The 2007 Streaming Media Readers' Choice Awards Winners
P2P Delivery Network
BitTorrent
First runner-up: VeriSign Kontiki Delivery Management System
Second runner-up: Itiva QStream
2007 will go down in streaming media history as the year that peer-to-peer came into its own, and in a big way. While BitTorrent has been a familiar name for years because of the technology’s prominence in the world of illicit file sharing, this year it went legit as a content partner with Warner Bros., Viacom, and 20th Century Fox. As such, BitTorrent’s new role as a leading content portal surely had something to do with its strong showing in the P2P Delivery Network category (as did the fact that it’s still the technology of choice for online piracy), and it’s no real surprise that it came in first in our readers’ poll.
No offense to BitTorrent (whose president and co-founder Ashwin Navin will be a keynote speaker at Streaming Media West), but their victory isn’t the real story here. In addition to first runner-up VeriSign’s Kontiki Delivery Management System and second runner-up Itiva’s QStream, the nine other nominees made it the most populous Readers’ Choice Awards category, and each of those nominees—from veterans like Abacast (who’ve been at the forefront of P2P delivery for years) to popular upstarts like Pando and Ignite Technologies—made a strong showing, proving that even if it still has its doubters, P2P is here to stay.
Regional (North American) Content Delivery Network
RealNetworks Real Broadcast Network
First runner-up: Streaming Media Hosting
Second runner-up: PowerStream
Even though the RealPlayer was one of the first media players to rise to prominence, it’s fallen out of fashion as a way to watch media and entertainment content. So it’s easy to forget that, behind the scenes, RealNetworks is still a major player in the realm of content delivery, whether it’s consumer-facing media for the Associated Press and C-SPAN or on college campuses like the University of Las Vegas or Grand Valley State University.
Likewise, runners-up Streaming Media Hosting and PowerStream might not get the name recognition afforded to international providers like Akamai or Limelight, but they’ve both established themselves as go-to services for content delivery needs that don’t span the globe.
Search and Indexing Platform
Gotuit PowerVideo Suite
First runner-up: Blinkx
Second runner-up: Coveo Enterprise Search
Gotuit’s PowerVideo Suite has got a lot more going for it than just search and indexing, but it’s the Gotuit’s VideoDiscovery module that grabbed the attention this year. Videos in a library are marked with metadata—title, description, time in/time out, tags, and attributes—for each logical scene, and then scenes are categorized into playlists based upon that metadata. It’s great for viewers, but it’s also terrific for advertisers who want to target their message based on the most precise criteria possible.
And even if 2007 didn’t turn out to be the "Year of Video Search," as predicted by Streaming Media contributing editor Tim Siglin, video search was still one of the hottest topics in the industry. No one—sorry, Gotuit, not even you—has unearthed the holy grail of automated video recognition yet, but first runner-up Blinkx is named one of Business 2.0’s "companies that will change the world" and as enterprise search leader Coveo makes the "EContent 100," it’s clear that plenty of R&D money will be flowing to companies like these that are working hard to find it.
Server Hardware/Software
Adobe Flash Media Server
First runner-up: Microsoft Windows Media Server
Second runner-up: Wowza Media Server
Adobe’s Flash Media Server won this category even before the announcement of version 3, which promises to increase efficiency twofold and therefore drive down total cost of ownership (TCO), thus addressing the major criticism leveled against the product today. That strong showing can be attributed at least in part to the "Apple effect"—users of Flash Media Server don’t number nearly as high as those of Microsoft’s Windows Media Server, but those users are fiercely loyal and enthusiastic about their chosen delivery method. Things promise to get even more interesting in 2008, when both the Adobe Media Player and Microsoft Silverlight are in full effect.
Of course, Adobe isn’t looking to decrease TCO out of a sense of altruism. The Flash Media Server faced fierce competition this year, particularly in Europe, from the software-only Wowza Media Server, which not only beat Flash Media Server on cost but matched or beat it on performance. We’ll see what happens after FMS 3 comes out in Q1 2008, but Wowza’s not going away anytime soon.
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It's the most prestigious honor in the online video industry, because it's decided by thousands of StreamingMedia.com voters. Read on to see which companies are taking home a Readers' Choice Award.
02 Nov 2016
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