A Decade of StreamingMedia.com

The next Streaming Media East show was back in New York, but this one was held in the Javits Center, rather than the Hilton. The expected tie-in didn’t come about there, either, as the Streaming Media show wasn’t in the same hall as Internet World. The turnout for Streaming Media East was very impressive though, with AOL rolling its bus on to the show floor and the magazine rolling out an inaugural issue with a Streaming Media 100 list that included the likes of Mike Lorenz of Accordent.

But in the weeks and months following the New York show, the industry as a whole began to melt down, following the path of the larger telecommunications and internet meltdown (not to mention the drop in trade show attendance following 9/11). A part of this can be attributed to Penton’s inability to understand a specialized show that was not nearly as generic as its Internet World show; after being crammed into the Hilton, the show "rattled around" in the Javits and other venues that Penton had already booked for its Internet World shows. Another part of it could be that the sales hype was captured (or tackled) by the realities of the technology’s inability to scale (I would always visit booths twice: Once in the first 2 days to hear a sales pitch and then on the last day to talk to the engineers to find out where the product or service’s development really stood).

Regardless, attendance at the shows began to drop off to the point where the next Streaming Media Europe show, held at the ExCeL London convention center, was down to 35 exhibitors. It may have been lower than that at other shows, but my personal memory stopped in late 2000/early 2001 as I’d chosen to get off the road and teach college courses in my two loves—entrepreneurship and digital media—several months before the implosion.

"Late 2000 to early 2002 was a bad time to be out selling the shows," says Kerry Lange, who was one of the original five First Conferences employees focused on the Streaming Media shows, and who then went on to work for Penton. The vendor drop also came from the drop in venture funds and smaller companies missing key revenue targets. In a scenario that played out again and again, companies that had been leaders in the field began to fade.

Take, for example, a company like Digital Lava (AMEX: DGV), founded in 1995, whose Video Visor products brought in revenues that put it in the early success category of a company that should have been able to weather the storm.

VideoVisor Web was a "browser-based viewer for deploying published rich mixed media content across the internet and corporate intranets. It includes an easy-to-use interface that can contain video or audio synchronized with searchable text, a hot-linked topic list and graphics, web applications, and other web-based information." This product’s ease of use and web-based interface made it ideal for training and educational online publishing.

As its customer base grew—at one point including customers such as Lotus, Dell, Shell Chemical Co., Zurich-American Insurance Group, and UCLA—the company won numerous critical and readers’ choice awards at both the DVC/MultimediaCom and Streaming Media shows in the 1997–1999 time frame.

The company even brought in a seasoned CEO, with 20 years of other industry experience. Robert Greene succeeded founder Joshua Sharfman, who remained in the role of president. Greene was formerly the senior vice president of The Lightspan Partnership, Inc., a privately held company that provided interactive educational programming for schools and homes using digital video and internet technologies.

But nothing could stop the wicked one-two punch of plummeting sales and the economic earthquake immediately following 9/11. On Sept. 17, 2001, DGV’s board of directors adopted a plan of liquidation and dissolution subject to stockholder approval, "providing for the complete liquidation, winding up and dissolution of Digital Lava … We have filed a proxy with the Securities and Exchange Commission relating to a special meeting of our stockholders to obtain such approval, as well as approval of the terms of the Asset Purchase Agreement providing for the sale of substantially all of our assets to Interactive Video Technologies, Inc."

Rebirth
But plenty of companies survived the boom and bust. Companies such as Digital Fountain, which had received significant funding just prior to the downturn, hunkered down and weathered the storm by having strong, unique products and services.

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