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!