Star-Gazing at the Ever-Changing Streaming Video Universe

Welcome to the 2019 Streaming Media Industry Sourcebook, our annual status check on the state of the online video industry. The new year may have started on January 1, but for us, it really begins when we send this double issue off to the printer. In it, you’ll find our usual industry updates, buyers’ guides, and how-to’s and tutorials, as well as case studies, white papers, product spotlights, and the one-of-a-kind industry directory.

This year, the industry directory features the “Streamverse,” our graphical representation of all of our premium sponsors. We hope we’ve helped you make sense of the nearly 100 companies in the directory by placing them in the categories that we use to segment editorial content on StreamingMedia.com. It’s not exhaustive, but it gives you a good idea of just how vibrant and competitive the industry still is, 20 years after it began.

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If the first 2 months of 2019 have been a harbinger of things to come, the Streamverse will look very different a year from now. Had we put together the Streamverse 10 years ago, online video platforms (OVPs) would have had their own “galaxy”—in 2009 we were tracking more than 70 of them. With Brightcove’s acquisition of Ooyala’s OVP assets in February, there are only two of the originals left standing. (Kaltura is the other one; the rest of the “Big Bang” of OVPs have either burned out or decided to focus exclusively on the enterprise and/or education market.)

Will the rest of the year see further consolidation in other galaxies? It’s a good bet that it will. As our publisher Joel Unickow predicted a year ago in an article called “The Dystopian Era of Streaming Video: How to Survive and Thrive,” there won’t be many more overnight sensations in our market, and so we can expect a year of stellar collisions. The strong will thrive, the rest will collapse into black holes.

[This article appears in the March 2019 issue of Streaming Media Magazine as "Stellar Collisions and Black Holes."]

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The Dystopian Era of Streaming Video: How to Survive and Thrive

Yesterday's sci-fi visions of the future are here, so now the real work begins. Video providers need to outsmart the big names or they'll find themselves hunting for scraps.

23 Apr 2018