AfterDawn: News

I just got back today from pretty lame Streaming Media Europe 2001 conference with only handful of companies showing up and most of them related to backbone technologies such as hosting and encoding of streamed video. Lack of content companies made the whole event pretty pointless for me -- sure it was an excellent event if you're shopping for your company's upcoming streaming provider, but comparing the event to previous similiar events in Europe and in U.S., you can see really how the economic downturn is taking its toll. And there was Content Management 2001 expo at the same place and one of the biggest CMS provider that was listed didn't have a booth at all... Well, maybe next year we'll see more interesting stuff in there -- although PacketVideo's show video was kind of cool providing ideas how wireless streaming can be used in everyday life. And yeah, Microsoft was there, next to RealNetworks' booth, providing 101% XP marketing with Windows Media theme :-)

Anyway, today was one of those days that all of the companies decided to post their Q3/2001 financial reports and EBITDA results. ArtistDIRECT, one of the indie promoting sites, posted EBITDA loss of $5 million, down over 60% from previous year. Also their revenues went down 59% from previous year's Q3 to $2.3 million. Meanwhile, Sony Corp reported $111 million losses for its financial second quarter, down from $151 million profit in Q2/2000. Despite that, Sony's revenues increased almost 6 percent to $15 billion. Last but not least, Roxio, a spin-off from parent Adaptec, posted its second quarter's results -- net loss of $1 million, down from $1.9 million of profit in last year (when it was part of Adaptec). Roxio's revenues increased 3.4% to $30 million.

Written by: Petteri Pyyny @ 25 Oct 2001 14:32