Not too long ago at NAB 2015 in Las Vegas, Wowza Media Systems, LLC revealed that it had extended its streaming product options with Wowza Streaming Cloud and Wowza Streaming Engine Pro. The new solutions increase the power and ease of streaming live content, including audio and video for enterprises of all sizes. Wowza’s latest lineup outlines the need for scalable Cloud solutions in the enterprise, marking the company’s ability to break new ground.

SiliconANGLE recently spoke with streaming industry veteran David Stubenvoll, CEO and cofounder of Wowza Media Systems, about how the company has filled a huge void in the content delivery industry by offering organizations effective solutions to take full advantage of streaming audio and video. He also shares the lessons learned over the years from law school and previous business experience, which have helped him take Wowza from the days before YouTube into today’s video-centric culture.

Wowza’s innovations in the Cloud

Q: What role does Cloud play in Wowza?

Stubenvoll: We have a number of customers deploying Wowza in the Cloud, and some are custom built. We’ve been extraordinarily active in Cloud. We think we’re going to be breaking new ground in ways customers can deploy on their own and on premise.

I think the interesting thing in Cloud is we actually started deploying in 2007 and we were able to take advantage of the flexibility of the Cloud a long time ago. More importantly, our new products take advantage of the best the Cloud has to offer. There’s ways for companies like Wowza, which understand security and scaling, to use the best of what’s available both on premise and in the Cloud.

Q: How do you address the issue of scaling?

Stubenvoll: When we started Wowza, video on the web was fairly early. We could see a number of potential changes on the horizon, and we were convinced that what we were doing in 2007 wouldn’t be the same in 2015. We realized that the video codex being used were in a state of flux. We built Wowza to be agnostic. And as we continued to build and mature Wowza’s streaming engine, that served us very well.

Q: How do you stay agile?

Stubenvoll: We have a large, diverse, global customer base that isn’t afraid to ask us for things. So any time any new tech comes out, there’s some group asking us, “When can we have it?”

We’re certainly active in a number of industry groups, such as the DASH Industry Forum and Streaming Video Alliance. Most importantly, we are seen in a lot of ways as the de facto standard. I can’t give specifics on this, but when major players come out with different protocols, they come to us and ask us to incorporate it and use us as the reference server to test whether or not different browsers and players are working correctly. We need to sit back and decide which requests to fulfill, and we’re always coming up with our crazy ideas as well.

Industry insights

Q: What innovation are you seeing in the industry?

Stubenvoll: What’s interesting with Cloud and video is that Cloud services really rely on selling CPU, bandwidth and storage. What’s video sell a lot of? CPU, bandwidth and storage. Cloud and video are a match made in Heaven. The amount of information that can be gathered from video engagement, not only consumer activity but in the education space and information spaces, there’s a tremendous amount of data and insight that can be gleaned from that data as you take advantage of these services.

Q: What core philosophies have you maintained to lead Wowza from an early adopter tech to the YouTube era?

Stubenvoll: One of the most important things to us as a philosophy is why we’re here: to make our customers successful. My cofounder and I wanted to work together. This is my fifth business (third one independently). We realized some of the more interesting businesses we’ve been involved with grew out of other businesses. When you’re in a business already you have access to unique information and because of relationships with customers, you have an opportunity to come up w/something unique.

We decided to start a business arbitrarily — it didn’t matter — and decided if we couldn’t support a daily Starbucks habit after three months, we’d shut it down. We started a video blog; it went nowhere. The tools we needed weren’t available, so we made them ourselves, and in February 2007 we launched the Wowza server engine.

Relying on experience

Q: How has your education in law and business experience helped you deal with the more troubling aspects of entrepreneurship, like the ongoing lawsuits with Adobe?

Stubenvoll: I’m also a certified mixologist from bartending school, and that’s helped a lot!

My background has helped a great deal, especially for Wowza. And there’s a litigious environment when it comes to CDN, so my background helps tremendously. I look at where we are, the wide variety of customers we have, and I find it hard to understand how you can be an effective CEO without understanding the law. It also helps that my wife is a patent attorney.

Q: You were a lawyer before founding Wowza. What’s something about the patent-filing process our readers would be surprised to know?

Stubenvoll: The U.S. patent process changed from a “first to invent” to a “first to file” priority for granting patents in 2014. This change puts us in line with the way the most of the world’s patent processes work.

Q: What’s a video trend you’d like to see go?

Stubenvoll: I’m ready to see the excessive focus on entertainment shift to a more accompanying viewpoint. While it is an important and huge market, video is much more than just entertainment. It’s also being used to educate, inform and influence, and we need to cover all of these aspects.

Q: With five startups under your belt, what one thing could cure you from Serial Startup Syndrome?

Stubenvoll: Serial Startup Syndrome is incurable. The primary symptom is the strong need to create, improve, grow and make an impact. Luckily, my current company and role fills that need by challenging me to think creatively and grow myself and the company. For those inflicted with Serial Startup Syndrome, it’s key to find a similar environment that allows them to put their entrepreneurial skills to use.

About David Stubenvoll, Wowza Media Systems CEO and Co-Founder

David Stubenvoll is a streaming industry veteran, launching Wowza Media Systems with Charlie Good to fill a stark void in the industry: the lack of flexible, simplified media server software on which to build reliable streaming. Wowza is Dave’s fifth new business venture, having previously served as Entrepreneur in Resident at Adobe Systems and as CEO/co-founder of Freeworks. Dave has also held senior positions at Intuit and served as President of GALT Technologies (an Intuit subsidiary). Dave holds two patents and concurrently earned a JD from Boston College Law School and an MBA from the Carnegie Mellon University Tepper School of Business. He holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Clarkson University.

feature image by ~Matt LightJam {Mattia Merlo} via photopin cc

all other images courtesy Wowza