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After a year of punishing stock market corrections, it isn't surprising while Streaming Media West was bigger than ever, it was also leaner and meaner.
Whereas the past shows emphasized the promise of streaming media, last month's show in San Jose markedly emphasized the bottom line. A full show floor featured row after row of vendors hawking networking products, services and software to make the business of streaming media cheaper, faster and easier for content producers.
Among the companies promising to make streaming media content cheaper to distribute was newborn Aerocast, which formally debuted at the show with backing from heavy hitters Motorola Inc. and Liberty Media Corp. The company promises to cut streaming media delivery costs to one fifth of the going rate using a mesh of servers located on network outskirts, while firing off content at rates between 300 kilobits per second to 1.5 megabits per second to broadband users.
Cutting cost was also the aim of a new coalition of major players pushing for adoption of open standards for Internet Protocol streaming media. The Internet Streaming Media Alliance, backed by Cisco Systems Inc., Apple Corp, Kasenna Inc., Royal Philips Electronics and Sun Microsystems Inc., is something of a challenge to the dominant proprietary streaming media formats peddled by market leaders Real Networks and Microsoft Corp..
The coalition argues many content developers have been hamstrung in trying to create rich media because they must duplicate the content in several formats. Having one format based on the new MPEG-4 multimedia standard, in contrast, could simplify things immensely, they say.
Not surprisingly, neither Real nor Microsoft joined the coalition, leaving many to wonder if the coalition will gain enough support to be effective.
The drive to make streaming media better business also meant expanding the market target from its entertainment roots to corporate uses. That was brought home by Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer and Yahoo! Inc. CEO Jerry Yang, who both emphasized in their keynote speeches a shift within their companies to create streaming media products for corporate applications.
"The enterprise market has literally doubled every year of its existence," Ballmer says. "There will be a day, I promise you, where every corporation will view it as routine to communicate with its employees via streaming media over the corporate intranet. I think that should already be routine."
During the show Yahoo! announced its new Webcast Studio service, an automated Website allowing corporate customers to set up a Webcast or corporate streaming event themselves. In a series of screens, business customers can select the presentation features, including the video display, the graphics color and layout and interactive elements such as chat.
Yahoo!'s aim is to make creating a live event easy without spending two weeks in planning or paying a pricey Web production company to design and run the Webcast. That could be a boom for companies planning product launches, presentations or companywide meetings.
"What they want is frequency," says Stan Woodward, vice president of business services. "But it's good because if we can put the tools in their hands, and Ford can do a product launch whenever they want with 48 hours notice, and we can turn around a Grinch site, then you get this frequency and what you end up with is the 100,000 channel set-top."
His boss echoes the importance of creating tools to help businesses tap into the Web in his keynote speech.
"Once people start to realize the fact they can take advantage of the tool sets and the technology advances to enable them to become their own content and services creators," Yang says.
While much attention is focused on entertainment streaming, Yahoo! is aware of the potential for business applications.
"One of the things I think people have pointed to is that streaming is in fact one of the strong areas for growth in streaming is the business to business and how business can use this within its walls-how they use streaming services," Yang says. "And we agree with them-we've seen some tremendous experiences."
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