I had the pleasure of attending three trade shows over the last several months and saw the three faces of streaming today. Regrettably, they didn’t happen in order of character, but those are the breaks in the big city.I had the pleasure of attending three trade shows over the last several months and saw the three faces of streaming today. Regrettably, they didn’t happen in order of character, but those are the breaks in the big city. October saw the Streaming Media East show at Javits Convention Center in New York, while January saw Internext and CES bump into each other under the Las Vegas lights. From fanciful, big-budget “what-if’s” to wistful memories of top shelf parties; into the cold, hard reality where money is being made today and be damned what the family thinks come Thanksgiving – these three shows run the gamut of Streaming Media today.

Let’s start with the big budget dreamers at CES. Here is a greatly diminished (in booths, but not attendance) show with a dot-com-daze party where Lenny Kravitz rocked the opening night Microsoft party. The show floor was littered with toys, which will not be available to even the most devout gadget geek for years to come and won’t trickle down to the average consumer for a decade. The speaker sessions often dealt with equally long-term what-if-ism.

On my panel “Streaming Video Management on the Net,” we had a lengthy discussion of whether MPEG would be the dominant codec for the web. I felt like I’d fallen into a tear in the fabric of the time/space continuum. Microsoft was demonstrating a working WMP9 on the show floor that is miles beyond anything else on the market as far as protection for the content owners and acceptability by the consumers. We were engaged in mental-masturbation as to whether MPEG would suddenly fly past the most powerful software company on the planet and become something. The winning codec will be the one that will offer content owners protection. Protected content will beget compelling content, compelling content will cause traction, and traction will ensure adoption by the masses.

From dreamers to whiners, we adjourn to Streaming Media East. Streaming Media was THE show to attend if you had anything to do with the Streaming Media industry and needed to see and be seen in 1999. The October show was by all accounts a show for the faithful kluged onto a slightly less sad show Internet World for the last time – Penton has recently jettisoned? Streaming Media Magazine to swim or sink.

The end result was quality vs. quantity in the attendant population – those who had trekked to the show were serious about learning how to integrate Streaming into their business, whether it was educational, medical, enterprise or the more expected media and entertainment. There was a disparity in the crowd between those who had been in for several years, had clearly drank the Kool-AidTM and will most likely retire in an established Streaming industry and those who are interested in the who, how, when and where of the development, deployment and cost. The end result was that one went from hopeful to wistful forty times a day until even the most devout evangelist of an “all content, all places at all times” universe would fall into a bi-polar coma and there wasn’t a single open bar to drown oneself in free Sapphire.

Finally, the New Year started with a blast of reality at the Internext show. For those of you living in a cave, AVN is a prominent adult industry rag and the best Internet show of the year is Internext, put on by those kind folks in Chatsworth, California. The show offers content creators, content aggregators and content manipulators a chance to meet in an open market freak-show to shave a few points off their back-end and make another couple of grand a month. As a rule, the people walking this show represent sites that are making real money on Streaming Media today and the topic de jour is DRM (Digital Rights Management). How does one keep one’s video from being ripped-off and make sure not to saturate the market with pirated content from one’s own site?

DRM is the process of assigning rules to a piece of content (audio, video or documents) – can this video be played once or twenty times; will it run indefinitely or freeze up on the fifth? By inserting these rules and pulling the MetaData into databases to slice and dice the content with templates one creates a cohesive environment to protect, sell and track one’s media asset. There are a number of DRM players, but the strong favorite is Windows Media Player, which offers DRM at an affordable price, which I am sad to report Real and Quicktime are not.

Porn – love it or hate it, consume or condemn it, it has driven innovation on the Net since Arpanet. Today, the best examples of profitable, killer content can be found behind well-guarded gates. Progressively, the studios are taking more control of their content and the distribution channels. This is the pointy end of the stick. Where is the money being left on the table?

Content owners have, for too long, given a disproportionate amount of money to content aggregators and are progressively taking control of their content and its distribution. The upfront costs have become easier to justify as they’ve seen the back-end points trickle away. Software, hardware, staff, storage and bandwidth will cost tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in set-up costs depending on the ambition of the product. With hundreds of thousands of new clients a month, the amortization can be in months, not years.

By next years’ shows, the question will be if that magic piece of content, The Milton Berle of streaming, will rise up and give the public-at-large an excuse to get broadband. Content creators will want to make money off of their creations, which, online, means imposing DRM to protect it, DAM (Digital Asset Management) to sell it, and reporting to find out who bought what. The pieces are in place, so now we must wait to see who will bring out the first standout show which will justify all those of us who drank the Kool-AidTM and want to believe.

Per Caroe is the Media and Entertainment Account Executive for enScaler.com and can be reached at per@enscaler.com.