Streaming Media For Organisations – Day One
Day One is done and while I would say that the learning’s were good, they were not necessarily ground breaking. The technology certainly has taken on some serious growth in the past few years, but we still, as South Africa, battle with issues of bandwidth and the costs associated with this.
I enjoyed the different working examples presented, in particular two businesses:
Star Schools – working in the education space have created really great e-books with a video embedded over the top providing “expert” tutorials. The application for rural schools, in my view, is amazing. Teachers who are typically under resourced and very often themselves not expert in all of the topics, are able to assume the role of facilitators with the expert giving the lesson. I really think that this application has some huge potential, although it will need the involvement of corporate SA as I am not sure that government have the resources to deploy?
Wildearth.tv The most important lesson that I took away from this organisation was the fact that they hosted everything off shore. That if you search hard enough you will find providers, excellent one’s at that, all over the place. That the cost using overseas partners are not prohibitive. Equally the observation that Pay TV channels have the opportunity to drive people to the Internet, while they still control the eyes.
My overall impressions were that the conference has a niche, that the suppliers in this space from a local capability point of view appear to be compitent and that we can deliver streaming media to our clients. We are going to hamstrung by the lack of infrastructure and more importantly the cost associated with this.
Here’s hoping that Day two will be as interesting and that the providers out there sit up and take note and bring the costing to a place that is reasonable and affordable to all.