转换

I have often been accused by the editor of this magazine of having an uncanny memory. 这可能只对了一半.

Living through 25 years of the streaming industry helps with recall, 但擅长电脑快速搜索也同样重要. 我有囤积电子邮件的倾向, 短信, 以及营业收据, which comes in h和y when every new company touts “first ever” or “pioneer” for something that’s been done many times before. Advancements in OCR guarantee that I’ll be able to extract words 和 phrases from trip photos 和 trade show receipts for years to come, jogging my memory about locations 和 dates where key conversations took place.

One such conversation centers on the 2004 arrival of this magazine’s editor, Eric Schu-macher-Rasmussen, 在流媒体场景中. From 1997 to 2001, I’d written for several industry publications, including 流媒体, 但在后9/11时代, I shifted away from writing 和 consulting in the streaming industry to focus on teaching college-level courses on topics from my prior career (codecs, 合成, 特效, 危机管理(公共关系).

At the request of a multinational corporation that had been a prior client, 2003年底，我又开始做咨询, naming my company 转换 as a nod toward the move back into the consulting field. 不久之后，我收到了Eric的一封电子邮件.

While the magazine had gone through a succession of editors at a fairly fast clip between 2001 和 2004, 和 Eric had not been through the first wave of streaming hype 和 overpromises, he was interested in bringing on a consistent stable of contributing editors to 流媒体 媒体米agazine 和 流媒体Media.com.

That group of writers included Christine Perey, Dom Robinson, Jan Ozer, 和 a few others. 埃里克告诉我，我想写什么就写什么, which led to 思维之流 和 my license to write this seemingly r和om column today. The majority of this writing stable has continued with him for the past 18 years, taking us through the first 和 second decades of streaming media as an industry 和 流荷兰国际集团(ing)媒体 作为一本杂志.

一路走来, Eric provided a sense of stability in an ever-morphing industry that was fundamentally changing the way that we consumed content. And in late 2018, he was there to help assist in the creation of the industry’s first charity, the 帮助我流研究基金会我是该公司的执行董事.

Eric was also instrumental in shaping conversations around power 和 sustainability. 2020年，他让罗宾逊和我合著了一篇题为《流媒体绿色化”, which has turned into a movement that had a public launch event at the U.K. 2022年6月的议会. 每个人都能把握住需要的脉搏, Eric also asked me—as one of his last editorial assignments before h和ing the magazine’s reins over to another highly qualified editor, Steve Nathans-Kelly­—to write an article on cradle-to-grave sustainability that you’ll read elsewhere in this issue.

Our conversations haven’t always been about the industry, 和 for that I’ve also been grateful. I remember one conversation on a particularly brisk mid-October 2009 walk through Hammersmith in London that ranged from religion to religiosity 和 from charlatans seeking power to charlatans seeking to perpetuate their power. 这类对话, even where we strongly disagree on both the premise 和 the endgame, 一部分是职业友谊，一部分是民间话语吗, which is often lacking on social media 和 naturally emerges from face-to-face discussions.

As Eric does his own transition, stepping away from the magazine 和 online news portions of 流媒体 进入一个他特别适合的行业职位, I’m delighted to know that the stability he created will continue going forward. Eric will also keep chairing the 流媒体 conferences for the foreseeable future, 也就是说我们还没看到他的最后一面, 这个行业会因此变得更好.