The 2020 Streaming Media 50: The 50 Companies That Matter Most in Online Video
MIRKO WICHA, CHAIRMAN, PRESIDENT, AND CEO
Haivision is about much more than encoders and SRT, although those alone would be enough to secure it a place on the Streaming Media 50. With the acquisitions of LightFlow and Teltoo, though, the company has turned into a global powerhouse.
PATRICK HARSHMAN, PRESIDENT AND CEO
Harmonic’s one-two punch of cloud software (its VOS360 platform for live streaming and channel origin) and a full range of encoding, server, and contribution hardware makes its annual inclusion on the list a no-brainer.
STACY KENWORTHY, CEO
HellaStorm’s Stream Processing Unit may not have a sexy name, but its combination of increased capacity, lower latency, higher efficiency, and reduced power consumption looks pretty attractive to us.
GINNI ROMETTY, EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN
Even though IBM scaled back its facial recognition technology in 2020, IBM Watson Media boasts some of the most innovative approaches to AI-driven analytics and captioning aimed at the enterprise and live-streaming markets.
SUNIL JAIN, PRESIDENT AND CEO
Offering one of the most comprehensive quality-control and monitoring solutions for video on demand and live OTT and broadcast, Interra has built up a customer roster that’s a veritable who’s who of major media companies from across the globe.
TALAL G. SHAMOON, CEO
Intertrust Media & Entertainment security solutions consist of ExpressPlay multi-DRM service, ExpressPlay XCA broadcast TV security based on Marlin DRM, and anti-piracy services, with customers including some of the largest OTT platforms across the globe. The company also offers ExpressPlay DRM Offline, which enables secure streaming of premium content along with the Kiora content delivery platform.
JOHN SHLONSKY, CEO AND PRESIDENT
In a year when just about every conference moved online, Intrado quickly became the gold standard. It offers full-fledged virtual conference environments, including everything from registrations to sponsor booths, providing an effective simulacrum of the real thing.
DAVE OTTEN, CO-FOUNDER AND CEO
Its player offerings are well-known, but over the last few years, JW Player has expanded to address streaming delivery, monetization, and engagement, embracing APIs along the way.
RON YEKUTIEL, CO-FOUNDER, CHAIRMAN, AND CEO
Kaltura was founded and grew on its reputation as the go-to online video platform for enterprise and education, but with its Cloud TV offering, the company is delivering entertainment experiences for big-name customers like HBO and Viacom too.
ANDREAS KISSLINGER, MANAGING DIRECTOR
Lightcast promises “A to Z” support for digital publishing. We still haven’t figured out what the “Z” stands for, but Media Cloud covers most everything else you can think of, from advertising, app creation, and live streaming to media management, monetization, advertisement, and social video.
ROBERT A. LENTO, PRESIDENT, CEO, AND DIRECTOR
While latency remains a buzzword for everyone in the industry, Limelight is the only CDN that has made it a linchpin of its service, promising sub-second live-streaming WebRTC along with top-notch quality and interactivity.
JONGIL KIM, FOUNDER, CHAIRMAN, AND CTO
Still the industry’s best-kept secret? Maybe. But you’ll find Media Excel’s HERO encoders in use by big-name clients, including the NBA, NFL, Olympic Games, and World Cup.
MATT MCCONNELL, CEO
A few years ago, MediaKind introduced its “universe”—Cygnus for contribution and distribution, Aquila for consumer delivery, Orion for consumer experience, and Vega for services and support. “Universe” might be a bit of an overstatement, but it’s certainly a galaxy’s worth of OTT offerings that’s worth looking at closely.
SATYA NADELLA, CEO
One of the most notable trends of the last year or so has been how many video solutions providers are partnering with Azure, demonstrating that Microsoft’s commitment to video—which, let’s be honest, has waxed and waned over the last decade or so—is on the rise again.
JON DAHL, CO-FOUNDER AND CEO
MUX takes an API approach to both video and data, and it’s quickly and quietly emerged as one of the true innovators in the space. Plus, its annual Demuxed conference brings together a group of video engineers second only to Streaming Media East and West.
ERIC BURNS, CEO
Panopto is simply one of the easiest-to-use, most versatile video platforms for enterprise and education. ’Nuff said.
CLAUDIO LISMAN, PRESIDENT AND CEO
Primestream has been at the forefront of media asset management solutions for years, and its latest platform, Creative Bridge, offers the unprecedented ability to access files using all of the major postproduction tools, no matter where they are.
VERN HANZLIK, PRESIDENT AND CEO
A perennial leader in enterprise video, Qumu supplies cloud, on-prem, and hybrid corporate video solutions to some of the biggest companies in the world.
CHRIS ALLEN, CEO AND PRESIDENT
Red5 Pro delivers sub-500-millisecond latency to more than a million viewers, with a combination of edge computing, clusters of virtual instances in the cloud, and WebRTC. And now the company offers a cross-platform player software development kit too.
MICHAEL NORREGAARD, CEO
The Mediasite lecture capture hardware is how Sonic Foundry made its name, but in recent years, its event streaming platform (also called Mediasite) has taken center stage. And with the COVID-19 pandemic sending academic institutions scrambling for online solutions, it stepped up in a big way.
ABDUL REHMAN, CO-FOUNDER AND CEO
SSIMWAVE keeps expanding the capabilities of SSIMPLUS, its proprietary algorithm that brings the way human beings perceive video into an automated, digital process measuring video quality across the end-to-end workflow and capturing banding, macroblocking and source validation, and other issues.
DAN CASTLES, CEO
From its estimable Wirecast live-streaming production software all the way up to its Vantage media processing platform and Lightspeed Live servers, Telestream has software, hardware, and cloud-based tools for virtually every point in the streaming video workflow and ecosystem.
BRENTON OUGH, CO-FOUNDER AND CEO
Live streaming stepped up to a whole new level in 2020, and Touchstream’s VirtualNOC (network operation center) integrates with every major CDN to monitor the quality of live streams in real time, across the globe.
GEORGE BOKUCHAVA, CO-FOUNDER, CEO, AND PRESIDENT
Tulix started out as “just a CDN” (in quotes because building a CDN is no mean feat), but has since evolved into so much more. Its Digital Distribution Platform and Monetization Engine help companies large and small to not only deliver content but to focus on ROI right away. It gets bonus points for being one of the first companies to offer its services for free to K–12 schools during the COVID-19 pandemic.
AMEDEO D’ANGELO, PRESIDENT AND CEO
Verimatrix not only offers watermarking, authentication, and multi-DRM solutions, but also ways for content publishers to use them to gain insights into consumer behavior and then leverage those insights to maximize revenue.
GURU GOWRAPPAN, EVP AND GROUP CEO
Verizon Media has added new capabilities to its Media Platform. They’ve made it easier to create virtual linear channels, extend content reach by publishing live streams or live channels across social media, and maximize ad value by making the programmatic ad marketplace more transparent.
DAVID STUBENVOLL, CO-FOUNDER AND CEO
After making its name 15 years ago as a media server solution, Wowza has grown to encompass a much wider range of solutions, and in the last year, it added professional services to its stable of offerings.
VICTOR PENG, PRESIDENT AND CEO
Xilinx has done more than any other company to advance the cause of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) in the streaming workflow, and in 2020, it introduced the Real-Time Video Server Appliance for low-cost, real-time video transcoding.
GORDON BROOKS, EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN AND CEO
Major broadcasters and publishers have used Zixi’s low-latency transport to deliver live streams for years, but as the company has faced competition, it’s had to expand. ZEN Master is a single unified intelligence center for content transport, and Zixi keeps adding features that keep it ahead of the competition.
ERIC S. YUAN, FOUNDER AND CEO
Chances are, you had a Zoom video conference today. While continued questions over security and a lack of clarity on the company’s long-term strategy give us pause, 2020 is undoubtedly the year of Zoom.
ED LACZYNSKI, CO-FOUNDER AND CEO
Zype is the go-to video CMS for small and medium-sized customers, but it also counts Vevo among its clients, so there’s no doubt it can scale. Plus, it took a real leadership role in helping businesses get online with video when COVID-19 shut down brick and mortar, and it deserves props for that.
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