. Some people have an old fashioned definition of what a CDN is or should be. My statement is that there is no definition of a CDN. There are so many different technical solutions, so many architectural differences. So many feature differences. To be able to compare CDNs a customer needs to be able to do in-depth research on the technologies, architecture, performance and features. For that, they need more transparency. To 90% of the market, the size of a CDN is not the most important factor. What matters are performance, uptime, features, ease of use, customer support, and transparency.
• I am active in 'advocating' better cooperation between content owners and network owners, to increase QoS, volumes and to lower costs on a macro level. Content owners and the broadband operators are the most important factors in the online content value chain.
Biggest trend in online video:
“We see a trend where smaller operators are going to launch their own CDN. Hosting providers, broadband access providers, mobile operators, content owners and enterprises. Some start a CDN for defensive reasons: to take back traffic that CDNs have taken away. Others start a CDN to optimize their network. And some because they need a custom CDN that better fits their needs.”
Biggest challenge facing the industry:
"The first challenge is the internet's capacity. Although CDNs claim that they can bypass carrier and exchange bottlenecks, they still face bandwidth limitations in the ISP networks. The internet cannot handle the viewing volumes that one can do with traditional TV and radio (terrestrial, satellite). In my opinion the web is perfect for video on demand, while traditional broadcasting is a better transport medium for live tv and events. True innovation is not replacing cable or satellite with the web, but in powering a new kind of content delivery: interactive VOD.
"Broadband access providers feel they are squeezed between CDNs who want to offload mega traffic volumes and consumers who pull these extreme traffic volumes from their network with their flat-fee subscriptions. Their margins do not allow them to size the network.
"To address this, we initiated a online video working group that brings content owners and broadband operators together. They discuss capacity requirements and resources sharing. We help the ISP's to rollout CDNs in their networks. They can share and overflow each others CDN resources. And we help the content owners to deploy overlay CDNs over these CDNs. This lets them bypass traditional CDNs. The content owners get more transparency, lower costs and more control. The ISPs get more control over their own network, they can reduce network load and costs by rolling out edge servers deeper in their network. End users will get better QoS, at the same low broadband rates. The ISPs will tell CDNs to remove caches and rent the ISPs CDN resources instead to cover at least the costs of last mile delivery. CDNs may feel that this hurts their business. But if they adapt and focus on customer service they will keep their added value in the chain. ISP CDNs help them bypass the ISP metro and last mile bottlenecks.
"The second challenge is differentiation. We see a very competitive CDN market. Commodity services that compete on price and size. These technology driven, loss leading CDNs over invested, fight over patents (bad for innovation) and are agressive because they have to survive. They are focussed on each other and their internal processes. The challenge is that on the one hand the CDNs have to become more transparent so that customers can really compare CDNs on all the different qualities, and that on the other hand CDNs have to differentiate themselves: find a market, focus, be customer friendly, flexible, bring innovation and become profitable.
"The third challenge is the content business case. Paid content is still an issue. Another business model is advertised content. The largest video portals lose a lot of money. They just cannot get advertisers for the content. Advertisers do not want to be associated with content they do not know. Video portals who focus on specific audiences, or have specific content have a better chance. News video portal customers make money. Advertisers and their ad agencies do have to realize yet that online video has a much better potential than television ads.
"Customers who directly benefit from online video are enterprises who save on other communications and marketing costs. They produce corporate webcasts instead of flying in 200 shareholders. They use online Human Resources video to save on recruitment ads. They produce online product videos to save on printed manuals and shipped DVDs. They use online video because it is more effective than brochures, web pages or powerpoints. They produce training videos to save on expensive courses.
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