Rich Media Publishing and Management: Definitely Here Today - Part 1

The session began with a few PowerPoint slides. Blaise and Andy were patient…until the bullets on their screen described the problem for enterprise streaming media to be an abundance of rich media content that hit a bottleneck at its introduction onto the IP network for publication and secure distribution. At this point in the briefing, the vendor was asked to stop and the situation across many enterprise streaming media operations was captured succinctly in one sentence: Gentlemen, it looks like you have developed a solution for a problem we would love to have, but unfortunately, we are not experiencing today.

Problems included the fact that content creation systems were too expensive and/or too complex. If they were sufficiently adventuresome to attempt it in the first place, subject matter experts or knowledge workers found creating original rich media content on a desktop computer was too complex and arduous a process to repeat. Even leveraging inexpensive tools such as PowerPoint Producer and other software specifically designed to ease the capture and integration of content, users were not sufficiently motivated to change their behavior and expand their media wardrobes to include dynamic data types.

enScaler, Virage, eMotion, CacheFlow, MediaSite, eScene, Digital Lava and others struggled through this period in search of viable business models and companies with employees producing massive quantities of rich media such that only an automated publishing and distribution system could handle the load. Some of these streaming media companies were acquired or merged. Others shrank, went dormant or closed their doors.

Those who survived are reviving their business engines, updating and refining how they go to market. There are also newcomers to the rich media publishing and management space who over the past 12 months have introduced their solutions to address the anticipated opportunities at far lower cost points than their forerunners.