I say this every year, but I mean it more each time: This year’s Streaming Media Europe really is set to be the best ever, with great speakers and a brand-new venue. You can see the entire programme online–we’re still filling in a few speaker slots, but almost all of the panels and presentations are now slotted. The highlight sof the event are our keynotes; on Day 1 (18 October), we’ve got Ian Mecklenburgh from Virgin Media talking about “Streaming to the Connected Home,” while on Day 2 we feature YouTube Europe Engineering Director Oliver Heckmann offering a “Peek Inside YouTube”
The entire event is loaded with top-notch speakers, though, and as with last year, it’s not just one event. This year, it’s four: The Content Delivery Summit on 17 October follows up on last year’s successful event with another great mix of presentations and speakers, including the BBC’s Richard Cooper, Limelight Networks’ George Fraser, and Level 3 Communications’ Derek Gough. The real highlight, though, is the frank and sometimes surprising conversations that happen during the panel discussions; how often do you get to see Adobe, Microsoft, Wowza, RealNetworks, Flumotion, and Code Shop discuss and debate application trends?
18 October also features the first annual Connected Home event. Programmed by informitv‘s Dr. William Cooper, this event is a one-of-a-kind gathering of online, broadcast, CE, and infrastructure leaders including Google TV, Samsung, LG, BT, TalkTalk, and others, all exploring the challenges and opportunities brought about by over-the-top video and the increasingly connected home environment. “These major industries are headed on a collision course, but to succeed they will need to work together,” says Cooper. “It is unlikely that a single winner will end up owning the consumer, but understanding the roles and relationships of the various players will enable participants to position themselves in the connected value network.”
On 19 October, we’ll feature the second Online Video Strategies event, the only event aimed squarely at the ever-growing number of organisations for whom video is now a central part of their communications strategy, but for whom video is in no way their core business. As such, it’s filled not with blue sky pondering nor awash in “inside the video industry” debates. Rather, it’s designed to give attendees the knowledge and tools they need to start or improve their strategy as soon as they leave the event—even if they’re not video experts when they walk in the door. The day begins with Pocket Video Power‘s Jules Watkins, who has produced reality shows like Pimp My Ride and MTV Cribs and will focus on “How To Make Online Videos that Don’t Suck—Without Breaking the Bank.” We’ll also have speakers from Red Bee Media, Kinura, AutoTrader, and more, all offering up practical knowledge to help attendees improve their video strategies as soon as they get back to their desks.
And, as usual, the day before the main event will be filled with terrific, in-depth workshops on “Delivering High-Quality Media Within the Enterprise on the Adobe Flash Platform,” “Next-Generation Microsoft Media Platform and Media Delivery with Sharepoint and Azure,” “Online Video Advertising–The Technology, the Science, and the Cash,” and “Encoding for Flash, Mobile, and HTML5.”
We’re also at a new venue this year: the Olympia Conference Centre in London, with the Content Delivery Summit and pre-conference workshops taking place at the nearby Hilton London Olympia.
Is your online video strategy working? Is your content truly engaging? Are you optimising your advertising placements? These are the kinds of questions that keep video creators and publishers up at night, but they needn’t—at least not if you’ve got the right analytics solutions in place, and know how to use them. This video from Streaming Media Europe 2010—featuring Brainient‘s Emi Gal, Ooyala‘s Jonathan Milne, and goviral‘s Nick Roveta, and moderated by Braintrust Digital’s Tim Siglin—offers insights into how to best answer those questions and more.
With the arrival of ‘video everywhere’ and increasing online video viewership, what role does search need to play to make it easier for consumers to find what they want to watch? Indexing and chapterising video to make it easily searchable can make the content much more valuable and effective, but that alone won’t increase consumption. With the recent improvements in search technology and advances in video recommendation, video searching is quickly becoming crucial to today’s content economy. Watch this discussion from Streaming Media Europe 2010 and learn how some of today’s search services work and what’s being developed to make them even better.
Moderator: Tim Siglin, Chairman, Braintrust Digital
Thomas Dvorak, Chief Marketing Officer, APRICO Solutions
Justin Hayward, Managing Director, Make It Rain
Stephen Tallamy, Product Owner and Technical Lead, LocateTV (A division of NDS)
Michael Woodley, CTO, Doovle Ltd.
The European CDN market is quite different from the US CDN market, with more of an emphasis on Quality of Service than on pricing. This panel discussion from Streaming Media Europe 2010 breaks down the European market by the numbers and examines cultural, market and technological differences among the various regions within Europe. Finally, panellists discuss the varying services – CDNs, hosting providers and streaming providers – and how they fit into these regional differences.
At this year’s Streaming Media Europe in London I moderated a panel that explored the future of monetisation. What struck me as both funny and scary was that publishers are still struggling with the same questions and challenges they have been for nearly a decade; for instance, it’s been accepted wisdom for years that simply repurposing television spots for online use isn’t the most effective way to advertise, but yet everyone is still doing it. Thankfully, our panelists—Chris Gorell Barnes from Adjust Your Set, Adam Gerber from Quantcast, Chris Johnston from Brightcove, and Colleen Kearney from Turner Broadcasting Europe—offered real insights into ways publishers might shake off the chains of convention and find new ways to use video as a way to generate revenue. (Hint: The video itself is rarely going to be the thing that people will pay for.)
In October, I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at the Nordic Media Summit in Copenhagen, organized by Xstream. Xstream’s Frank Thorup and Brynhild Vinskei put on a terrific event, featuring speakers from the region’s leading newspapers and broadcast/cable networks, including Norway’s Telenor, which with Xstream has put together an on-demand service for internet-enabled TVs that is the slickest, easiest to use interface I’ve seen. I talk a bit about that in the interview here*, along with the differences between the U.S. and European markets, as well as what U.S. companies can learn from their European counterparts. Watch this space for interviews with other speakers from the event as they become available.
*I had originally embedded the video here, but for some reason that wasn’t working, so it’s best to view the interview on the Xstream site.
Videos of the keynotes and all the sessions from Streaming Media Europe 2010 are now online here. (All but one, that is; the presentation from Forrester Research isn’t available per Forrester policy. Also, we do not have videos from the Content Delivery Summit or Online Video Strategies). We’ll be posting one video per week here on the blog, beginning with two this week: the keynotes from YouView’s Anthony Rose and Red Bee Media’s Ben Schofield.
Rose talks about how YouView is creating the right environment for Connected TV to thrive in the UK and beyond.
Schofield discusses how broadcasting is evolving from one screen to many, offering not just greater access on a multitude of devices but also greater personalisation and interactivity for the consumer.
Nearly half (45%) of UK TV viewers admit to using social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook to discuss a TV programme while it’s on air, according to new research from Intel. Devices used while watching TV include a laptop (57%), a desktop computer (23%) and an internet enabled smart phone (19%).
Two thirds (63%) say they would like their TV to have internet access so that they can find more information on the shows they’re watching, shop online, and use social networking sites.
According to Intel, the rise of ‘Event TV’ such as X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing is fuelling this trend.
The number of Europeans viewing video on mobile devices has increased 66% in the past year, reaching a total of 12.1 million mobile consumers across the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy, according to new data from comScore.
The UK and Italy top the table, each with 2.7 million mobile video consumers. The UK market increased by 75%, and Italy grew 55% in the year from July 2009. Mobile video consumption in Spain was up by 90%, making this the fastest growing market overall.
On-demand video demonstrated substantial growth in the past year, with an increase of 99% to 5.2 million consumers. Viewing broadcast TV programmes also increased by 70%, to 3.5 million subscribers.
Not surprisingly, across the 5 countries surveyed, two out of every three people who viewed mobile video were smartphone owners.
Anthony Rose, CTO of Project Canvas—the joint venture among Arqiva, BBC, BT, Channel 4, ITV, and Talk Talk to build an internet-connected TV platform—will keynote day one. Project Canvas provides this description of his talk:
Steve Plunkett, Red Bee Media
Project Canvas is set to transform the daily viewing experience of UK television audiences and influence IPTV deployments globally when it launches in the early part of 2011. It will unlock a world of content and services, combining live channels with on-demand, bringing web-based services and interactive extras to the living room TV. Anthony Rose explains how Canvas is creating the right environment for Connected TV to thrive in the UK and beyond.
Day two offers Steve Plunkett, Director of Customer Innovation for Red Bee Media, which provides technology and creative solutions to help broadcasters, content rights holders, and brand owners engage with their audiences in traditional and new ways, including web and mobile. Red Bee Media’s client list includes Discovery International, BBC, Virgin Media, Nike, Lonely Planet, Motorola, and Siemens, and they’ve worked with media brands across the globe, including Sky Italia, TV Globo (Brazil), Star News India, and Canal+ (France). Plunkett will be discussing “Video Everywhere and In Everything:”
Check back soon for more details on all of our events—we’ve got speakers from Adobe, Akamai, Amazon, BT, Cisco, Deutsche Telekom, the Football Association, GlaxoSmithKline, Limelight, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, Zattoo, and many more.
