SME Observations: AT&T, P2P & Ads, Ads, Everywhere

Written by Ryan Lawler

Thursday, May 22. 2008 at 11:40 AM EDT Post a comment

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Attendees and exhibitors at Streaming Media East said there was a bit more buzz on the show floor than in past years. So what was of interest at this year's show?

Advertising, for one thing.

Ads: a hot topic
Anecdotal evidence suggests that the companies in attendance are getting serious about exploring new ad formats and ad models, or at least learning about them.

Breakout sessions revolving around advertising -- and there were plenty of them -- were mostly full, as content owners (presumably) and service providers scout out how they're going to monetize the gobs and gobs of video content they're streaming to end users.

Panache president Steve Robinson says there's still a lot of confusion in the market, which could explain all the interest. "Right now we're at the first batter of the first inning. Everyone's trying to figure out what works," Robinson says.

AT&T exhibiting, but won't say why
One of the surprising new exhibitors on the show floor was AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T), which had a booth full of sales people in bright orange branded shirts talking about the company's Intelligent Content Distribution service. But when pressed, they were hazy about the details of that service.

The carrier has operated a content delivery network (CDN) for the last seven or eight years, but industry sources say it has a limited client base compared to companies like Akamai or Limelight and it hasn't competed very aggressively for deals. But recently, AT&T has expressed public interest in expanding its footprint and competing head-to-head with some of the pure-play CDNs.

At the company's analyst day meeting in December, Ron Spears, AT&T's group president of global business services, said AT&T is committed to adding content servers to network locations around the world and would have a sixfold increase in caching and live streaming capabilities by the end of 2008.

AT&T was mum on how those plans are coming along. For what it's worth, the company is a diamond sponsor of Streaming Media West, so clearly something's brewing.

Where's P2P?
Seemingly absent from the show floor were peer-to-peer (P2P) technology companies. Despite recent buzz from the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) about best practices and technology interworking with carriers, there weren't a whole lot of P2P companies represented.

The exceptions? BitTorrent Inc. , which is trying to make the case that it's gone legit, and Kontiki , which was recently spun out from VeriSign Inc. (Nasdaq: VRSN).

That's not to say P2P wasn't a hot topic at the show. In one panel, service providers Comcast Corp. (Nasdaq: CMCSA, CMCSK) and Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ) promised not to throttle P2P traffic.

And the DCIA had its first best practices working group meeting Tuesday after the show. But as for who was there and what was talked about, no one's really saying.