Wowza’s marketing at work again. #webrtc.

Let me be honest, I really dislike marketing in general. Public researcher by training, I’m looking forward to the truth, to reproducible results, and claims that are backed up by data and processes I can access by myself to reproduce the results and the conclusions of the analysis. Marketing is very often the opposite of researching of the truth: it aims at making the market buy your product(s) and service(s). Very often, the end justify the mean, and FUD, deceiving and/or unsubstantiated self-serving claims become the norm.
Let’s be clear, if you don’t have a killer feature, you might as well pretend that either a/ you have it, b/ it is not something important, c/ what you have is so much better. Eventually, as all lawyers know, if you can’t argue the facts, go after the credibility of those bringing them to light. Microsoft have made this approach very famous and even gave it a name: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt: FUD.
When I read some Wowza marketing piece I cannot help but noticing a strange correlation with those technics, and it’s frankly upsetting. We have just made a “Fact checking” session about WebRTC at Live Streaming West in New York. I think it’s time to do it again here, so at least people can have access to enough verifiable information to make their own mind.

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Video CDN and Satyagraha: admitting defeat in the course to perfect live streaming.

Satyagraha, (Sanskrit and Hindi: “holding onto truth”), was the philosophy proned by gandhi when addressing the British Imperialism: non-violence, self-scrunity and research of truth. It lead to citations like “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win”, and more simple saying like “believe what they do, not what they say”, which should be applied any marketing material, really.

For the past two years, all CDNs and most streaming server vendors, have been trying to downplay the disruptive impact that WebRTC would have on their business. It wouldn’t scale. There would be no market for it. It would not be needed. It has now changed.

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