eCompany launches Internet streaming services in the UAE

Customers will now be able to stream pre-recorded video and audio files over the Internet from their web sites for viewing by their audiences. This new service complements eCompany EIM Web Hosting and will extend the usability and effectiveness of the customer websites.

The power of streaming is that it extends the conventional broadcast day. Most broadcasters rely heavily on peak or "drive times" to reach their audience. Now that audience can stay in touch after the peak times, in fact anytime. eCompany will provide the mechanism to stream video and audio files as an Internet Service Provider without being involved in the production or encoding of the media material. The streaming service is speedy and efficient, yet very simple to set up.

Commenting on the benefits of the service to corporations, Mr. Abdulla Hashim, Senior Manager, eCompany, said: "Customers can view the eCompany Streaming Service as 'anytime broadcasting' to focused target audiences that is ideal for any marketing campaign or public messaging exercise. The world over, customers have been extending their peak broadcast day by 4 - 6 hours with streaming. The impact of audio and video can be brought to bear on opinions and preferences of the audience in ways that are not possible with just images. Financially, it simply makes more sense than mass campaigns. No other form of broadcasting is this economical."
Streaming media files consume much more disk space and bandwidth than standard HTML Web pages, requiring a robust server platform, with plenty of disk space and a fast speed connection to the Internet. This is all provided by eCompany to its customers.

For those with a minimal Web infrastructure, using a hosting provider such as eCompany could save money. eCompany will provide the economy of skills and scale to its customers being the ISP in the UAE.

The streaming service supports the most popular Multimedia streaming formats on the Internet; QuickTime (QT), RealMedia (RM) and Windows Media (WM). On top of that, the service will support extra formats that are gaining momentum on the Internet such as MPEG-4 and MP3.

eCompany EIM Web Hosting customers applying for the streaming add-on will be able to utilise the storage space and data traffic allowance that were bundled with the original packages. Non-customers applying for the streaming service will have to acquire storage space from the eCompany EIM Web Hosting packages.