by Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen
June 11, 2009

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One of the most popular articles we've recently run on StreamingMedia.com has been Jan Ozer's "Choosing an Online Video Platform," a terrific overview of the pros and cons of distributing video via UGC sites, hosting it yourself, or using an SaaS online video platform (OVP) to publish it. Jan's article was certainly timely—someone joked at Streaming Media East that "you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a new online video platform"—as more and more organizations are looking to use an OVP and are faced with more choices and thus, more confusion than ever before.

We've put together a downloadable list of Online Video Platforms on the market today, and we're continually updating it as new entrants appear. We also recently announced our first Online Video Platform Summit, a two-day event to be held during Streaming Media West that will focus exclusively on this rapidly expanding space. In addition to plenty of demos from the platforms themselves, we'll be presenting two days' worth of panel sessions and discussions aimed to educate attendees on the value that OVPs can bring to an organization.


We'll address topics such as monetization, syndication, user experience, ROI, IT integration, and the use of APIs. We're putting the program together now—in fact, we're still accepting speaker submissions until Monday—and I'm happy to announce that Larry Kless will be joining me as co-chair of the event. Larry is a 2009 Streaming Media All-Star, and is founder of Online Video Publishing [dot] com, a new media consulting firm, as well as the production manager for videoconferencing at Kaiser Permanente Northern California.

He's spoken on and moderated several panels at Streaming Media West in recent years, and recently started his own blog, which is loaded with great content about the online video industry. Check it out, and stay tuned for more information about the Online Video Platform Summit.