Streaming Media East 2005: From the Show Floor

One end of the exhibit hall was cordoned off into a demo room, allowing exhibitors to provide 20-30 minute presentations on their product or service. These demonstrations were scheduled throughout both days and provided an opportunity for exhibit-only or full conference attendees to sit and ask questions of key company personnel for a given product or service.

Payvision, a Netherlands-based company that used Streaming Media East as a launching point to expand its services into North America, provided a succinct overview of its service offering. Payvision bundles billing services, digital rights management (DRM) and electronic commerce into several service offerings for content owners. These service offerings can be used online, in the form of a "Virtual Wallet," but Martijn Van Halen, CTO of Payvision, also notes that offline purchases, in the form of pre-paid movie/video/game cards (MVG) are also gaining popularity in Europe.

"Our ability to tie pre-pay cards to a virtual wallet, combined with our StreamTracker software and MVG delivery platform, has yielded great benefits to our European customers," said Van Halen. "We’ve used our demonstration time to explain the benefits of using our service to North American attendees of Streaming Media East, using real-world case studies. We can offer our customers several advantages, such as lower merchant account fees and the ability to monetize low-cost content at a rate that makes sense for both the content owner and the end user."

Webcast In A Box also used their demonstration time to present a case study for a recent project. While Webcast In A Box started as a company that provided turnkey Linux-based encoding and delivery tools, CEO Erik Herz acknowledged that their product offerings go well beyond the initial "in a box" concept.

"We’ve recently completed a project for the US Navy, which captures and delivers over 30 daily training classes for US military personnel," Herz said. "We set out to use Linux and open-source wherever possible for the encode and delivery portions of a streaming media or video-on-demand workflow and have seen a great response to our products, not only in the ‘in a box’ single encoders but also in mid-size systems implementations. We think our solutions, along with the new H.264 codecs, hold promise for large-scale deployments. H.264 is also the standard for videoconferencing systems from companies like Tandberg and Polycom, which many of our customers already use, and it is already available on the Macintosh platform with QuickTime 7 with free players soon to be available on Windows and Linux, thanks to the open source community."

One new exhibitor this year was Focal Press, an imprint of Elsevier. Focal Press recently published The Business of Streaming and Digital Media by Dan Rayburn and Michael Hoch, and is preparing a "Hands-On Guide" series on streaming media topics, several of which will be showcased at the upcoming Streaming Media West show. The booth did brisk business, selling multiple copies of the new book as well as other pertinent titles.

"With our commitment to launching the ‘Hands-On Guide’ series in the near future, we thought Streaming Media East was an appropriate show at which to exhibit," said Angelina Ward, senior acquisitions editor for Focal Press. "Since this was our first show, we were uncertain about the initial response, but we have exceeded our expectations in terms of sales of current books and interest in future books in the ‘Hands-On Guide’ series."