Published on Streaming Media here
The Streaming Media 100 is back—welcome once again to Streaming Media’s annual list that foregrounds the industry’s most innovative and influential technology suppliers, service providers, platforms, and media and content companies, as acclaimed by our editorial team. Some are large and established industry standard-bearers, while others are comparably small and relatively new arrivals that are just beginning to make a splash. All set themselves apart from the crowd with their innovative approach and their contribution to the expansion and maturation of the streaming media universe.
In past years, we’ve focused exclusively on technology vendors, rather than content companies. This list has traditionally been entirely about recognizing the companies that enable video services to deliver great content to consumers reliably at the highest possible quality on every device and hopefully to make money from it.
Back in 2018—a pre-pandemic previous lifetime for most of this industry—we narrowed the list to 50 worthy honorees drawn entirely from the ranks of companies supplying products and services on the technological side of the aisle. But when we speak of the streaming media universe (it’s not quite a multiverse yet for most of us, but it’s getting there), content companies inevitably come into play. Is there really a streaming universe without Netflix, Warner Bros. Discovery, Apple, Amazon, Disney, Paramount, NBCUniversal, or the dozens or hundreds of next-tier, independent, and niche platform and channel suppliers that flood that universe with the content that all of the tech companies combine to ingest and transcode and monitor and secure and support and deliver at innumerable stages of the journey from source to destination? The picture is, arguably, far from complete without including the providers of the content that fills our screens.
So we’ve expanded the list back to 100 to include two dozen or so companies from the content side of the equation (recognizing the best of the best from the elephants in the room almost down to the roaring mice that are giving them a good scare) and to make extra room for a number of great tech innovators that got squeezed out when the list was scaled down to 50 (including, of course, quite a few innovative up-and-corners that hadn’t appeared on the scene or shown up on our radar the last time we published a triple-digit list). A lot of more-than-worthy companies have failed to make the list in recent years as we trimmed it to a lean and mean 50, and this year’s re-expansion gives us a chance to recognize a number of deserving honorees that might have just missed the cut in recent lists.
Once again, this year, we largely excluded the video production segment of the market (with the exception of a few companies whose technology innovations transcend the product-specific and wield their influence in the broader streaming scene), the one covered by Streaming Media Producer, with an eye to giving that genre its own list. Look for the 2024 Streaming Producer 25 to make its triumphant return next spring.
Also, the Streaming Media 100 focuses exclusively on companies with headquarters in North America. In March of this year, we published a similar list, the Streaming Media Europe 51 (go2sm.com/sme51), focusing on companies with headquarters in Europe. Of course, some companies have headquarters in both the U.S. and abroad; in those cases, we ask the company (or they forthrightly tell us) which list they want to be considered for.
So how do we arrive at the list? We invite members of the magazine’s editorial inner circle to look at a master list of all of the vendors in the online video marketplace and assess their importance in the industry. We pool and average out the results, and the top 100 make the list.
Without further ado, here’s the 2023 Streaming Media 100. Congratulations to all.
Bitcentral
Chief Officer: Steve Petilli, CEO
Read article on www.streamingmedia.com/Bitcentral