Alan Saperstein is an American Internet entrepreneur in the video and digital media field. He is recognized for his accomplishments in the streaming media field as the first person to broadcast video on the Internet in a commercial application with a product called Hotelview in 1993. Saperstein is the Co-Founder of Visual Data Corporation, now called Onstream Media Corporation.
Biography
Alan Saperstein was born 1 February 1959 in Englewood, New Jersey, United States. He graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 1981 with a degree in Cinematography and went to work for NFL Films as Director of the Entertainment Division. Saperstein used off-season National Football League cameramen to cover large multi-camera arena rock performances by artists such as Journey, Billy Squier, Cyndi Lauper, and Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band for major record labels and MTV. Saperstein was the first music video producer to employee the use of the skycam in a live concert setting. In 1992, Saperstein co-founded Visual Data Corporation with partner Randy Selman. Visual Data was the first company to feature streaming video on the Internet in June 1993 with HotelView, a travel library of two-minute videos featuring thousands of hotel properties worldwide. By 1998, they created an online webcastingsoftware as a service product called VisualWebcaster. It is responsible for over 150 thousand webcasts to date, and is used by many major public companies to broadcast their earnings calls every quarter. In 1999, Saperstein and Selman, seeing the coming of both Internet video media services and user generated video, developed tools to help non-IT staff manage and stream digital video for their websites. They purchased several companies with various technologies and hired government contractor SAIC to help build and integrate the core infrastructure of a Digital Media Services Platform. This Platform is used by several thousand companies, providing live and on demand videos to millions of their online customers everyday. The company was renamed Onstream Media in 2004. Onstream Media today is called upon to handle and facilitate unusually large live streaming events for very high-profile entertainment, corporate and government clients. One of the largest grossing online pay-per-view concerts in history, The Allman Brothers Band 40th Anniversary, was produced and live streamed from the Beacon theatre NYC by Onstream Media. =Virtual Trade Shows= Onstream uses its virtual event software, along with its integrated live streaming technologies, to conduct virtual tradeshows which became very popular with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. =Technology Patents= Saperstein and his partners have been granted a family of streaming video patents that are being utilized by many of the world's largest companies today in capturing, transporting and storing millions of hours of video content worldwide.*
