The Big Bang: Media & Entertainment Year in Review

Sling Media’s box allows viewers to watch their local television content regardless of where they are—more of a placeshifting than the timeshifting made possible by VCRs and DVRs.

Even the big technology companies are getting into media entertainment delivery: Level 3, Cisco, Ericsson, and others have identified the streaming and online media entertainment market as a key growth segment. Akamai, which has been around this space for a while, has made key acquisitions to accelerate media delivery, and even AT&T has announced an interest, as it did several times during the videoconferencing and early internet protocol television (IPTV) boom. That latter announcement makes some industry pundits suspect.

"It took Level 3 acquiring the CDN assets of SAVVIS and 12 months of buildout just to get a basic offering out the door," said Streaming Media’s Dan Rayburn on his Business of Video blog. "If AT&T does not acquire anyone, how long would it take them to be at even 30% of the capacity Akamai is at today? They can’t do that in a year. And what about streaming support? Whatever limited CDN service AT&T has today, it does not support delivery via streaming, live or on-demand, has no support for Flash, no content management system, no video reporting etc … all things Akamai and others have today."

Finally—and this thrills my heart—one of the pirates of the industry was able to do a keynote at Streaming Media West. Ashwin Navin, CEO of BitTorrent, Inc., provided the opening keynote in San Jose, talking about BitTorrent DNA, the company’s file swarming/file segmentation delivery system. Even the outlaws are going legit.

In conclusion, 2007’s bang and whimper are indicative of the continued shift to new mediums, as well as the replication of new media on traditional broadcast technologies such as TV, cable, and even pay-per-view. From consumer-generated content to big media’s tentative but determined embrace of the web as a delivery medium, streaming media continues to move forward. And, while U.S. broadband deployment continues to lag behind that of many other first-world countries, the continued advancements in codecs and the consumer’s insatiable appetite for creating and consuming content combined in 2007 to show a glimpse of the path forward for streaming and rich media.