Industry Perspectives: Riding the Global Webacasting Wave
It was here that our industry responded to the challenge with real solutions. Webconferencing firms, webcasters, streaming media providers, content delivery networks, and elearning firms stepped up with online applications that really worked to fill the need. The business community was surprised to find that a slow but steady adoption of broadband access through corporate LANs, T1s, cable modems, and DSL had taken root out of the bubble-related telecom industry collapse and was beginning to power streaming media, webcasting, and webconferencing applications. Many corporate professionals were quick to adopt this method of meeting online with interactive conferences and business presentations for everything from financial reporting to elearning. From data logs, webcasters could see the average bandwidth usage per streaming user accelerate quickly as on-line participants upgraded to broadband connections to facilitate new robust multimedia and content delivery applications that were suddenly in demand.
As the demand for streaming media and webcasting solutions grew, our industry gelled as a technology sector. Microsoft, Real, Apple, and Macromedia rose to the occasion with solutions that met the new appetite for interactive online audio and video applications. Media entities such as StreamingMedia.com and its associated conferences and exhibitions helped galvanize and define our industry as demand grew. Statistics and metrics began to appear from Nielsen, Accustream, Interactive Media Strategies, and most recently comScore that to this day are validating what everyone in our industry believed about the symbiotic growth of broadband and streaming media.
Today, there are numerous indicators that the webcasting wave has hit worldwide. From exciting new applications driven by the introduction of products such as Apple’s video iPod, services such as Google’s Video Upload Program, and the surge in internet media-based advertising, live and archived streaming media is everywhere on-line. The country-by-country approach Ha and Ganahl utilized in their book to track this webcasting revolution is extremely revealing and provides a unique perspective on each society’s evolving media infrastructure.
Where are we headed over the next year and beyond? I can speak for the internet video side of the business we serve at TV Worldwide. Many feel we may be where cable was in 1979, but without the regulatory hurdles that cable had to overcome. Just as cable successfully targeted "niche" markets to challenge broadcast television’s dominance in the 1980s, many internet TV providers are leveraging the low cost of internet video distribution, along with its interactivity and content archiving advantages to serve "micro-niche" audiences that can’t be economically served by cable, in lucrative sectors worldwide, where a content provider can solidify first-mover brand presence to establish competitive barriers to entry. We call that "thinking vertically, interacting globally."
While there are similarities to cable, there are also differences. For instance, we recognize the motivated, "lean-in" nature of our internet TV audiences, intent on interacting with highly targeted, specific content for mainly professional purposes, as opposed to the less-engaged "lean-out" audiences associated with the entertainment content of cable and broadcast. Time will only tell how well the comparisons and contrasts with cable hold up as high-speed broadband access (ironically often delivered by cable companies) becomes ubiquitous as it continues to power the growth of webcasting and streaming media. Speaking of ubiquity, lets not forget the growing presence of wireless connectivity, another webcasting market accelerator.
I’m confident the future success and growth of webcasting and streaming media will be measured more by the creative content applications and solutions internet webcasters and streaming media professionals develop than the proliferation of content such as the latest media-hyped, tasteless video that terrorists post on the web to further their agenda. In the end, I believe that webcasting and streaming media content applications will be the catalysts for a new productive boom in the technology sector worldwide.
StreamingMedia.com welcomes opinion pieces and other editorial submissions from members of the streaming media industry. Please contact erics@streamingmedia.com if you're interested in contributing to our Industry Perspectives series