Streaming Media East Program Now Live: Speaker Placement Starts Today

I've been a little behind on blogging lately as I have been hard at work finalizing the advance program for the Streaming Media East show, taking place May 15-16 in NYC. I'm happy to say the program is now done and speaker placement will start today. You can see a PDF of the program here and all sessions in red are open. I now have to sort through hundreds of submissions and work with moderators to place speakers over the next eight weeks. If you see a session in red you want to be involved on, send me an email.

One thing you may notice is that we have a lot of stand-alone how-to presentations by single presenters this year and we also added a fourth track to the conference. For those that may be wondering where all of the sessions are pertaining to infrastructure related topics, we'll be covering that segment of the market the day before the East show at the Content Delivery Summit, taking place Monday May 14th. I have just started working on the advance program for that show and will have something to share in a few weeks.

If you want to propose a speaker for one of the sessions on the program you are welcome to do so, but please keep in mind that I get hundreds of submissions. So sending me an email saying you want someone to speak but don't include any bio on the speaker, company background, details on what previous conferences they have spoken at or which topics they can speak to, is a sure way not to be considered. If you are serious about placing them on a panel, please detail why they are an expert on that particular topic and what they bring to the table. As always, all vendors who bring customers will always get picked before vendors that don't bring customers.

Studios Still Don't Get It: Paramount Charging $20 To Stream 10+ Year Old Movies

For all talk from the studios about how much they are "embracing" digital, they really aren't. Consumers are asking for more choices when it comes to being able to get first-run content in digital form, for multiple devices, yet the studios continue to launch services that are limited in playback, with pricing that's too expensive.

The latest example comes from Paramount which has just started offering the streaming of films from the cloud, using the UltraViolet platform, and are charging between $22.99 for HD and $12.99 for SD. Support for Android and Windows Phone are not possible and while it works on iOS devices, HD quality isn't possible, only SD. It also doesn't work on set-top boxes and on average, the DVD of these movies they are selling cost 2/3 the price of digital. On the ParamountMovies.com website, a recent movie from 2010 costs $22.99 to buy rent in HD, yet a movie that is thirteen years old is only $3 cheaper and still costs $19.99.

What studio executive thinks consumers are going to pay $22.99 to stream a movie when we can buy the DVD for $7 or rent it for less than $2? The economics don't make sense for how the studios price digital content and the fact they are keeping Netflix and others from even renting physical discs, only so they sell more DVDs, clearly shows where their true interest lies - and it's not in digital. At some point, the studios are going to get burned just like the music industry did and while they spend a lot of time complaining about piracy, they need to wake up and realize that consumers are demanding digital content, for a fair price. So far, the studios are not willing to give it to them and over time, are going to see their business models crumble as of a result. They own arrogance is going to be the death of their legacy business.

Streaming Media West Conference Videos From LA Now Online

All sessions from the Streaming Media West 2011 show in LA this past November are now online and available for on-demand viewing at www.streamingmedia.com/videos

You may re-purpose these videos as you wish. Due to some technical issues we had with the recordings, one session entitled, "Making a Living on YouTube" was not able to be archived and two of the recorded sessions have less than ideal audio levels. I apologize to those speakers that have archived sessions  affected.

Wanted: Pre-Conference Workshop Presenters For Streaming Media East Show

On Monday May 14th, the day before the Streaming Media East show kicks off, we have four workshops that provide hands-on instructional classes. All workshops are three hours in length and I currently have two workshops confirmed on the topics of "Planning Online Video Deployment for HTML5 and Flash" and "Encoding for Flash, Mobile, and HTML5".

I am looking for two more workshops and am open to topic ideas and suggestions. Instructors will be paid and I am looking for those who have experience in doing hands-on classes. These aren't high-level discussions taking place but rather actual classes that show and explain to attendees how to do something. I am not looking for vendor workshops on how to use a particular product, but showing off multiple products and platforms is ok. I am looking for technical topics pertaining to anything in the video ecosystem that would be interesting to a large portion of the market.

If you would like to be considered for one of these workshop presentations, please contact me this week. I will be making a decision within the next few days.

The Top Articles I Found Interesting That You Might Have Missed

Here are the stories I found interesting over the past week or so on the Web. I've tried to highlight ones that didn't get picked up as much and might have been missed since they weren't caught by mainstream outlets.

• "The World of Pain that is HTML5 Video" - bit.ly/zNZNX4 - @flashfreaker

• "Lies, Damn Lies, Ad Industry Growth Forecasts" - bit.ly/zlpIoP - @JackMarshall

• "Netflix: Auto Scaling in the Amazon Cloud" - bit.ly/yoQHRX - @netflix

• "Who Buys All Those Google Ads? An Infographic Breakdown" - bit.ly/A0ceQv - @johncabell

• "90 minute end-to-end look at Windows Azure" (video) - bit.ly/AmBTLR - @scottgu

• "Trouble finding HD or captioned titles on Netflix?" - bit.ly/AaXfJX - @TechOfTheHub

• "How MSNBC Customizes Videos For Various Platforms" - bit.ly/xAvwdX - @TimSiglin

• "The TV Business Keeps Getting Stronger!" - bit.ly/AaFRDN - @mcuban

• "One-on-One With YouTube's Content Boss" (video) - dthin.gs/z2WR99 - @pkafka

I will try to publish a list like this every week and all of these stories come from my Twitter feed. So if you want to see what I am reading in real-time, follow me on Twitter (@DanRayburn).