IQ News: ZDTV Taps e-Media for Streaming Media Services

E-Media, a developer of streaming-media networks and technologies for e-businesses, today announced that ZDTV has chosen e-Media to provide bandwidth and streaming services for ZDTV.com. San Francisco-based ZDTV produces and distributes TV programming about computing, technology and the Internet. The company was acquired from Ziff-Davis Publishing by Bellevue, Wash.-based Vulcan Ventures in January. In addition to hosting all streaming media content in QuickTime, Real and Windows Media formats, e-Media will create a scalable media-server environment at co-location facilities in the San Jose area for the migration of ZDTV's streaming services. E-Media also has facilities in Vienna, Va., and in New York, near the company's headquarters in New Canaan, Conn. The company last week closed a $27 million round of private equity financing led by Summit Partners, and including Vulcan Ventures, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's investment firm; Microsoft Corporation; EMC Corporation, a leading provider of enterprise storage systems; the Goldman Sachs Group; and Winfield Capital Corp. John Engel, who founded e-Media in 1995 and is the company's CEO, said e-Media's proprietary management, merchandising and marketing technology allows it to wrap e-commerce applications around video streams while conducting real-time analysis of online customer behavior. "Although our central activity is content delivery," said Engel, "what sets us apart is all the things you see around the delivery of the Webcast: banner ads, merchandising, a converging of ads and their synchronization with broadband content." Michael Terretta, e-Media's chief technology officer, pointed out that standing behind the company's content and commerce services is a single converged lifetime customer database. "If you're a traditional company trying to do e-business, you're saying, 'Give me some banners from there, some content from over here and e-commerce from that company,' and all of those pieces are mutually exclusive," he said. "E-Media believes you get exponential growth if you leverage these components off of each other." Engel pointed out that e-Media can also handle wide variations in traffic, since it has a hugely scalable infrastructure of proprietary Web and ad serving networks. The company says it processes more than $35 million in e-commerce each month, delivers 2 billion hits, 750 million ads, 200 million page views and 10 million media streams. In the entertainment arena, e-Media in 1998 teamed with Microsoft to invent "one ticket, one seat" pay-per-view technology for video streaming, used by such sites as the World Wrestling Federation's WWF.com. Last week, e-Media announced it had debuted the Internet's first-ever live music video digital download service (VDD), offering an ongoing lineup of content-rich live music archives that covers a broad and eclectic range of music. The service was introduced in conjunction with last week's launch of Microsoft Windows Media Player 7 beta and Windows Media.com. n

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IQ News: ZDTV Taps e-Media for Streaming Media Services

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