Cue the Strangelove Moment: Media & Entertainment Year in Review
Many thought that Move Networks was also involved with the NBCOlympics.com delivery of the Beijing 2008 Summer Games, but Move executives have repeatedly denied the rumor. Lessons learned from the two events, though, are still reverberating throughout the industry.
Microsoft’s end-of-year release of Smooth Streaming—an IIS 7 Media Pack technology based on Move’s 2-second "chunking" of content—was identified as an enhancement based on what Microsoft learned from the Olympics. The use of streams that start low-quality but snap to high-quality if bandwidth is available should help address massively scaling content needs.
In much the same way, Adobe’s beta release of Flash Media Server 3.5—which has dynamic (multiple bitrate) streaming and a live DVR functionality that can be used to pause a live stream and to mitigate the need for immediate onlining of servers during rapid viewership spikes—was based on lessons Adobe learned during the largest live event of 2008.
The recurring theme of Move, Flash, and Silverlight continued through the rest of the year, culminating in several big media and entertainment programming announcements.
MLB.com, the official website of Major League Baseball, moved from Flash to Silverlight and then back to Flash. Collegesports.com, a CBS property that hosts college football and basketball games, went with Silverlight and was one of the key partners at the time of the official Silverlight 2.0 release.
Several other key sports and entertainment properties fell one way or the other, helped in some part by undisclosed funding provided by Adobe and Microsoft as the streaming industry returned to the decade-old debate over the merits of tying down either technology or content. Clearly, for at least the majority of 2008 and the foreseeable future in 2009, content is king again.
Piracy Watch
Piracy and bootlegging also made their annual appearances, but in some ways their appearances in 2008 brought a pointed reminder that rights management can be as much of a detractor as a beneficiary of online viewing patterns.
In a clever stroke of marketing, Akamai Technologies used a study of online piracy as a clarion call for traditional media and entertainment companies to move their content online at a faster pace. The company also showed how its workflow could allow that move in a relatively painless fashion.
In partnership with Vobile, Inc., Akamai’s study showed just how fast premium broadcast content is pirated on the web. Stating a somewhat obvious fact—that popular U.S.-based prime-time television shows are available online within minutes of being broadcast—Akamai noted that "content owners need to distribute premium content through legitimate channels within a window of 12–18 hours."
Recommending a twofold approach of syndication (such as Hulu) and direct posting to a site (as with ABC.com), Akamai suggested security measures such as fingerprinting and encouraged companies to register "their content with companies like Vobile to prevent the broad propagation of their copyrighted content across the Internet."