Earlier this month, Dan Rayburn announced that Streamingmedia.com will be launching a new one-day summit on May 11, 2009, held in conjunction with the Streaming Media East conference and exhibition, that will focus on the infrastructure of online video. According to Dan, "my goal is to bring together content owners, infrastructure providers, analysts, and Wall Street to discuss the business and technology challenges of delivering video online. (www.ContentDeliverySummit.com) While competition is fierce amongst CDN vendors, there is still an opportunity for all vendors and customers to help push the market forward with information sharing, best practices and debates about the most important business and technology topics relevant to the growth of this industry. This is where the Content Delivery Summit comes in.""As online video gets consumed more often, on more devices and at higher quality, the importance of content delivery networks is crucial to the success of content owners. With more delivery vendors entering the market every quarter, backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in VC money, customers, content delivery networks and industry analysts can now come together to network, discuss, and learn."
The Content Delivery Summit 2009 will focus on:
- How competition, customer demands, consolidation, and the broader IT landscape will shape the content delivery marketplace.
- What the traffic and growth patterns content owners are seeing, the type of reporting and analytics they need, and what pricing trends are taking place in the market.
- The technology debate on what impact P2P, network architecture, HD quality video and live broadcasting will have on the market.
I spoke with Dan just before the new year and he discussed how the idea of the CDN Summit got started, "The CDN industry has been bickering and fighting for the last ten years, there's 50+ vendors and there's been over $450 million raised in the market in the last 18 months yet none of these folks are talking to one another. None of them are comparing notes or talking about what the future of the CDN market is and how everyone can play in it. Instead they just want to fight and sue one another.So my whole goal is to bring the industry together so that we have Wall Street, customers and vendors all talking to one another. It's going to be real interesting to see when I put the message on the blog very clearly saying, "I need your help." If you're in the CDN industry, I need your help. I want you to speak, I want you to send in ideas, I want this to be your event. It's going to be a high level summit, no exhibition, we're going to keep it really cheap for anyone to attend and we'll see just how well they respond."
It's the first time Streamingmedia.com has done a one-day, no exhibition event really focusing on high level networking. Dan says that even though he thinks a lot of the CDNs will not support it, it will be really good for them and will bring a lot of exposure to that segment of the market. "Since I deal with a lot of Wall Street folks," he said, "I'm expecting a third of my attendance to be the Wall Street crowd."
"The majority of speakers at the summit will be customers, those who actually buy CDN services and can share with us what impact video delivery is having on their business today and what kind of growth they expect in the future. We'll have two tracks with roughly twelve sessions, four keynote presenters and roughly sixty total speakers and will be having multiple networking functions during and and after the event."
All the sessions will be recorded and available on demand as all their other Streaming Media shows. One of the keynotes already confirmed is Jeffrey Cohen, GM, Edge Computing Network, Microsoft who is responsible for all the content delivery services internally at Microsoft. Dan noted that this be very timely in terms of the subject matter because all the analysts on Wall Street side keep asking him with Microsoft building their own CDN -- because they license the technology from Limelight -- how much is that going to impact business? How much will the CDNs lose from Microsoft?
"While 2009 marks the 14th year since some of the first CDNs starting delivering video on the web, I think there is a lot more that the CDN industry needs to be doing as a collective group, working together to share information and help grow the market faster."
Dan concluded, "If you have any ideas on how the Content Delivery Summit can help to achieve this, I welcome and any all suggestions and answer my phone 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I'd love to hear from you. (917-523-4562)"
Check out his blog post, Announcing New Content Delivery Summit, The Infrastructure Of Online Video | The Business Of Online Video and visit the web site Content Delivery Summit 2009 for more information.
Registration for Streaming Media East 2009 will open soon.
Updated 1/27/09: Revised speaker information.
