The change in the senior management of VCST seen in the establishment of a three member "office of the President" is a very short term piece of window dressing until a permanent CEO is appointed. I believe that announcement will be forthcoming within 3 weeks.But more pertinent to my view of the market place that VCST is addressing was greatly enhanced by my attending a joint VCST/SMAC presenation given to the Unysis Computer Systems Division personnel today. SMAC is in a 3 year mentoring program with Unysis. I learned a number of things ,not the least of which is that VCST has over 15,000(no there is not an extra zero)active customer accounts. Just a few of the biggies-MCI,Intervu,Morgan Stanley,CNN, Fox News,CNBS,NASA,Discovery Channel,Boeing etc etc. There is no doubt whatsoever ,IMHO, that in streaming VCST/SMAC are the industry leaders by a very wide margin. I fankly am looking to a super 2nd quarter report In this part of their business there are three main products.1. viewcast net streamer, the SMAC Stream Switch and the various "Osprey" devices. The osprey is the only device that provides 320x240 at 30fps without dropping a single frame. Ths family is strongly endorsed and recommended by Microsoft. Frost and Sullovan predict that by 2002 the stream equipment and service business will total $170 billion and Forrester has reported that the roughly 15,000 web sites currently providing video content will enjoy a triple annual growth rate over the next three years and projects that by 2001 there will 750,000 web sites with streaming media content.Currently there are about 65,000 hits on Real G-2 on an average day. Windows net player is getting 40-50,000 hits per day. This clearly defines the next major broadcast media. There are a plethora of opportunities for networked video communications. The key to all this is the content. Without content there is no need. For example: Boeing provides over 400 instructional courses for their employees via streaming from their web site. A student can access any on his own schedule and no wide band transmission is required. Boeing estimates they save $8 million per year in training over what VCR tapes cost to make and distribute. Morgan Stanly provides about 2000 programs per month each of which details a small cap company to the brokerage community. And of course we have all heard the story of Victoria's Secret streaming show. Shortly after that initial use of streaming this company streamed a fashion show. This event drew 1.5 million viewervs which grossly overloaded their web site and had severe impact on portions of the internet itself. All this with VCST products. Intervu used VCST to stream the Clinton/Monica testimony to over 5000 simultaneous viewers. CNN enjoys 100,000 hits per day for their news stream,the BBC 20-30,000 viewers per day.All are VCSR customers.
The key to all this is the ability to capture the video and compress it,manage the bandwidth so the high resolution needs are met and users requiring lesser resolution can view the video as they need it. Cisco asd Lucent are drooling over this explosive growth because it dramatically increases the demand for their routers. Real and Microsoft are the leaders and VCST supports both. More on this aspect in my next posting.
Viewers with long positions stay in place.
Let me paraphrase-VCST/SMAC are to streaming as Cisco and Lucent are to Networking.I can't say it any plainer!. |
