Here at Streaming Media West... been going to these since 2000.
It's always a good place to see what's going on with video (used to be more multimedia oriented in the past) and what people are doing.
Seems like everyone is jumping on the Flash video bandwaggon, which is where we've been over the past year. Real, Quicktime and Windows might lose... although I'm pretty sure that Microsoft will spend billions of $$ on their "Silverlight"platform. I think Adove won that battle already. At least Microsoft can be happy that they beat Sony with their gaming system. You win some, you lose some.
As I said, this conference focuses on "video"... same as the "Video Web Summit" back in June. I wish there was more multimedia oritented, that's my only pet peeve for this.
It's interesting to know how people are using video in their organization, business and institutions. There's definitely similarities between all of these types of applications. Some of the same problems that were identified in 2000 are still here. How to create effective content, what CDN should you use, how can you search multimedia, etc.
For this entry, I wanted to tak about User Generated Content. It is the big talk of the week. The YouTubes of the world are now swamping the network with billions of videos streaming around the globe. Amid all this traffic, it creates opportunities for CDNs to cash in on media infrastructures. P2P hybrid networks makes sense in some instances, for "hot" content, but presents a barrier to entry with client side apps that need to be installed and security, resources issues. For example, using P2P, you can reduce your CDN costs, but that content comes from other people's
CDNs... OPR (other people's resources). Would companies allow their systems, their high-priced network to be piggy-backed for free? Some kinks have to be worked out first...
Next, how do you find content you want (or didn't know you wanted) to see. Relevance. How to provide viewers with the correct content? Right now, it's based on search parameters, online behavioral monitoring... and privacy information. It weeds out all the "spam" who don't correctly tag media when publishing, just to get the hits (booo these people!!!). The most interesting one is behavioral. Based on previous searches, drill-downs within a site, the system "learns" about you.
What do you or other people like you recommend, rate the highest, share with others? Would that content be relevant for you? The most touchy subject is intrusion of privacy in order to increase the likeliness of really finding what you really want (or didn't know you want). Having personal profiles shared with search engines that will know your work experience, music, tv shows, travels, interests, etc.
Finally, how can you apply these video social networking sites for an enterprise. What can be, shouldn't be shared? Who monitors it? How can an internal tool like this increase a company's productivity and competitive edge? What if the meetings with the execs were available for all employees to see, to get the story straight from the top, versus the diluted pass-down that takes a week... a month... where it could be hours....
now... how about the opposite. What if employees could share best practices, ideas to the management/exec layer? That would be pretty cool...