Tony “Streamboy” Greenberg, ranked as the worst guitarist in 47 states, has been breaking boundaries and achieving the impossible with digital media since before its birth.
With a latent inspiration from being in the studio while his Uncle Steve recorded Funkytown, and Prince was in the same studio recording “I Wanna Be Your Lover” Tony moved on from founding a successful retail chain in his 20s to a headlong dive into the intersection of content and technology that has now lasted for 25+ years.
In the late 90s, Tony was part of the first hosting company to support online broadcasts, co-producing the first webcast (a fundraiser with Dave Chapelle), putting the first URL on a TV broadcast (NBC’s “Profiler” in 1996), helping deliver the legendary 40 location Intel Live-OnLine and crafting many of the pioneering distribution and business models for online music & video.
As the dotcom era frothed into its most visionary phase, Tony helped run the first pre-YouTube online webcaster with professional content, crafting over 50 distribution deals and help launch the first digital record label with Beck, Beastie Boys, Foo Fighters and RATM and Bran Van 3000. And as VC funding started to evaporate and the age of austerity descended, in 2000 he founded RampRate to keep the pioneers of online media – the likes of Radio Free Virgin, Microsoft, Advertising.com, now AOL, iFilm, now MTV and Audiblenow Amazon- solvent, innovative, and efficient through their acquisition while co-developing and refining dozens of online & mobile video strategies in well-heeled firms such as Microsoft and Disney including major transitions from physical to digital for Intel and several divisions of Sony. We recently consulted and built out a cable cutter network for Intel, acquired by Verizon.
Since then, Tony and RampRate have been the world’s leading experts at optimizing digital supply chains for cost, performance, and innovation; negotiating hundreds of millions in content delivery, hosting, telecom, and ad tech contracts and helping reinvest the massive 7-figure savings in innovative technologies and new business models. Executed over 75 strategy & dozens of sourcing projects for Microsoft, including helping build our Azure to compete with AWS; CBS, helping them grow in the 2000’s then split digitally from Viacom and helping optimize CBS and prepare for acquisition in 2019.
His clients have run the gamut from traditional broadcasters (NBC, Fox, etc.) to massively multiplayer games (Blizzard / World of Warcraft, Riot Games / League of Legends, etc.) to eCommerce (eBay, Nike, Ticketmaster, etc.) to telecom (AT&T, Verizon, Level 3, Vodafone), high tech giants (Microsoft, Intel, Broadcom), publishers (Hearst, McGraw Hill, Scholastic, Scripps) and new online business models (Sony Crackle, Snapchat).
While running RampRate, Tony has supported innovative startups and social impact driven projects, including an artist-focused royalties financial management project with Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics and Universal Music; innovative companies in peer-to-peer delivery; and several major hits in the blockchain arena, such ad Block.one; He is currently an advisor/investor to startups in motion capture / VR/AR (Limitless); innovative networking (Syntropy); blockchain technologies; and several social impact and wellness-related ventures, as well as creating early-stage ventures in IT waste reduction and socially responsible sourcing.
