Stream of Consciousness: Integrate or Disintegrate

Streaming media is nothing special — and it is absolutely essential. The technology itself is ultimately only a tool for communication. Think of the telephone. Think of the fax machine. Think of the copier.Think of e-mail. If you’re going to be working in an office environment, you’d better know how to use these tools effectively. Heck, if you’re going to be alive in this century, you’d better figure out how to use these tools. Same with streaming media. That doesn’t mean, though, that you have to become an expert. Do you really know, or care, how the copier works, at its most fundamental level? I didn’t think so.

The first wave of Web publishing saw hundreds of thousands of people teaching themselves HTML. I used to teach an HTML class, back in 1995. The interesting thing about this wave of self-improvement was that every single individual who planned to use the Web to communicate felt that it was his or her obligation to learn HTML. This included secretaries, salespeople, vice presidents of marketing, and even CEOs. I still think that learning was a good thing for those people who took the classes. But knowing HTML — essentially nothing more than a typesetting language — was unnecessary for most of them. The few who did need to know HTML were the ones who wished to start new careers … to become "webmasters."

For everyone else, for those who simply wished to use the Internet or an intranet to communicate information as part of ongoing job duties, Microsoft would eventually integrate Web publishing into its standard Office suite of tools (and so would all the other office suite vendors). It’s a cinch to save a document from Microsoft Word, for example, as HTML. HTML became, as it should have been all along, an invisible part of the process, just like PostScript is an invisible part of desktop publishing for most people.

The same process of integration into common, everyday tools is about to happen to streaming media. (See Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s keynote speech at Streaming Media West 2000, at www.streamingmedia.com/video.asp?id=6875, for an overview of Microsoft’s plans in this regard.) For those who have made their living as streaming "experts," this is both a good thing and a bad thing. Just as HTML authors were able to command huge salaries in the early days of the Web, many people have built careers and businesses based on streaming media fundamentals like, for example, encoding.

At some point, though, encoding a file into streaming media formats will be as easy as clicking "Save" in as common a tool as PowerPoint. Once these relatively simple processes are built into the tools people are already using, there will be less demand for such rudimentary skills. (I’m not saying the demand will go away entirely. Just as there are companies whose entire repertoire consists of mass mimeograph services, even though everyone knows how to run a copy machine, there will still be a demand for bulk encoding, even though everyone will be able to encode.)

There is plenty of good news here for the streaming media industry — even for those who may initially see their livelihoods threatened by this kind of ease of use. Widespread streaming, in the enterprise and beyond, means that the challenges move to the next level, to the deeper integration: management of digital assets, for example. If thousands of employees are creating tens of thousands of streaming media files (training videos, presentations, "face-time memos," conference calls, etc.), somebody, or some system, will have to be in place to control the flow of information – to create and manage files, databases, distribution, network policies, and so on. This is especially true in the enterprise, and even more so within the largest companies.

These, and dozens of similar factors will be addressed at some point within the next year or so, by some company, somewhere — perhaps by yours. Here, in short, is a good place to position your streaming media company. It’s not as sexy as building the next DEN.net or Pseudo.com, but it’s far more secure, and will be profitable for far more companies and people.