If you took a look at our Advance Programme, you probably noticed our teaser about who the keynote speakers might be for the conference. So were there any guesses based on our early clues?

To be honest, we figured the first one was a bit of an easy one — Didn’t want to be too tough on you! — but just as a reminder, we mentioned that this executive was from…

the commercial arm of the world’s largest broadcasting corporation, which is now participating in a joint venture with other commercial broadcasters in the UK…

And that wasn’t any exaggeration — the “world’s largest broadcasting corporation”.

Well if the BBC was immediately obvious to you then hopefully we’ll give you a greater challenge with some of the others, but in the meantime we’re very pleased to announce that one of our confirmed keynote speakers will be Mr Claude London, Digital Director BBC Worldwide | Kangaroo JV.

We feel very fortunate to secure Claude for the event, because in addition to his extensive responsibilities for the BBC Worldwide and also for the Kangaroo JV, he’s also an established startup advisor very involved in leading edge companies and innovations, in addition to having an established track record as former VP Digital Operations, Warner Music International, and at Bain & Company.

If you’ve got any questions in advance for Claude, note them in the comments here and we’ll be sure to pass them along!

Streaming Media Europe 2008 doesn’t officially open until 16 October, but on 15 October we’ll have five in-depth workshops. The first is “Delivering Content With Adobe Flash Media Server,” a three-hour workshop that will be presented by Steve Allison, who’s a technical evangelist for Adobe’s Dynamic Media Group covering the EMEA region. Steve’s background includes content management, protals, ecommerce and financial service technologies, so he brings not only knowledge of FMS but also a breadth of perspective that will help him present that information in a variety of real-world application contexts. The workshop will cover integrated live video streams, delivery to mobile devices, encrypted streaming, and new logging/measurement tools. For a full description, see our preliminary programme (pdf version here).

We’re looking for a company in London to video all of the keynote and sessions at Streaming Media Europe. We don’t need hosting, since we’ll be delivering the videos on demand after the show is over using our Brightcove account—see the Streaming Media East videos on the Streaming Media Global home page for an example. We just need an experienced company to shoot, edit, and encode the sessions and keynote speeches. If you’re interested, please contact me at erics@streamingmedia.com for specs.

eMarketer just posted some interesting findings indicating that 52% of respondents to a YouGov study sponsored by Redback say they’ve watched TV or other video online, and that most of them are doing it via internet TV services like the BBC iPlayer. Whatever problems the iPlayer might have had, people are clearly eager to embrace the time-shifting and convencience that internet TV offers.

After opening our call for speakers in mid-April, we’ve just closed the submissions period last week, and are really impressed with the amount and quality of submissions, suggestions and ideas received. Eric and I are going through all of them now, but at first glance, we’re really going to have a fantastic event — and that’s thanks mostly to all of you.

We received submissions from all of the countries in Europe (which may not be such a surprise), but also from as far away as Pakistan, Australia, and the United States, proving that our event in October is truly relevant to the global industry of streaming media and online video. The topics and papers proposed cover areas ranging from technology suppliers and components, to mobile-specific encoding and advertising streams, with content segments including sports, corporate, educational and UGC initiatives.

As these submissions clearly validate, streaming media really does now apply to any organisation’s overall digital media (online) strategy and vision, and most of the proposals are quick and specific to provide data points for the return of investment and how to approach this new channel of communicating with one’s shareholders, internal employees/colleagues, students, and other audiences.

So that’s all of the good news …!

On the other hand, the bad news is that this presents Eric and me with a pretty big challenge in having to sift through all of these fantastic ideas and try to slot them into our programme! We hope to have some of our ideas about how to do this firmed up over the coming weeks, but in the meantime, thanks again for all of your thoughts, ideas and submissions.

And finally, in case you haven’t seen it yet, before we got all of your input, we laid down our initial ideas which are reflected in our preliminary programme (pdf version here).

As always, let us know what you think!