Beware Geeks Carrying Gifts

I received an exasperated email from our Spanish reseller recently as a deal he had been working on was awarded to a company with no track record or capability in video, but who had dressed up a demo and made a good sales pitch.

The reality is that internet tv is a lot harder than it looks. If a company wants to tackle it itself it will need five to ten times the budget of using and external company with a proven track record in my experience.

And then there are the companies that bid low and then inflate prices as soon as a contract starts; ostensibly clients are forced to pay for training their staff and going through a sharp learning curve. back in the 90s I saw clients fleeced up to $500,000 for a very basic website. This is deja vu all over again, as they say.

But, working with companies with no track record is asking for trouble. Delivering a hundred streams at 1Mbps is similar to serving 5,000 concurrent users of a traditional web site.

This is a different medium and demands particular skills. I suppose they will have to learn the hard way...

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