The 2018 Streaming Media 50: The 50 Companies That Matter Most in Online Video in 2018
First things first: Why the Streaming Media 50, and not the Streaming Media 100, which we’ve published since 2011?
Isn’t the online video industry growing, with more vendors than ever in the space?
While it’s true that the online video space is more crowded than ever, we’re predicting a shakeout in the next 12 to 18 months. Consumers can only subscribe to so many video services; more and more big broadcasters and telcos are bringing technology in-house via microservices and virtualization; and enterprises video is table stakes. So we decided to take our most challenging task of each year—picking the most important, innovative, and interesting companies in the online video space—and make it even harder. The goal? To provide our readers with a list of the cream of the crop, the companies that are here today and won’t be gone tomorrow.
CLICK HERE TO GO DIRECTLY TO THE STREAMING MEDIA 50 LIST
The other reason the list is smaller this year is that we’ve decided to take the video production part of the market, the one covered by Streaming Media Producer, and give that its own list. The Streaming Media Producer 25, which we’ll publish in the April/May issue of Streaming Media magazine.
As usual, we’re focusing almost exclusively on technology vendors, rather than content companies. This list has always been about recognizing the companies that enable video services to deliver great content to consumers reliably at the highest possibly quality on every device, and hopefully to make money from it.
And as in past years, we asked our regular contributors to look at a master list of all the vendors in the online video marketplace and rank them on a scale of one (doesn’t belong on the Streaming Media 50 at all) to five (no list of the most important companies would be complete without it). The top 50 make the list.
Also, the Streaming Media 50 focuses exclusively on companies with headquarters in North America. Later this year, we will publish a similar list, the Streaming Media Europe 101, focusing on companies with headquarters in Europe.
Congratulations to this year’s inaugural Streaming Media 50!
THE 2018 STREAMING MEDIA 50 VOTERS:
Troy Dreier, senior associate editor, Streaming Media; and editor, OnlineVideo.net
Jan Ozer, principal, Streaming Learning Center; and contributing editor, Streaming Media
Robert Reinhardt, CTO, VideoRx; and contributing editor, Streaming Media
Dom Robinson, co-founder and creative firestarter, id3as; and contributing editor, Streaming Media
Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen, VP and editor-in-chief, Streaming Media Tim Siglin, contributing editor, Streaming Media
CLICK HERE TO GO DIRECTLY TO THE STREAMING MEDIA 50 LIST
You can see many of these companies and their products and services in person at Streaming Media West in Huntington Beach, California, next month, Streaming Forum in London in February, and Streaming Media East in New York City in May.
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