Thanks to everyone involved—speakers, sponsors, delegates, visitors—for making this year’s event a resounding success. We had 768 attendees, which is a whopping 54% increase over 2007; what’s more, those attendees represented 23 countries and a who’s who of prominent organisations across all market verticals. Attendees were present from the likes of Alcatel-Lucent, BT Media & Broadcast, GlaxoSmithKline, ITV, TV 2 Danmark,Télévision Suisse Romande, TV 4 Group Sweden, the University of Helsinki, and King Saud University. We also had 35 stands in the exhibit hall, which is nearly twice as many as last year. 

Soon, we’ll start planning for Streaming Media Europe 2009, so if you’ve got any comments or suggestions about how we can make next year’s show better, please note them in the comments section.

One of the highlights of Streaming Media Europe was presenting the first-ever Readers’ Choice Award for Regional (European) Content Delivery Network. The finalists were Global-MIX and Stream UK, both from the UK, and Jet Stream from the Netherlands. Showing the truly pan-European nature of the show, Jet Stream was the winner for its Streamzilla content delivery service. Congrats to Stef van der Ziel and everyone else at Jet Stream.

Next year, we’ll be presenting an entire awards program specifically focusing on the European market. Watch this space and the Streaming Media Global site for details to come!

Jose Castillo writes:

“Over 50% of the broadband usage in Europe is video”, said Fernando Gil del Bernabé from Cisco Systems. And yet a large portion of online video have not embraced social media features. Our panel discussion today, The Convergence of Social Media and Online Video, discussed the merits of using social functionality to add business value to video. Njara Zafimehy, VP Marketing and Sales, ScrOOn, Fernando Gil del Bernabé, Managing Director, Cisco Systems, and Yann Motte, Co-Founder and CEO, Webjam, brought great perspective to the ongoing debate around ROI on social features like blogging, embedding, sharing, commenting, and uploading.

Here are 3 reasons to use social media that stuck out from the great discussion.

1. It costs ten times as much to get a new customer than keep an existing one. Social features allow much more interaction and allow customers to truly engage with the content, offering higher retention rates.

2. The cost of implementing social features is free or very cheap if you are all ready using video.

3. Remember to be very specific about your goals and set clear reasons and targets for using social media.

Whether you were at this session or not it would be great to hear your feedback on why or why not we should use social media to expand the impact of online video. Comment below and lets keep this conversation going!

Thanks to Stream UK and Global-MIX, we’ll be webcasting the closing session from Streaming Media Europe live from London at 16:15 GMT/4:15 p.m. EDT. The session, “What the Future Holds,” will feature Jake Ward from Broadview moderating and Mark Little from Ovum Research, and Dan Cryan from Screen Digest, two of the leading analysts of online video trends. 

They’ll be looking at what we should expect over the next few years in terms of technological advances, business challenges and opportunities, and audience demographics. Click here for the Windows Media webcast at 16:15 GMT/4:15 p.m. EDT.

Two terrific keynotes this morning. First, Alec Hendry went into great detail about MTV UK & Ireland’s workflow, both from capture to distribution and among MTV offices in different territories —  much of the content is entered by MTV’s New York offices and then when it’s approved for European distribution, it becomes available to the MTV UK offices, pending any edits that have to be made because of rights considerations (sometimes the music on the U.S. shows isn’t approved for use in the UK). He also talked about how the MTV Overdrive player allows the network to achieve two of its core objectives: “It lets the user control MTV, but lets MTV control the content.” 

Digby Lewis from Dailymotion talked about the company’s standing as the #2 video site in the world, just behind YouTube. “We don’t really view them as competitors, because they’re really in their own universe,” he said. Dailymotion’s strategy now is to focus not so much on user-generated content as on professional and semi-professional filmmakers and content producers. “It’s about more than just skateboarding dogs and copulating kangaroos,” he said. “That stuff might interest people for five minutes, but it’s not content that’s going to keep them engaged.” He also shared a statistic worth reflecting upon. “Video now is where the internet was a few years ago. 60% of users feel overwhelmed by all of the content, while 40% feel they’re able to cope.”

That was one of the messages from Claude London, director of digital media for the BBC Worldwide, in his opening keynote at Streaming Media Europe Thursday morning; and he showed statistics to support his claim that online delivery of television shows doesn’t decrease broadcast viewership. Streaming Media contributing editor Tim Siglin writes more about London’s talk as well as other sessions from the first day of the show here. 

We’ll have more reports later today — plus, we hope to bring you the closing session, “What the Future Holds for Online Video” live at 11 a.m. ET. Watch this space for a link.

Streaming Media Europe is less than a week away, and already more than twice as many people have registered to attend than were at last year’s event. We’ve also got a full exhibit hall floor, and this year the exhibit hall will also feature the Exhibit Hall Theatre with timely presentations on everything from webcasting to encoding in H.264. 

Here’s a list of the exhibitors who will be at the show. See you in London!

• Adfero
• Allegro
• Astream
• BestTV
• BGA Group (Gold Sponsor) 
• Craze Productions
• Datmedia
• Edgeware
• Eye Partner
• Garland Partners (Gold Sponsor) 
• Global-MIX (Diamond Sponsor) 
• Gomez Europe Ltd. (Gold Sponsor) 
• Groovy Gecko
• Highwinds (Gold Sponsor) 
• Internap Network Services (Platinum Sponsor) 
• Ipercast International (Gold Sponsor) 
• Jet Stream (Gold Sponsor) 
• Limelight Networks (Gold Sponsor) 
• Mirror Image Internet
• Mydeo m3
• Nativ
• Nedstat (Gold Sponsor) 
• Over Achievers Ltd.
• Packet Exchange Ltd. (Gold Sponsor) 
• Sharpstream
• Something Abstract Ltd
• Stream Projects Ltd
• Stream UK (Platinum Sponsor) 
• Streaming Ltd
• Streaming Media Partners Europe (Gold Sponsor) 
• StreamingMedia.com
• VBrick Systems
• Velocix (Platinum Sponsor) 
• Vidiator (Gold Sponsor) 
• ViewCast