Here’s How Vendors Can Speak At Our Streaming Media Shows

I get a lot of emails from vendors asking to speak at our Streaming Media East/west conferences and I appreciate so many companies wanting to speak and taking an interest in our show. Unfortunately, I simply can’t fit everyone into the program with all the requests I get so with that in mind, here is how I select which vendors get to speak and how the selection process works.

I have about 120 speaking/presentation spots at each show and usually get more than 500 speaking requests. About 75% of all the speaking spots go to customers, which I classify as end-users who buy and deploy online video services as well as content owners. Since there are so few spots for vendors, I pick vendors who help bring their customers to speak at the show. The way we get so many top notch content owners and enterprise users to speak at the show is with vendor’s help. They invite customers, introduce us to them and try to bring them to speak on a particular topic.

So if you are a vendor and want to speak at the show, you have to submit your speaking request with a customer. For now, all you have to do is send me an email and list a few potential customer (company) names. I don’t need individual speaker names, unless you have them, and you don’t have to confirm that any of the companies are available yet, just offer some suggestions.

Once I have that I will cross check it against companies who have already asked to speak or are confirmed speakers and will look to see what sessions these companies may fit into. Once I figure that out, we’ll try and confirm one of them and it they agree to speak, then your company gets a speaking spot as well, usually on a different session that the customer is on.

That’s the process I have been using for 12 years now to keep it as fair as I know how. We don’t sell speaking spots with the East and West shows and companies can’t buy their way in via sponsorship. I know that’s not how other shows do it, but it’s also one of the reasons the StreamingMedia.com shows has been around for 15 years. Think of all of the other online video related shows that have come and gone over the past ten years because they gave all the speaking spots to the sponsors and never focused on creating value to attendees.

So that’s the selection process  for vendors and if you have questions, ideas or suggestions, I’m always reachable via email and phone (917-523-4562) and I am happy to speak to you at any time.