The V2Net Story
by Michael D
Founder and CEO of V2Net.com

Since 1993 we've been providing new media solutions to a wide variety of organizations, from production companies to cities, municipal governments, schools, television stations, hotels, and CATV. As we began to deploy media richness online for our clients so we thought 'OK what's our objective?' We came up with:

	Flexibility - we wanted videos to be able to be stored in multiple resolutions from MPEG-2, to small proxy videos, to every resolution in-between.
	Storage - we wanted our clients to be able to store every one of their important audio or video assets online. For flexibility, convenience, distribution, collaboration, and asset protection.
	Save and Make money - with high-speed access so prevalent among our clients we wanted to harness this to create new revenue opportunities and greater efficiencies.
	Economical - it shouldn't cost thousands of dollars per month just to store 10 or 20 gigabytes for a few dozen viewers. See our price list to see how easy and affordable V2Net makes it.

To our dismay we immediately encountered 3 big problems.

	Name brand ISP's and Big "Streaming Media CDN's" They all had the wrong model - they assumed we were CNN or a Madonna Webcast! For our needs - HUGE storage and large, crisp picture quality, they are extremely overpriced.
	Storage While some companies offer loads of viewing capacity they only offered a few hundred Megabytes of storage - we need Gigabytes!.
	Complexities No one out there seemed to be able to work with all the elements or even know what to recommend!

So we thought this can't be that difficult, let's try it ourselves. The first problem was that while we had software, bandwidth, a very knowledgeable staff, and a lot of equipment most of those resources were already being utilized. As we began experimenting we quickly found that even if we used 100% of the capacity of the people, know-how, bandwidth, and equipment it was still not quite enough.

Getting the job done, streaming and storing videos, was overtaxing our existing infrastructure - we would need more of all of the resources. So we though let's contract for them: connectivity, capacity, storage, software, site maintenance and development, encoding. Then we encountered our next problem: all of these services came from different vendors! No accountability, just problems and confusion.

Despite this we launched with all the vendors in tow and after a lot of experimentation we carried off several successful live broadcasts. Our first was for the United States Surgeon General who was running a call in talk show.

Just as important was deployment of video on demand. The biggest issue we found here was that many of the others doing video on demand was simply not useful. Even high speed users were getting postage stamp sized videos. We knew as folks working in broadcast video for years that this simply wouldn't do for our clients. We were able to develop simple solutions for this. V2Net enable web sites offer highspeed users the most TV like experience anywhere.

In the end the biggest continuing problem were all the vendors for all the different pieces, bandwidth, hosting, encoding, etc. So we decided to invest in our own infrastructure.

We've put together the infrastructure, people, knowledge, etc. all in a single place: V2Net.com. Clients of V2Net, or one of it's affiliates, are able to harness the infrastructure needed to continue focus on their core business. While at the same time utilizing technologies and capabilities for managing and delivering that core business online. This creates new opportunities and efficiencies for those with V2Net accounts.

One area of particular interest to virtually all of our clients is our ability to play the videos from the Internet with very high resolution. Many others in the industry recognize that high resolution video is doable from the Internet but choose not to attempt it due to cost concerns. It is true that a single viewer watching a video at very high resolution can use the same amount of bandwidth as a dozen other users who've been throttled. This means that it can cost the provider of the video 12 times more for a viewing than for traditional webcast viewing.

The thing that we found odd was that most folks in the industry assume that every video will have millions of viewers. We know however that in many instances this simply isn't a factor. Our emphasis has always been on delivering broadcast quality video when that is what's necessary. It's always easy to also provide lower resolution as well but it is simply not possible to go up in resolution.

We enjoy assisting our clients in enhancing and empowering their media assets with the finest online technology and services available. Everyday we continue to develop V2Net to keep up with the technologies as they become available. Everyone at V2Net shares in this passion and truly enjoys this quest.