Commentary: SM East 2007—More Substance, Less Hype

A few of us have been fortunate enough to work on projects recently that seamlessly extract and mine metadata or are true next-generation search methods, but these will take a year or two to commercialize. There are currently enough standalone indexing and search vendors in the industry today to at least field a decent showing at the Streaming Media shows. Perhaps another way to address this would be more cross-promotion (or even adjacent proximity of exhibit halls) to the attendees of Enterprise Search Summit, another Information Today event taking place at the same time as and just down the hall from Streaming Media East.

Flash and Silverlight. The debate over whether or not Flash or Silverlight is the underlying technology that will enable the future of Web 2.0 was much more pronounced at Streaming Media East than it was at the NAB show in Vegas, where Silverlight was announced. This may be due in part to the fact that more information is available about Silverlight (including Sean Alexander’s excellent keynote on Tuesday), or it may be that the audience at Streaming Media is more attuned to the difference between delivery platforms and video/audio codecs.

Microsoft clarified questions about the codec that Silverlight will use when it said a newer version of the WindowsMedia codecs will ship with Silverlight 1.0 and showed off the Expression Studio suite of products. On the Flash side, Lisa Larson’s presentation on the use of Flash Video for the web was one of the most-attended tutorials, with the room filled with enterprise, education, and entertainment industry attendees, not to mention more than a few bloggers..

Citizen Journalism. Blogs and podcasts were both part of the show coverage and a topic of discussion on the show floor and panels. Martin Nisenholtz, senior VP of digital operations at The New York Times Company, carried the conversation forward during his keynote on Wednesday, when he showed how the reporters of the newspaper was moving forward in its use of video to supplement stories.

"While there’s compelling amateur content out there, we’ll put our money on the quality we produce," said Nisenholtz. "But since the ‘new big’ is smaller than the ‘old big,’ we also think there’s plenty of room for smaller sites to generate revenue if they effectively marry video and print together."

On2’s Savello added to the discussion, noting that, with the current swing to citizen journalism and user-generated content, we’re actually returning to our roots by fostering a new type of broadcast model.

In all, Streaming Media East 2007 provided a venue for a great deal of dialogue and a sense that streaming is continuing to press forward as a vanguard of Web 2.0. The attendee level—more than 3,400 this year—means that next year’s show may very well have to expand into a larger space, perhaps even rivaling the early Streaming Media shows that took over two levels of exhibit halls in the same Hilton venue. More important, though, is the fact that the dialogue is now returning to core benefits and business models that prove the initial appeal of streaming as a way to enhance multiple industries has not been lost.