A Decade of StreamingMedia.com
After several years of stale or limited content on the StreamingMedia.com site, Information Today, Inc. (ITI), the new owner of Streaming Media, Inc. property, began a push in early 2004 to expand the shows and the website. A few articles had been posted over the years of 2002–2003, but the majority of the traffic was around the mailing lists that Dan Rayburn had been spearheading, which proved popular for business and technology discussions.
By late 2003, after several former clients continued to push for new go-to-market projects, I’d considered a return to consulting. I received an email from a former colleague that I’d kept in touch with; she was writing for StreamingMedia.com from time to time and asked if I’d fill in for her on occasion. After contacting Dan Rayburn to discuss the opportunity for additional writing as the magazine began to gear back up, I was put in touch with Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen, who had recently taken over editing the website on a part-time basis, and I began writing for the site.
It’s interesting to look back at those "dry years" for the website, since the articles—while fewer than before or since—really were focused and appealing. One of the interesting things about writing now versus writing then is that the sheer number of article views (the number of times an article is read) only just recently reached the level of articles from the early days. For instance, there are only four articles from 2005 and 2006 that made it into the Streaming Media Top 25 most viewed articles. Up until just recently, the top viewed article was titled "RealPlayer 8: Bells, Whistles, and Canned Content" from back in June 2000.
Even with the upper levels of articles being dominated from pre-2004, the types of articles that make the top 25, or even the top 100, tend to be about formats and codecs. For instance, the No. 3 viewed article of all time is titled "Quality Comparison: RealVideo, Windows Media Video, and Sorenson Video," from 2001, followed by "Darwin Streaming Server: Open, Functional and Free" (also 2001), and then followed by two of my favorites: "Choosing a Codec" and "Streaming vs. Downloading Video: Understanding The Differences" (Jan Ozer, 2006, and Larry Bouthillier, 2003, respectively). Recently, as a gauge of just how popular some of the new technologies are, we’ve found that simply having the word "Flash" in the title guarantees a big readership boost.
Podcasts are also making a comeback for the third time, although some of you might remember that the first time around they were called webcasts (remember, that was before RSS feeds). Readers and show attendees appreciate being able to hear analysis and interviews with key C-level industry players, and the podcasting tool has proven popular in describing content and concepts that can’t be put into words easily. And these tools let us do what we tout, using streaming and progressive downloads to educate and inform our audiences. It’s actually fun to do an audio recording these days, since the process of editing, mixing, and distributing a podcast takes significantly less time than when I began editing sound for film.
The Schwag
But the biggest draw of all isn’t the website articles, podcasts, or even the blogs or job board; it’s the conferences. What started with First Conferences and grew into something that had more than 7,700 attendees in 1999, was almost killed by Penton’s acquisition and uncertainty of how to market the show alongside its Internet World shows, has been reborn stunningly as Dan Rayburn has managed to grow the show continuously while keeping the price of a full delegate package relatively low compared to other technology trade shows and conferences. This feature of Streaming Media is by far the most telling evidence that the streaming media industry (yes, I used that word, even though one of my first post-return articles was about how this isn’t an industry at all) has rebounded and is back on track to meet expectations set for it back in 1997.
We all have our litmus tests or barometers to gauge how well something’s doing. One of mine is traffic in Silicon Valley, specifically on Highway 101. During the boom it was bumper-to-bumper traffic; then, in the early 2000/2001 time frame you could actually drive from San Jose, Calif., to San Francisco International Airport on 101 without encountering a traffic backup. Today traffic’s a bit denser and traffic slowdowns are quite common, even if it’s (thankfully) not back up to bubble-era levels.
For Dan Rayburn, executive vice president of Streaming Media, it’s the schwag, as he famously stood up and announced before a keynote at Streaming Media West 2006, clutching a lighted yo-yo. "I haven’t seen a giveaway on the show floor over 10 cents in the last few years," Rayburn said. "But this yo-yo proves we are back in the hot spot."
So I went looking and found a website (www.calmx.com/articles/bl61200.htm) that showed all the schwag gathered from the Streaming Media East 2000 show, held June 14, 2000 at the Hilton New York. Those of you who remember that show remember it was the one just prior to vacating space in favor of the Javits, given the fact that the Streaming Media East show was then consuming three floors of exhibit hall space at the hotel.
"As we journeyed through the aisles we had goals," writes the site’s host, known only as CalmX, "including finding things an East Villager is into most. On our search we were rounding a corner and we saw some innocent-looking manila bubblewrap envelopes, they were from MaxVU Media in Cleveland, Ohio and had a coupon in them that if you filled them out and sent them a tape, they would make a streaming video of your content in two different bandwidths, one lowband version and a high bandwidth version. This wins our Best of Show award."CalmX also went on to award the "Trendy Item Award to iBEAM.com, On2.com, and artesia.com, who all checked in with these delightful light balls."
Wisdom From the Show Floor
Two of the most insightful comments I’ve heard over the years came at an early show and at a more recent show. The one from the recent show was from Martin Nisenholtz, senior VP of digital operations at The New York Times Co. When he took the keynote stage on a May morning at Streaming Media East 2007, his comment could have been pulled from the early days of streaming, as he started his job just as Real was bringing tools to market that they hoped would one day revolutionize the way we distribute content.
"Arthur [Sulzberger, Jr., chairman of the New York Times Co. and publisher of the newspaper] asked me when I was interviewed in 1995 if I understood we weren’t in the print business, but that we were in the journalism business," said Nisenholtz. "Since we’re in the journalism business—even though we have a deep and consistent print business—this allows us to expand to an additive process that includes both [streaming] video and print."
I’ll be the first to admit I never thought I’d hear someone from The Gray Lady say that streaming video as a means of journalism was on equal footing with print.
The other quote came from my friend Darren Giles, who co-founded Terran Interactive as a spin-off of a tool that Giles had created for his video production business. The tool, Media Cleaner, met with early success via word of mouth and the company was eventually acquired by nonlinear editor manufacturer Media 100 and sold to Autodesk as Media 100 lost focus.
Darren was very good at describing the issues ar
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