Alan Saperstein

Alan Saperstein (born February 1, 1959) is an American Internet entrepreneur working specifically 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. Alan is the Co-Founder of Visual Data Corporation, now called Onstream Media Corporation which is recognized as the leading webcast and virtual event company on the internet. Alan 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, employing their cameramen to cover large multi-camera arena rock performances by artists such as Journey, Billy Squier, Cyndi Lauper, and Bruce Springsteen for major record labels and MTV. In 1992, Alan co-founded Visual Data corporation with partner and financier Randy Selman. The two are noted as being 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 webcasting software as a service (SaaS) product called VisualWebcaster that is responsible for over 100 thousand webcasts to date, and is used by many major public companies. 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. The Company was renamed Onstream Media in 2004.