Tell us a little about you, your background and your current role.
I have been running companies with a theme of making the transition from traditional methods into modern digital delivery for quite a few years. My current role means I seek to steer exceedingly clever people with skills covering a wide spectrum such as professional broadcast, networks, telco, satellite, mobile and web. Luckily I do not hinder their progress but seek to assist and encourage them as we come up with every more clever ways of broadcasting to a mind boggling array of end user devices.
What will you be talking about at Streaming Forum? Why have you chosen this subject?
I shall be moderating a session called “Video and the future of Education”. I ran an international language company for many years during which web and then mobile learning started to kick in. It fascinated me then and still captivates me now that we have so many well developed platforms and methods of making learning material available and interactive on all sorts of devices
Name some key challenges faced by your clients, and tell us how you are overcoming them?
In a corporate training environment, allowing users to take advantage of their mobile devices, whilst keeping track of them and at the same time seeking to integrate and monitor performance is as much a security challenge as it is a learning one.
More generically, everyone wants to deliver really effective learning content on small screen devices on the move with ever richer media experiences. Few would claim to have cracked it, and as with all learning it is always a case of seeing how the delivery method and content can be tweaked to increase achievement levels
What do you see as major trends in streaming media?
From a techie point of view, the encoding/transcoding for all devices in richer and richer formats has some way to run
What do you enjoy the most about your job in this industry?
Working with a wide spectrum of people both technical and non technical and getting great content delivered to the highest quality – even if we are in the middle of field, or half way across the globe. It all takes great teamwork as there are so many interdependent facets to what we do, so it is enormously rewarding when our careful planning and execution pays off.
Ben’s session, Video and the Future of Education takes place on Tuesday 18 June 2013 13.45-14.30. The discussion panel consists of:
Moderator: Ben Kittow, CEO, The Streaming Company — UK
Mike Saville Howarth, eLearning Consultant, Director Mike Howarth Associates — UK
Philip Tubman, Learning Technologist, Lancaster University — UK
Jeffrey Newman, Education Account Executive – EMEA, Kaltura — UK
Bob van den Brand, Adjunct Associate Professor Accounting Innovator in Education & I-STAR-Learning, Tilburg University — The Netherlands











