Streaming Media Europe: It's About Quality, Not Quantity

Day Two
The second keynote, given by Oliver Slipper, CEO of PremiumTV/Inform Group, dealt with monetization of content as the proliferation of devices continues to expand exponentially.

Other sessions provided hands-on examples of certain streaming media tools. Stefan Richter of FlashComGuru, based in London and co-author of a book on Flash with Jan Ozer, did a short version of his Live Video Streaming with Flash during the conference, compressing his pre-event session down to 60 minutes, but included a live demonstration of a Flash live encoding stream.

"Who is using Flash for live video streaming?" Richter rhetorically asks his audience. "It varies—from live webcam chats to video blogging to user-generated content, Flash live streaming has caught on; that, in turn, has caught the attention of traditional broadcasters, who see the upcoming H.264 integration as a way to integrate Flash Player delivery into their existing MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 workflows."

Running concurrently, the session "Corporate Communications Across Convergent Media" spent considerable time discussing the effectiveness and appropriateness of user-generated content within the enterprise. "The key, as always, is measurement," said Claudi Schneider of take 3 productions. "Are you hitting the message nail on the head, or just doing it for the sake of doing it?"

The show ended with two forward-looking sessions, detailing concepts around the "New Media Delivery Revolution." The first session, "From the Web to Your TV," dealt with delivery of content to consumers, in the vein of the Slingbox or AppleTV, and how content creators are beginning to understand and harness the power of these new devices, arguing that, technologically, at least, revolution has given way to evolution.

"I don’t see innovations so much in the next 24 months," said John Folland, Co-founder of Nativ, a technology consultancy and system integrator, "but I do see a continuous steady improvements in storage and camera technologies."

"Media transfers between studios and back again," said Level 3 VP Stephen Trainor, "A lot of that is FedEx driven today; the infrastructure is there, now, with file accelerators to overcome issues with FTP, but the adoption of those tools have been slow to take off. Expect to see these tools integrated into the content creation tools in the next 24 months, which will totally affect the collaborative workflows."

The session also explored the difference between broadcast content and on-demand content, which naturally led into the next session, titled "IPTV vs. Content on Demand." This latter session discussed the pros and cons of IPTV rollouts, with a look at existing content-on-demand systems that have been used in lieu of wide-scale IPTV deployments.