Streaming Media Europe: “Cannibalisation Doesn’t Exist”

By on October 17, 2008 in Keynotes, Media & Entertainment, Media & Entertainment

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.

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Full List of Streaming Media Europe Exhibitors

By on October 10, 2008 in Exhibit

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
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Dailymotion: More Than Just UGC

By on September 30, 2008 in Keynotes

Dailymotion first achieved success as a platform for citizens and independent journalists during the Paris riots of 2005, but it has gone past its roots in user-generated content to become one of the leading publishers of professionally produced independent video content in Europe. Creative director Digby Lewis, who will be keynoting at Streaming Media Europe on 17 October, spoke with Eileen Broch recently about the company’s development and future plans.

First, a little bit about your background. How did your work with Google and DoubleClick prepare you for what you’re doing at Dailymotion?

Digby LewisI joined Dailymotion after six years working in television and online media. Before that, I worked in the print publishing sector as a writer and editor for newspapers and magazines. I’ve always worked on the editorial side of things, and Dailymotion provided an excellent opportunity to put my experience to use in an exciting, developing medium. It’s also interesting, having been a content creator before, to be able to see things from the other side and act as a curator in this role.

How does a site like Dailymotion distinguish itself from YouTube? What’s its value proposition for users? What about for advertisers?

Firstly, the most noticeable aspect for the user is the video quality. Dailymotion has led the field in high-quality streaming video and we were the first major player to introduce HD video streaming this year. Professional content creators want users to have the best possible playback experience and Dailymotion delivers that.

Secondly, we have very strong links with the independent film sector, from students right the way through to Oscar-winning directors like Michel Gondry. Our Motionmaker programme is all about giving talented young professionals the tools and visibility they need to succeed in the industry. 

We then act as curators to programme the best of our contributors’ work-both Official Partner and Motionmakers-on our local homepages and channels. So when someone goes to the Dailymotion homepage, they should notice a significant difference in the quality of video content available on the platform.

All of this is attractive to advertisers-Motionmaker and Official Content provides a safe environment for brands. We have developed a number of products, display and instream, to maximize the opportunities for advertisers.

What advertising strategies do you predict will be most successful moving forward: typical text/banner ads, video ads, or perhaps branding and placement campaigns that blur the line between “advertising” and “content”?

We offer advertisers a suite of products and branding opportunities because we recognize that clients have different needs and business models. The key thing is to be as dynamic as possible. Display advertising provides a great starting point. In-stream is still finding its feet, but done well, can be far less intrusive a user experience than the standard pre-roll format which we have seen to date.

Original sponsored or branded content is clearly another very exciting arena for platforms like Dailymotion to work alongside advertisers. Once again, the key thing for us is to maintain our core values of quality content, so a project has to be just right for us to develop it beyond the concept stage.

Brands are also keen to engage with our Motionmaker community, and we have run successful campaigns in France which have harnessed our own “production team” if you like, and we hope to replicate this in the UK.

Do you have a geographic breakdown on viewers and users in terms of Europe vs. elsewhere?

Dailymotion is now the 50th largest website globally and the world’s second largest video entertainment website with 38.8 million monthly uniques. Our home territory, France, is still our most dominant user-base, making up about a quarter of that total audience. Our next biggest community is North America, with around 6 million uniques. Belgium, UK, Italy, Spain and Germany are our other principal European territories, ranging from 1.5 million to 600,000.

How much of your emphasis is on professionally produced content as opposed to user-generated?

Dailymotion started life as a platform for user-generated content and during the Paris riots of 2005 because synonymous with citizen journalism and editorial independence from mainstream broadcasters. While UGC continues to make up a large portion of the videos uploaded to Dailymotion, the landscape for streaming video has changed remarkably in the last 12 months and we believe that users are now hungry for professionally produced, quality video content. We are constantly signing Official Content partnerships-broadcasters, production companies, film and gaming studios, record labels, you name it. What’s exciting is that these partnerships are not about pushing TV content online, but creating web-specific content with professional quality production standards. As a former TV producer/director, that’s very pleasing to see on the site.

What sort of traction is your HD content getting, and how important do you think HD content will be to Dailymotion’s future success?

Dailymotion pioneered high-definition streaming video on a mass scale and it works well both for our users and content providers. These days, everyone from home-movie enthusiasts to super-indies can shoot in HD, so if you can provide a means to distribute this online it has to be a real bonus. As technology moves forwards and current data transfer limitations are overcome, high def streaming video will become the norm.

Will delivery to mobile devices figure into Dailymotion’s roadmap? And what about getting Dailymotion content onto TV screens? In the long run, can companies like Dailymotion compete against traditional broadcasters without a presence on the television screen?

While our website remains core to the business, we want people to be able to access Dailymotion videos wherever and whenever they choose. We’ve just announced a partnership with Orange World, which will launch in France over the coming weeks, soon followed by other European regions including the UK. We have also partnered with IPTV platform Channel Neuf in France to show Motionmaker videos. We don’t consider traditional broadcasters as direct competitors, in fact I think they are more concerned with reaching the digital audience than we are trying to reach the highly fragmented cable or satellite audience.

Finally, a big-picture kind of question. As you look forward, what kinds of online video initiatives do you see as being most successful in the next year or two? What are current video sites doing right, and what do they need to be doing differently?

Longtail UGC will become much less appealing to the online audience as we move towards an era of greater quality content-both in terms of production values and playback. But interactivity will also remain crucial to the user experience, so how do you develop those aspects further? Original sponsored series, as we have seen on a few of the major social networking sites, can be a fantastic fusion of sponsorship, entertainment and user interactivity (although the product placement can still be clunky and the scripting/acting a bit dire, so I would expect the standards to be raised here).

Dailymotion is also working to take its online communities offline-we have a monthly screening of Motionmaker films in Paris called ‘La Séance’ and looking at venues to do the same kind of thing in the UK. We are also partnering with major film festivals in Europe and the US to strengthen this bond between our Motionmakers and the independent film industry.

 

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Interview with MTV Networks’ Alec Hendry

By on September 18, 2008 in Keynotes

On Friday, 17 October, we’re lucky to have Alec Hendry, director of digital media operations and development for MTV Networks UK & Ireland, join us as a keynote speaker. We had a chance to sit down and talk with Alec a big about some of MTV’s successes—and challenges—in the realm of online and mobile content.

Q: Please explain your role and focus at MTV Networks.
A: As director of digital media operations and development for MTV Networks  U.K. and Ireland, I sit within the digital media group, and look across all of the different platforms that consumers interact with us on, including online/websites, mobile services, interactive TV and also broadcast TV where we’re working with SMS and interactive TV technologies.

Q: How does streaming media and online (and/or mobile) video fit into MTV Networks’ focus and emphasis?
A: Our aim is to provide as much content as possible across all of the platforms we’re currently working with.  Broadcast television is obviously one of our main outlets, but we’re also across the web and on mobile networks, and all of our research is showing that our core audience (16-24 year olds in U.K./IE) is on all of these different platforms, continuously moving between all of them, and using all of them at the same time.  So we try to ensure that we’re everywhere our consumers are-whether on our own property or others’, such as various social networks including Bebo or MySpace, and that our content is available on those sites to drive people back to TV, back to our own website (MTV.co.uk), and back to our mobile services.

Q: How would you characterise or describe the split across all of your platforms mentioned above- websites, mobile services, interactive TV and broadcast TV?

A: I don’t have direct figures as to the split between each of these, but sometimes we have the same audience across all four of these platforms, and on other occasions (or for other events and content), we have different audiences on different platforms. 

Certainly at the moment we’re seeing that the web is one of our strongest platforms right along with broadcast television, and that the web is one of the primary digital opportunities for us. 

And since we’ve been doing video on mobile handsets for quite a while (at least 3 years now), we’re seeing more and more mobile consumption as handsets improve over time.  We first launched mobile video content in the U.K. with 3UK when it launched its first 3G video content.  At that time we first started offering MTV video on demand downloads and streaming content, and now we’ve expanded to offering live mobile TV channels on most U.K. operators.  We’re seeing that we’re consistently in the top 10 mobile channels, normally coming only second to sports and news, so we’re obviously very pleased about this.

 
Q: What would you describe as the biggest challenge facing MTV Networks in terms of its online /mobile video initiatives?

A: I would answer that by saying I don’t think we have as challenges as we do opportunities. For example, how do we better engage with the audience wherever they are?  Media is a crowded marketplace, but our brand is very strong, our audience knows us well, they trust our content (both on the music and on the entertainment side), so we are able to serve a breadth of content as a trusted editor to bring the best and most relevant content to our audience.  We also pride ourselves on the high quality of content available online, including a wide range of content repurposed from our TV channels, but also made-for-mobile content, extra content produced strictly for online series and the like.

Q: What does MTVN see as the future of monetising (or building sustainable future for) online or mobile video?
A: For us, monetisation has always been a mixture of sources.  We have some ad-funded content, with pre-roll and post-roll advertising, and then we also have branded sponsorships.  We are also able to use online video as a driver to traditional TV broadcasts and advertisers there, so our in-house advertising agency is able to offer complete packages (broadcast television + online/web + mobile) to advertisers as part of their sponsorships, and so our efforts are definitely paying for themselves.

Q: Can you give us an overview of the MTV Overdrive initiative?
A: Our MTV Overdrive product launched in 2006, which was the first time we brought all of our video into an aggregated place that people could come to access.  To enable this, we built internal workflows to manage the digital archive and the custom-built content, e.g. our MTV News team has a daily news package which we were able to make available.  So again, we have end-to-end workflow processes to produce content cross-platform and then we don’t have to worry about the technicality behind the delivery process [to different platforms].  It’s a managed process end-to-end of a huge archive of online content now.

The MTV Overdrive platform was a great starting point for us to show some of our video content, and as that’s evolved we’re seeing the demand for video (especially in the U.K.) as extraordinarily high and we’re very pleased with the results there.  Now we’re in a process where we’re moving some of that video content so that it’s not just in the MTV Overdrive area, but rather phased out so that the video content is wherever it’s relevant, such as MTV News video clips on the MTV News site and so on.

Q: Can you tell us a bit about your experiences with streaming the 2007 MTV Europe Music Awards? 
A: Last year for the first time we were able to stream in high-quality Flash format, and to do this we used one of the very first commercially available hardware products that supported Flash video streaming, the ViewCast Niagara Pro Encoder, provided to us by Garland Partners Limited.  As it happens, we met and engaged with Garland Partners Limited as a result of their exhibitor space at Streaming Media Europe 2007.  They were previewing the ViewCast hardware, and that’s when we established contact and engaged with them for the MTV Europe Music Awards show to take place a few weeks later.

In any event, the ViewCast Niagara Pro Encoder allowed us to take the broadcast feed from our Camden (London) studios receiving the show feed from Munich and then live stream that in high quality Flash format.  At the time, that was really the only commercial product to deliver high quality video/audio over a sustained period of time (such as the 3+ hour long Music Awards show). 

Additionally, our team was able to produce inserts to use during the ad breaks, and we were able to send footage back from Munich (such as Wyclef Jean interviewing stars backstage) to drop into the ad breaks.  

 

 

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Interview With the BBC’s Claude London

By on September 8, 2008 in Keynotes

We’re lucky to have Claude London, Digital Director, BBC Worldwide & Kangaroo JV, as our leadoff keynote speaker at Streaming Media Europe  on Thursday, 16 October. Eileen Broch was able to conduct this Q&A with Claude for the new European edition of Streaming Media magazine, and we reprint it here as a sneak preview of what Claude will be speaking on at the show.

Can you give our readers a brief description of the charter of BBC Worldwide and how it fits into the rest of the BBC? 

BBC Worldwide is the wholly owned commercial subsidiary of the BBC.  Its role is to maximise the value of the BBC’s assets after the public service window, for the benefit of the licence payer – essentially we commercialise BBC content with all of our profits being returned into the public service business.

BBC Worldwide has seven core businesses – Global Channels, Global TV Sales, Magazines, Content & Production, Home Entertainment, Global Brands and Digital Media. We generated sales of over £900 million in 2007-2008.

As Digital Media we oversee a stable of commercial websites such as BBC.com (the BBC website outside of the UK), TopGear.com and GardenersWorld.com; we syndicate digital content via outlets such as YouTube and MySpace as well as mobile operators; and we’re also a founder of Kangaroo, a VOD JV with UK broadcasters ITV and Channel 4.

 

What’s your role and focus at the BBC Worldwide?

I’m Director for Kangaroo, BBC Worldwide’s joint venture with ITV and Channel 4 to launch an on-demand service for the UK. I’m leading Kangaroo for BBC Worldwide, which means I have responsibility for the commercial strategy, product development, and brand building of the venture, as well as ongoing business development – from a BBC Worldwide point of view.

 

What do you think is the most important goal for BBC Worldwide over the next 1-2 years? What do you think are the greatest challenges facing BBC Worldwide in this same time period?

One of the key targets for BBC Worldwide is to expand its digital revenues from 1% of total to 10% of total over a five year period.  This is a big ask but its one we’re answering with a range of revenue-focused digital projects.

The most obvious of these has been a very pro-active syndication programme – getting our content onto the web via some major partners in revenue generating deals.  We were the first major broadcaster to sign up for a channel on YouTube, we were the first global broadcaster to sign a deal with MySpace and we were also the first UK broadcaster to sell full length content on iTunes.

Under the partnership, the best BBC video content will be made available online globally via MySpaceTV, the social networking site’s popular new video platform.

As well as syndication, branded sites are an important part of our digital strategy.  We take brands based around BBC content and create connected commercial web presences.  Sites like TopGear.com and GardenersWorld.com are building on established magazine operations. 

We’re also looking overseas for revenues and one of our major activities here is BBC.com, the international expression of the BBC online.  With BBC.com we’re essentially looking to monetise the millions of non-license-fee-paying overseas users of BBC.co.uk.  BBC.com is ad-funded and acts as a global window to BBC Worldwide content on the web and therefore is an important cross marketing tool as well as a straightforward destination media site.

Obviously Kangaroo is a major business objective for us.  By coming together with two of the other major broadcasters in the UK to create a VOD platform we’re helping build the wider market for online video content in the UK.  Kangaroo is potentially a huge opportunity for us to generate revenues from our content archives whilst giving users access to a huge library of content that hasn’t been available online before.

In terms of challenges, we face that same as any other media owner online.  It’s a hugely competitive and fast moving market and its not simply a matter of translating what we’ve done on traditional channels into new media formats.  We, like all media owners, have had a steep learning curve in terms of what does and doesn’t work online or on mobile and we’re continuing to pick up new data and examples every day that help us optimise our digital activities.

 

How do you feel streaming media and online (or mobile) video fit into these areas of focus and emphasis?

Given our broadcasting background the video world is at the very core of what we’re about and so online video is a massively important part of our future.  Where it’s really important for us already today is in reaching brand-new audiences – part of our mission is to target audiences who might not see our content on traditional outlets and delivering video online or on mobile is the only way to reach these populations.

Clearly new forms of video delivery have been at the heart of our syndication efforts, whether short form content on YouTube or full-length programming on iTunes.  Similarly, online content is central to our international ambitions.  We have channels in territories across the world, but online, streaming content is still an important way of getting our content out there.

 

How involved is BBC Worldwide with mobile efforts?

We’ve been actively involved with mobile for some time now and have content deals in place with a number of operators in the UK and overseas – people like O2 and 3 to name a couple.  It’s definitely an area we see growing in the future but I think we all need to recognise that, in revenue terms, mobile video is still at a very early stage. There is undeniable potential however, with mobile internet specifically.

 

How does BBC Worldwide factor in revenue generation (monetisation) either for its partners or itself in these syndication deals? 

Revenue generation is what we’re about.  Our role is to generate profits that go back to the BBC, so if there’s no compelling commercial logic for a deal then it just won’t go ahead. 

We’re flexible on how monetisation occurs – for example pay per view has been dominant on mobile for a while now, but in online environments ad-funded viewing tends to work better for short form content.  It’s all about what gives the best consumer experience and, in the end, the best returns.

 

What does BBC Worldwide see as the future of monetising (or building a sustainable future for) online or mobile video?

In the longer term media outlets seem to tend towards an ad-funded model, with profitable pockets of pay customers, as we’ve all seen from the satellite television world.  However, at the moment we’re in a hybrid content economy with a general mix oscillating between pay per view and free to air ad funded content.  For the foreseeable future I would expect that mix to stay in place.

 

How do the BBC iPlayer and Kangaroo fit together?

iPlayer is the BBC’s seven day, free, on-demand catch up service whilst Kangaroo is a joint venture between BBC Worldwide, ITV and Channel 4 to offer tens of thousands of hours of paid for or ad-funded programme content.  Whereas iPlayer is about displaying content within the public service ‘window’ – i.e. today seven days after broadcast – Kangaroo is about making huge swathes of great content available on demand, including BBC archive material.

The two platforms are different but are definitely complementary. Ashley Highfield, the new CEO of Kangaroo, summed it up well when he was at the BBC – if iPlayer is like BBC1 through BBC4, then Kangaroo is like the UKTV channels, part of BBC Worldwide’s joint venture with Virgin Media 

 

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Huge Numbers for Olympics Streams in the Netherlands

By on August 21, 2008 in Content Delivery, Industry News, Media & Entertainment, Uncategorized

OlympicsThe six gold medals won by Dutch competitors (so far) isn’t the only big Olympics-related news coming out of the Netherlands. According to Egon Verharen from Netherlands Public Broadcasting (Nederlandse Publieke Omroep, or NPO), the broadcaster delivered 17 million streams of Olympics video during the first week of the games. Not bad for a country with a population of just over 16.5 million, and terrific when compared to the 30 million claimed by NBC for the same time period in the U.S. (population 301 million — you do the math.)

Also, unlike NBC, NPO is streaming almost everything it is broadcasting on television, from 12 SD satellite feeds and 2 HD satellite feeds, Verharen says. The 12 SD feeds are delivered at 800Kbps Windows Media Video 9 in both Silverlight and the standard Windows Media Player, along with a feed from Netherlands-1, so viewers can choose between 13 streams in the player. On Netherlands-1, Verharen says, “we use the HD feed as much as possible. Only if Dutch sporters are active in a sport that is not available on the HD sat feed do we use the SD feed.” The HD stream is 7.1Mbps VC-1. “The demand for the HD stream is low, but purposely kept that way,” says Verharen. “We see this as an experiment and in no way can it interfere with the regular internet streaming.”

To provide enough capacity for all that streaming, NPO is using private peers and is peering at the Amsterdam Internet Exchange (IX) with Dutch providers to deliver its traffic. That approach is something of a test run for NPO’s plans for the future to use the Dutch Open CDN Project via the Amsterdam IX, which sees about 450Gbps of traffic at peak, according to Stef van der Ziel of Jet Stream; Jet Stream originally initiated the idea for the Dutch Open CDN Project, which is a non-profit consortium of ISPs and broadcasters including NPO, RTL, KPN, Jet Stream, Crossmedia Ventures, and SURFnet. According to van der Ziel, the ISPs involved agree to help offload traffic when it goes over the peak that the Amsterdam IX can handle. For the Olympics, Jet Stream is supporting some of the ISPs and is offering overflow capacity.

NPO’s offloading approach is part of a project Verharen calls the “sports summer” pilot, since it was used for not only the Olympics but also the UEFA Champions League and Tour de France. “The ultimate goal of the Dutch Open CDN Project is to lower costs, increase volume and quality of service, and to let ISPs offer better management of the traffic. In the future, there needs to be discussion about covering the costs that the ISPs make to handle the traffic,” says van der Ziel.

The HD streams are “a pilot within the pilot,” van der Ziel say, since some of them are multicast within the SURFnet network. “If a wi-fi staton or router at any point near an end user isn’t multicast-enabled, it rolls over to SD,” he says. According to him, about 5% of broadband subscribers are capable of viewing HD streams over ADSL or fiber optic.

Other NPO partners, according to Verharen, are Digital Rapids (for the HD encoding), Technicolor (for hosting the HD encoding and encoding the regular satellite feeds), SURFnet (for distributing the HD stream in unicast and multicast within their network), and Crossmedia Ventures (for serving the HD stream and Silverlight app to the general internet).

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10 Downing Street Boosting Online Video Presence

By on August 19, 2008 in Conference Sessions, Enterprise, Education, and Government, Enterprise, Education, and Government, Industry News, Media & Entertainment

Last week, the British Prime Minister’s Office launched Number10TV, a new video channel as part of its Number10.gov.uk website. They’re using Brightcove’s Flash player to deliver the clips; right now it’s mostly “feel-good” PR stuff from Gordon Brown’s office, but it sets the stage for the PM’s office to have a direct video line to citizens for more important announcements. 

Brightcove is just one of several internet TV platforms that will be represented at Streaming Media Europe in a session called, fittingly, “Comparing Internet TV Platforms.” In addition to Brightcove VP of International Partherships Raghav Gupta, Ooyala CEO Bismarck Lepe and BestTV Founder and VP of Business Development Oded Felled will debate and discuss what content owners should look for when selecting a platform to help them deliver their content. The session will be at 13:45 on Thursday, 16 October; to register, visit the Streaming Media Europe site, where the full programme will be announced next week.

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Fourth Keynote: Digby Lewis, Dailymotion

By on August 6, 2008 in Keynotes

We were certainly disappointed when Kate Burns left Dailymotion and had to back out of the keynote slot for the show, but we’re thrilled to announce that we’ll have Digby Lewis, who is creative director for Dailymotion UK, on Friday, 17 October. He’s in charge of the acquisition of UK-relevant content and sourcing and devloping “unsigned” directors through the platform’s Motionmaker programme.

Digby LewisHe also directs the platform’s editorial strategy, and brings a wealth of experience to Dailymotion, including 12 years in print, TV, and online journalism, including five years at MTV producing interviews and coverage at European music festivals. Prior to that, he was a diary writer for Daily Telegraph and features editor at the youth music bible Ministry. His career highlights include interviewing David Bowie (three times!) and producing documentaries for the Rolling Stones.

Watch this space for an interview with Digby soon!

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Presenters Needed for Video Format/Encoders and Webcasting Workshops

By on July 25, 2008 in Pre-Conference Workshops

We’re looking for Europe-based presenters for the following sessions at Streaming Media Europe, both on Wednesday 15 October:

Comparing Video Formats and Encoding Tools, 10.00-13.00: This updated workshop is a crash course to help you evaluate and select the right delivery format for your content. Attendees will see direct comparisons of the latest streaming media formats and codecs, including Flash, QuickTime/MPEG-4, RealMedia, and Windows Media, and objectively evaluate and quantify the pros and cons of each format. A comparison of encoding applications will also be discussed to help you choose the tools to get the best-quality results for your content.

Webcasting Essentials, 14.00-17.00: Work through the five phases of a webcast—planning, production, encoding, authoring, and distribution. To add to your real experience, the workshop itself is treated as a webcast, with the goal to webcast live from the workshop. This workshop covers production techniques and encoding hardware and software including the Windows Media Encoder and RealProducer. Workshop attendees are encouraged to participate in the webcast production to get the full “live” rush.

If you’re interested, please send an email to erics@streamingmedia.com along with a CV or list of your credentials. We’re looking for someone with solid presentation skills as well as hands-on experience in the subject areas. 

 

 

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Keynote speaker announcement #3: Alec Hendry MTV Networks

By on July 22, 2008 in Keynotes, Uncategorized

Going back to the hints we included in the Advance Programme for the conference, we’re very pleased to confirm that the multinational music and entertainment powerhouse we were referring to is none other than MTV Networks, and we have the pleasure of Alec Hendry delivering another of our keynotes.

MTV Alec is director of digital media operations and development for MTV Networks UK and Ireland, which means he looks across all of the different platforms that consumers interact with MTV on, including online/websites, mobile services, interactive TV and also broadcast TV where MTV employs SMS and interactive TV technologies. Accordingly, it’s Alec who engaged with Garland Partners Limited — a supplier he met in the Streaming Media Europe 2007 Exhibition Hall no less! — to live stream the award-winning 2007 MTV Europe Music Awards. The event and live stream delivered 3.2 million video streams online which reflected 10% of the TV broadcast audience, obviously an enormous success, as validated by its receipt of the “Best Streaming Event of 2007″ by the IWA (International Webcasting Association).

Alec HendryWe certainly look forward to learning more about this case study during Alec’s keynote as well as other remarks he’ll make regarding mobile streaming/video services, monetisation, user engagement and other elements which continue to motivate MTV Networks’ investments into streaming.

And as always, let us know if you have questions you want to queue up for Alec in the meantime!


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