Participants in this podcast include David Stubenvoll (DS) and Gian Trotta (GT).

GT: I’m your host. eBizQ’s Gian Trotta. Today, we’re joined by David Stubenvoll, CEO and co-founder of an interesting company called Wowza Media Systems. Eleven months ago they launched Wowza Media Server Pro, the award winning flash streaming serving software solution. Since then, they’ve racked up over 3,700 global licensees across various different industries (Editor's note: since this podcast was recorded, the number has jumped to 4,400 licensess). These include CDNs, service providers and enterprises that are looking to effectively expose and share internal information assets.

As is often the case, doing so effectively allows a company to provide a service as a product for customers so the net result is a full win/win. As one example, Macy’s is using Wowza for internal employee training while the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are using it to provide life post-game press conferences and game analysis. The BBC is employing it as the powering force behind their music archive while top global CDNs -- that’s Content Delivery Networks – and service providers like Interoute, Yonden Media Works and StreamGuys are also using Wowza. Dave, I want to thank you for taking the time to join us today.

DS: Hi Gian, thanks for having me.

GT: Dave, obviously first question that springs to mind is why Wowza? It’s a bit of an unusual name and what’s the desired response from your customers?

DS: We want to get the WOW into video, not only from an eye popping perspective where you see great video but also from a price and performance perspective. As an example, I’ve been speaking with someone and when I’ve mentioned our latest pricing, they’ve responded “WOW – za!” so it’s a perfect name.

GT: OK, it’s also begs the headline “Wowza, Yowza!”

DS: Right.

GT: ...which may or may not appear on the top of this Podcast. But, semantics aside, can you tell us what Wowza does? How your company started and is your objective really to enable integration or external publishing?

DS: So, Wowza started about two years ago when my co-founder, Charlie Good and I, left Adobe, actually and decided to try something new. It’s one of these products that was actually created by accident.

GT: Like Ivory Soap?

DS: Absolutely. We began doing a very simple video blogging solution that wrapped, actually Flash Media Server, our primary competitor with a WordPress core and we quickly ran into problems with Flash Media Server. It wouldn’t work the way we wanted, it was priced ridiculously, it kept failing and telling us it was alive so not knowing at all what we’re getting ourselves into, we decided to write our own. And, we did, very quickly and while our initial service didn’t exactly rock the world, people started asking us about our server and we had our first sale of the server in 20 minutes of a first phone call. And it led us to believe, “Huh, there might be a different business here. Maybe we should sell some software.”

So, we actually went back and completely re-architected the system, built it again from scratch using a fresh sheet of paper and came up with the Wowza Media Server and it was architected from the ground up to be an industrial strength media server and it performed tremendously well. Wowza itself is a media software server company and what’s interesting about us is that we’re the only independent media server company out there, we’re the only ones that don’t have some other interest in either a video codek or a player or even a protocol so while we started with Flash and that’s where we are today, we’ll be moving beyond flash pretty soon so that we can offer our customers a full suite of video capabilities that can go to, you know, any device, on any platform, using any codec. That’s where we’re heading.

GT: Not all developers like agnostic platforms. Let’s talk about the specific deployments. I think, again, we’re looking for the breakdown between internal integration and external publishing.

DS: Those applications, they represent, as you said, two sort of different, very different applications but we actually don’t look at it as pure internal and external. We actually look at it as pure interactive vs. the more passive kind of experience. So, those that are doing that are doing training such as Macy’s, Rubbermaid, folks like that, that is where they’re using the full power of our media server to communicate bi-directionally with each other. That could be video up to the server as well as down to the server, text going back and forth, shared objects, all that sort of great stuff. We see it used internally in corporations such as Macy’s and Rubbermaid but also externally with e-learning platforms such as Infolearn and Japan Online and a number of other folks. And then there’s the more passive video consumption. So, whether you’re consuming a lot of video through Modulus or are watching the post-game analysis or a press release from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, it’s a bit more of a passive interaction where, you know, you are consuming that video.

The breakdown for us is probably, it’s not quite 50/50 but it’s fairly close because of that rich ability to interact is very strong and because we’re built on the Java platform, it allows us to very easily integrate with your back end systems and that’s also been a very, very big plus for us and our customers.

GT: What’s your base system requirements, David?

DS: Well, what we keep saying is it will run on a cell phone. We still can’t figure out a good reason why, but we know it does. We are a pure Java and it’s a remarkably compact piece of code. The server itself is only about a megabyte in size so if you can run Java 5 or 6 and have enough memory to handle that one meg, you can get Wowza Pro to run. The truth is, though, when you use it in practice, most people are putting it on a dual core or a quad core machine and even on a dual core machine, we can handle 2000 concurrent live connections. We’ve got, you know, various folks doing, you know, dozens of connections up to many thousand connections on a single machine. What we really run into as the bottle necks for video on demand is disk I/O. We’re more limited by how fast you can get the bits off the disk that what the server itself can handle. And then, with live video, we rapidly get into problems with internet connectivity – “do you have enough band width that Wowza can throw out there?”

GT: I wanted to turn to how the service providers see the strategy for deploying Wowza. Recently, we understand that Interoute is one of your customers and they’re a very large player…

DS: Interoute does quite a few things. They are, you know, very large fiber owner in Europe and they do, not only VOIP but also content delivery networks services and the like. We’ve been very fortunate that we’ve gotten a number of content delivery networks to incorporate Wowza, in many cases, exclusively such as Interoute, Yonden Media Works, StreamGuys, Nacamar, the list just keeps going on. We’ve also have gotten deals with companies that are also using our competitor and have realized that Wowza Pro is a great way to get things done as well, especially for “live”, we just crush our competitors in terms of our live performance and stability.

GT: I’ve also read that you have a product for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. Is this essentially Wowza Pro? As SaaS, software as a service?

DS: It’s almost there, right, it’s pretty much getting towards the software as a service although you were kind of combining two entities in Amazon and Wowza. The program in which we’re going this is called the DevPay program is this interesting hybrid which allows us to license our software along with hosting services and bandwidth to customers at an all-inclusive price that’s actually paid to Amazon as opposed to Wowza. It’s the same Wowza Pro that we offer on our standard licenses except, of course, that it comes with the hosting and the bandwidth. This is still a development platform at this point so you can do anything you want with Wowza Pro in terms of building significant server side capabilities, building out those programs, you can use it for chat, video on demand, live video, remote recording, the whole span. I think what a lot of people think about when they think of software as a service is it’s in the video space, kind of like a You Tube or something like that whereas we’re really providing the infrastructure to our customers and, you know, in a slightly different way.

The great thing and the compelling thing about these EZ2 platform is that it allows you to easily add and delete servers so you can expand and contract as your needs require and the bandwidth, it’s just economically compelling especially for folks that are doing live events like church services or sports or things like that where your going to have a large audience over a small span of time once a month, right. Sunday for four hours, you’re going to have a whole bunch of concurrent users with all of your customers watching various services and games. And then the rest of the week, it’s going to be kind of quiet. So if you have as few as 2000 concurrent connections watching a 512 kilobit stream, you need a gigabit connectivity to the internet and if you’re going to pay for that for the whole week, that is ungodly expensive but with Wowza Pro on EZ2 you don’t have to pay for the time you’re not using it, you just pay 20 cents a gigabyte and that price just can’t be beat by any CDN that I’m aware of today.

GT: All right. Are you finding that, you know, that’s really the asynchronous pricing plan is why the market is reacting? And, I mean, your obvious competitors here are Adobe at present and then perhaps Microsoft in the future. How do you see your market position playing out vis a vis both those companies in the future?

DS: So, as we said earlier, we’re kind of the agnostic player. We are the media server company and our view of the world is different. Flash is tremendous. Silverlight is great. Java is wonderful. And, as we’re getting towards this notion of convergence, right, I want to see my Heroes whether it’s on my, through my living room or on my desktop or on my mobile phone, that really means I’ve got one set of protocols and one kind of codek going to my set top box, so maybe that’s H264 to my set top box. And then I’ve got Flash coming to my desktop computer over the RTMP protocol. And then I’m doing RTP via with 3GPPP video to my mobile phone. Today, with these disparate systems and these media servers, you know, caring about more about the client than anything else, a publisher will have to release a number of disparate systems to meet all of those needs.

In the future with Wowza, you’ll be able to use the same servers for all of those outlets and that’s very, very compelling. I think we have been a plus to the adoption of Flash because now people in with Wowza Pro have the ability and have an alternative to combine the software from Adobe. I think we’ll end up being a plus for Silverlight as well and as more and more phones are powered by Java and these various media players are available for them, we’ll support those as well. So, in the end, I think we are going to be a boost to each of these systems and I would say our relationship with these companies today is cordial, I think that’s a fair way to say it.

GT: Right. I’ve heard correct and cordial is the way I’ve often heard it expressed. Both within neighbors and competitors. But, it sounds likely that our next Podcast will be streamed on Wowza.

DS: I look forward to that.

GT: I wanted to end with one question that piqued everyone’s interest which is that in a recent ComputerWorld story, you compared Wowza to David Hasselhoff and what could you possibly mean by that?

DS: I think the actually joke that I have is that we’re the David Hasselhoff of software because we’re really big in Europe. Most of our sales are actually in Europe. The adoption there has been absolutely phenomenon and we’ve got a large number of individual companies, content providers, social networks and content delivery networks that are built on top of Wowza Pro, so it’s been great. We’re a little bit less well-known here in the United States but that is certainly changing.

GT: You know, channel alpha bill. I wonder if you’re also big in Japan?

DS: You know, Asia is just starting to come on. It’s been a little bit slower for Asian adoption but actually over the last month, we’ve seen a significant increase.

GT: David, this is all very fascinating but unfortunately, our time is nearing and end. Where on the Wowza website can our listeners go for more information?

DS: The best place to go is the home page of the Wowza website which is at www.wowzamedia.com.

GT: OK, I thank you, David. I thank you for taking time from a busy schedule and wish you all success.

DS: Thank you so much. This has been a lot of fun and I look forward to speaking with you again.

GT: OK, thank you. I’d also like to remind my readers that David has agreed to field any follow up questions you may want to send in. You can submit a comment on the Podcast landing page which can be found at www.ebizq.net/blog/firstlook. This is Gian Trotta thanking you all for your participation.