Innovator: Hui Zhang's Hiccup-Free Streaming Video

There are seven words you can’t say on television, but only one that would-be viewers hate to see fill their online video screens: buffering. Researcher NScreenMedia estimates media companies lose $2 billion a year in ad revenue because 1 in 5 consumers gives up on patchy online videos. Computer science professor Hui Zhang says he can stop that.

Zhang’s San Mateo (Calif.) startup, Conviva, makes stream-monitoring software that big companies can use to ease network congestion. Able to oversee millions of connections at a time—as it did during its first big test, the 2008 Olympics—the software determines whether incoming video is lagging what’s on the screen. If it’s slower, Conviva compensates by lowering the resolution or switching the viewer to a different server. While companies monitoring network capacity typically keep tabs only on their own server loads, “If you have a real-time sense of what’s happening with each video player, there are ways to infer what is happening inside the network and decide what optimization steps to take,” says Zhang, 45, who teaches at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.