NY Video Meetup: The Meetup Meets Streaming Media East (#NYVM)

By Lauren Keyson

Yesterday, the NY Video Meetup joined forces with the Streaming Media East conference in NY to take a look at the business and technology of online video at the Hilton Hotel in Midtown. The Meetup’s organizer Steve Rosenbaum, summed up the growth of the video sector, “I’ve been coming to the Streaming Media East show for eight years. I’ve watched this industry boom and then I watched it go down — and then come back up again. But I’ve never seen a busier, more diverse and more engaged group of people on the trade show floor than in the last day – to me that’s a clue about what is happening in here in NY. It’s not kind of one company doing one thing, it’s a whole bunch of different companies that are all really passionate about video, whether it’s encoding, video delivery or content. So that trade show floor, if that’s an indication of where were going, then we’re in really good shape.”

Jeff Malkin, president of Encoding.com, started off the presentations. He said that a common theme among his customers was, ‘Can you make my source video and make it work for all the devices,’ — and that’s where video coding comes in. “It’s a process of converting source video to all the file formats required for people to watch video on the plethora of mobile devices tablets, set top boxes and browsers, and it’s a headache, expensive, very complex — part art and part science.”  So he came up with Vid.ly, the “first, universal video platform” that allows users to take videos from anywhere and give them a common embed code.

Then Michael Gatzke talked about GRAB Networks. He called it a “distributed media company whose mission is to work with web publishers.” The network offers websites that don’t have video content and makes them available to 1000, mostly mid-tier sites, that don’t have the economics or scale to produce a video themselves. “We are definitely not an ad network,” he said. “We are more like a television network. We have affiliates who rely on us for content service. Like television, we sell the advertising against our own content that we license on those affiliate websites.”

Online video innovator Kathryn Jones explained how she thought that streaming media is the democratization of entertainment. Better Left Unsaid TV, her first interactive, live-streamed theatrical play that is a cross between a play, online video and a live stream event. “What I want people to take away from my presentation is that there is a huge future in live stream performance. There is a huge audience out there, and the community that produces that kind of work really is not jumping on board. I feel that live streaming is a golden egg for those communities that are suffering and having a hard time finding audiences. The audiences are there, and they’re willing to pay for it – more than you would expect them to.”

PookyMedia, a creation of PookyAmsterdam, presented her real-time animation company that, “Allows users to have a virtual wealth that can be created in a 360 virtual environment. Our goal is to help companies distinguish their videos without having a multi-national corporations advertising budget. We have a great opportunity there to really reach people, but we have to deliver something that is important. With time being the new currency, if you can get somebody who is just sitting there to click that button to play and you can make a connection with them, then you have somebody who is going to be part of your user base, and who is interested in you and what you’ve got. Animation is a fantastic way of showing a fresh look, of showing something different and new.”