Ortiva Wireless Launches Content Delivery Network For Mobile Video

I follow the content delivery market for video probably closer than any other facet of this space because it's how I got started in the industry and I really enjoy how fast the CDN market changes.

While most CDNs are talking about and working on the delivery of video over the Internet, Ortiva Wireless has a taken a different approach and has built out a CDN specific to the delivery of only mobile video. I recently completed a survey of content owners and current CDNs and found out that most CDNs have no offering for mobile delivery or have one that is very limited. The reason for this is simple. Mobile delivery in the U.S. is not yet a real business. Traditional CDNs can't spend a lot of time and money to invest in mobile delivery if they can't get near-immediate revenue. But for a company like Ortiva Wireless, they have the potential to create some real revenue based on the fact that it's all they specialize in. Content owners I spoke to, both large and small, found that mobile delivery over traditional CDNs was complex, expensive and confusing. Delivery of video for mobile is not easy from a technical perspective as delivering videos to PCs is.

I first met the executive team from Ortiva Wireless at the Streaming Media West show at the end of last year. I heard their pitch and liked their technology and the fact that they are focused on offering a single product and service. They know what content owners want for mobile video delivery and have confidence about the business they can build over the coming years as mobile video starts to get adopted. Yes, there are some big potential hurdles that mobile delivery in the U.S. has to overcome, but at some point in time, video to mobile will become a real business and Ortiva Wireless is looking to lay the groundwork now to be a major player when it hits.

Why Are Bloggers Not Easier To Contact?

Since I started this blog two weeks ago, I have received a lot of calls and e-mails from people based on my contact info I have on the site. People are always amazed when they get a response to their e-mail or actually have a number to call when they have a question. I know what they mean.

I have contacted a lot of bloggers before who are running business blogs, blogs they are making money from, blogs where their sole business is blogging, and many times you never get any response from them. Too many times they either don't have contact info on their website, they don't return e-mails or more often than you would believe, don't even have an e-mail address listed on their blog. And when was the last time you saw a phone number on a bloggers website?

There are over 58 million blogs on the Internet today and only a small percentage of those are business blogs with real traffic. You would think all bloggers would want to build a good, lasting relationship with their readers and stand out from the crowd. With all the blogs out there, readers have a choice. Are they going to  visit a blog that helps them when they have a question or one that simply wants to dish out news and comments without giving anything back? This does not apply to all bloggers, some are great with communication, but as I have seen first-hand, way too many aren't. 

My Prediction, Brightcove and blinkx Will Get Acquired This Year

I don't like making predictions. In fact, I stay away from them whenever possible as too many predictions made are done just for headlines. But in this case, I think blinkx is really the only vendor in its vertical niche who has a product that works far superior than anyone else. They also have great momentum in the market, some smart folks at the company and based on their recent profile in the New York Times, they clearly know their strengths and more importantly their weaknesses. In my eyes, they have a lot of options for being acquired by a large portal or even from a large content creator who wants their search technology. While their founder and CTO Suranga Chandratillake told me that they are "making money" that does not really mean anything without numbers. He said "we don't comment on how much (revenue) or how close to break-even". So not knowing how much real revenue they are doing and what their burn rate is it would be hard to say what their evaluation would be. So far, blinkx has raised about $12M and with a small head count under 30 they are probably not burning that much cash. My guess is that they are still an affordable acquisition.

As for Brightcove, they are a bit different as they have a lot of competitors in their vertical niche, but so far, no one has really stepped up with a technology offering that seems to be actively competing with them. There are some who have competitive offerings for pieces of what Brightcove offers but not really for the entire solution. We know they have a lot of cash and can burn through it for some time with no worries and they continue to expand their market and customer list. There is no guarantee that even with the exposure they are getting that they will make money from their current business model or how long that may take them but I see them as being an acquisition soon from a large portal and media play who wants to speed their time to market.

While any company can always be acquired, who do you feel are the ones that have the best shot at being purchased this year?

 

Former VP of Broadcast & Streaming Media for JPMorganChase For Hire

If you are looking to hire someone who has hands-on experience with the entire webcasting work-flow process, Nico Mclane is someone you should talk to. Until last week, Nico was the VP of Broadcast and Streaming Media for JPMorganChase. Over the past seven years at JPMorganChase, she helped build, deploy and manage their internal webcasting solution including the hardware, software, distribution, A/V production, web developers etc...saving the company an estimated $3M is communication costs in 2006.

I have known Nico for many years and would vouch for her experience in the webcasting market. If you are looking for someone with her expertise, contact her directly.

If you are looking for a new position, have taken a new job or are a company that has a job opening, let me know. In many cases I will highlight it here on the blog - free of charge.

Reporting Tools Lacking For Companies That Delivery Videos Online

I speak to a lot of companies that do their own hosting and delivery for video content, be it downloads or streaming, live or on-demand. Many of them are enterprise organizations who have found it makes more sense for them to distribute their own content across their private networks because it is cheaper, gives them more control of their content and gives them additional flexibility. In addition to Fortune 1000 corporations, there are also a lot of smaller content owners and publishers who have a few servers setup to stream audio and video.

With all those servers in the market, to date there is still not a single good software package that you can buy off the shelf that will parse your raw logs and give you the kind of data you need from the logs. I'm talking about a software package that is setup just to parse raw logs for streaming and not something like WebTrends which was not built for video and does not work well for streaming. Back in the 2000 era you had a reporting product made by Lariat, which was then bought by EnScaler, which then went out of business at least 5 years ago.

In that time, there have been no other solutions on the market. Yes, there are a lot of third party tools out there, many of them free like FunnelWeb, Sawmill etc... but they all have many limitations, especially when it comes to large log files. So my question is this. Why has no software company created a package that is specific to a particular hosting platform? The demand is there. I hear from companies all the time who say they would pay $1,000 for a software package like this. Just think of how many companies are out there in the enterprise with Windows Media servers, that market alone is huge. And right now, they all try to do it themselves, write their own software, or use a third party tool that does not give them what they want.

Why has no one jumped all over this and developed a solution? Once you develop the product, the only overhead you have is support and upgrades and you could easily have a consulting side to the business that builds something specific for a customer. Why is no software company addressing this need in the market when there is such a demand and it's not complex or expensive to do?

Someone somewhere needs to built this product and I want to work with them to do it. A product like this would go a long way to helping our industry as a whole.

 

Why Does The NAB Show Have No Sessions About Online Video?

With all that is going on with the current broadcast industry and all of the online video initiatives that broadcasters have under way, I still can't figure out why for the second year in a row the NAB has nothing in the way of conference sessions talking to the online video market for broadcasters. Where are the sessions talking about the new emerging business models? Where are the sessions talking about the technology and work flow issues these broadcasters are having, let alone the reporting and metrics issues that come with this new online distribution business?

Why isn't the NAB at the forefront of wanting to educate its broadcasters in a public forum? The RTNDA@NAB conference has some sessions about online but primarily all about the radio and news industries. Nothing about video distribution channels, technology, or business models in the entertainment and broadcast industries.

UGC Site Viddler Looking To Raise $1M in First Round of Financing

Viddler, another UGC site that launched at the end of last year is now out looking for its first round of financing between $1-2 million. Viddler classifies themselves as an interactive online video platform that allows people to enhance and share video inside of the browser.

I spoke to Viddler's president Rob Sandie yesterday who gave me an update on their technology and business model. Of course, the first thing I had to ask was how they plan on making any money and how they are any different that all the other UGC sites out there. Rob explained that they want to be the Flickr of web video allowing users to upload long form content, provide the tools for them to be able to edit the video and then allow the user to be able to buy a DVD of their video. I don't know if there is a large enough market for that but I don't recall any other UGC sites trying to do this. Selling DVDs is not the only business model they are focusing on but rather taking the approach of creating revenue from advertising, subscriptions to their video platform and the DVDs.

On the investment subject, I hear from a lot of companies all the time who are actively looking to raise a round of financing, but then always tell me I can't tell anyone they are looking? Usually they say they don't want their competitors to know. How do you expect to raise the money if you don't get word out in the community that you are looking? And so what if your competitors know, that should have no affect on your business.

Kudos to Rob for saying he wants to get the word and out wants everyone to know that they are looking for financing. I'm happy to let any company looking for money to use my blog to get the word out. That's the whole point of a blog, networking with your peers.

Expensive Bandwidth Means Joost TV Is Anything But Free

I didn't post anything on the Joost Viacom announcement last week because quite frankly, I don't really see it as news. While a deal was announced, Joost has not yet launched out of beta and no Viacom content is yet available to the public. While I am closely watching to see what happens, to me, no deal is real until the content is available, especially when a product is still in beta. In addition, there are plenty of other sites out there that gave their thoughts on the deal.

That being said, I came across an interesting article on itwire.com.au website this weekend. Alex Zaharov-Reutt writes in detail about how If you have restrictive bandwidth caps on your broadband connection, Joost TV is anything but free. It's an interesting read and one that looks at the Joost content distribution from a different angle.

The article is entitled "Joost Viacom warning: expensive bandwidth means IPTV not free" and you should head over to the iTWire site to read it.

A Brief Guide to Online Video Lawsuits

I was going to write an in-depth post about all of the lawsuits taking place surrounding major video sharing sites, but Steve Bryant over at reelpopblog.com already beat me to it with a post entitled "A Brief Guide to Online Video Lawsuits". He gives details on lawsuits and subpoenas against Veoh, Bolt, Grouper, YouTube, Google Video and MySpace. Head on over to his site to read it.

Steve will be moderating a panel at the Streaming Media East show in May about "User-Generated Content Tools".

Video Journalism on the Web: Where is it Going?

With all that is going on in the online video news space, I am pleased to announce that Martin Nisenholtz, Sr. VP of Digital Operations for The New York Times Company will be the keynote presenter on the first day of the Streaming Media East show.

Martin's keynote will be talking to how video factors into the historic transformation taking place at The New York Times, and what online video means for the future of journalism.

All keynote presentations are free to attend. Sign up for a free exhibit pass and your in.

Acacia Technologies DMT Patents Still Need To Be Watched

For the past 3 years, StreamingMedia.com has been closely watching and covering Acacia Technologies and their Digital Media Transmission (DMT) patents and what this may mean to content owners and online video vendors. While we are not lawyers or providing legal counsel, we have been leading the charge to educate readers with the information they need to make an informed business decision regarding these patents via a dedicated section on our website at www.streamingmedia.com/patent

If you are a content owner or a vendor in the online video industry and have never heard of Acacia Technologies, then you need to do some catch up on your reading.

Very simply, Acacia claims they hold patents on streaming, downloading and just about every form of digital audio and video distribution out there--including pushing MP3s from peer-to-peer groups, streaming newscasts from Internet radio sites and delivering movies through cable networks.

Yesterday, Law.com published a great article by Xenia Kobylarz entitled "Extreme Makeover: From Patent Troll to the Belle of the Ball" which gives a great update on Acacia's growing momentum. I also wrote an article with the Analysis Group for the latest edition of the Streaming Media magazine which can be found here.

If you don't know about Acacia, educate yourself, educate your customers and help them educate their customers. This can have a ripple effect in a good way if everyone passes along the information needed to stay informed about what is going on with Acacia.

Verizon FiOS Signs First Content Deal With Revver, Relaunches Broadband Portal

As predicted, Verizon FiOS signed it's first content deal with content syndicator Revver. I expect this is the start of many content deals to come from Verizon, specifically for the FiOS service. While Revver's content will initially be available only through FiOS TV, it will also be available on the Verizon FiOS Internet portal later in the year.

Speaking of the Verizon portal, I commented earlier in the week about some of the things I wanted to see Verizon do with their videos in the portal. Yesterday, I noticed they had overhauled the portal and changed the name of it to Verizon Surround. The portal, still powered by ROO, now offers videos at up to 700Kbps. Better then the 300Kbps the old portal had but I still am waiting to see some content encoded over 1MB.

Business 2.0 Issue Features Online Video Companies

The March edition of Business 2.0 magazine, which arrived in my mail today, has some good stories about the online video market and in particular what some of the vendors are working on. Erick Schonfeld does a feature story on "Make Way For Must Stream TV" and talks about Diggnation, Joost and Veoh and how they are targeting content to niche audiences. It's a good read but I don't see it on the Business 2.0 website as of yet. Erick just e-mailed me to let me know the article is now online.

Another article in the issue talks to the "25 Hot Startups To Watch" and includes a page of online video related companies. Unfortunately, none of the companies mentioned  are really classified as startups in my mind and I would have liked to see them highlight companies who haven't been in development for at least a year. They highlight Joost and Revision3, two companies already thoroughly covered in Erick's article and they also highlight blip.tv, Metacafe and Dabble. Not what I would really call startups except maybe for Dabble.

There are also some other editorial pieces in the issue that talk to online video advertising and some other rich-media applications.

Questions All Analysts and Money Managers Want Akamai To Answer

Aside from the consulting I do, I also work with institutions to provide independent, unbiased, industry specific data on key investment sectors in the online video, telco and wireless industries to institutional money managers.

I do many calls each month with these money managers and probably 50% of the calls I do are in reference to Akamai. That probably does not come as a surprise to anyone considering how hot of a stock Akamai has been and just how many money managers follow them due to their size in the market.

That being said, here are the questions I am asked most frequently that I don't have answers to:

• what percentage of Akamai's revenue comes from audio and video delivery? be it via streaming, downloading, webcasting etc...
• what percentage of traffic delivered over the Akamai network is from audio and video content? again, type of protocol used is not important.
• how many of the 20,000+ servers on the network are dedicated to delivering streaming content and what percentage of them are Flash and Windows Media?

Akamai has said they don't make the answers to these questions public but I think it would only help them if they did. For instance, Akamai is known as being a thought leader in the industry, people think of them that way and everyone knows they have the most market share for the services they offer. However, that being said, there is no data in the market place as to how big the content delivery market really is, what market share percentage a company has and what percentage changes hands each year from one provider to another. Why not make that data available and tell people we have x percentage of the market? Money managers are always asking me, what is the size of the market and how much if it does Akamai have? And my answer is always the same, I have no idea and anyone who throws out numbers is purely guessing.

My point is this. If you do have as much market share as everything thinks, and if you are growing your audio and video delivery business like we all know you are, why not tell people? You would have to think it would make people want to buy even more of your stock if they thought you had x percent but you really had twice that. And it would also give you the ability to be a thought leader in telling people what the size of this market for delivery services really is.

Hopefully, over time this data will be made available. Are there other questions you would add to the list that you would want to see answered?

How Many More Rounds Of Funding Can Companies Like Brightcove and The FeedRoom Get?

Talking with an analyst this morning got me thinking to just how many companies have recently gotten a third round of funding. Brightcove, Anystream, The FeedRoom and CacheLogic to name just a few.

How many more rounds of funding are investors willing to do before they ask to see some real revenue numbers and profitability? With online video being such a hot topic in the market, the pressure by investors on all vendors in this space has to be more than it was 12-18 months ago. With the market perception of online video being large than life, it's still important to remember that few companies are really making a lot of money from this, yet. And in most cases, we don't even know if they are breaking even. Since most companies don't release any revenue numbers to the public, the perception of revenue being generated is complete speculation.

I know it's not common for most companies to give out any revenue figures when they are private, but I think it would only help companies rather than hurt them. If your numbers are really that good and if you are a leader in the space like you say, then why not show how your revenue is growing? It's not the year 2000 anymore when customers were buying services from vendors based on the perception of how big of a company they were. Today, as we have all clearly seen, size does not always equal quality in the market and a lot of smaller players in all sectors are actively closing business.

I don't see the harm that comes from releasing your numbers. For one, myself and other members of the media would give you more coverage and would want to talk to you more about your business. And you'd be able to say you are profitable and actually have people believe you, instead of having to say the phrases I hear all day like "our business is growing", "we are exceeding our expectations" and my favorite, "our revenue is growing faster than we can keep up".

What other companies besides Limelight Networks are releasing numbers publicly even though they are private?

Is Google Having Problems Delivering YouTube Videos?

Every since the Google acquisition, many times when I go to play video clips on YouTube they don't load as fast as they use to or they have to stop half-way through to re-buffer. For me, this is happening more and more. Yesterday, it took nearly 2 minutes for a 30 second video to start to play and it was a video that had only been viewed 6 times. There has been a lot of speculation on how Google was going to integrate YouTube's videos into the Google delivery network and I have to believe that they are clearly having some performance issues.Has anyone else seen a drop in performance in the playback of videos since the acquisition?

JetBlue CEO Uses Video To Reach Customers

With all that has been going on with JetBlue the past week, it's great to see their CEO David Neeleman use video to talk to his customers by posting an embedded YouTube clip directly on the JetBlue.com website. With all of the services that are out on the market today, making it so easy for anyone to quick post and deliver their message, you have to wonder why more companies don't use the medium to reach out to customers. Usually you see only technology companies like Cisco, Dell and others use video like this to deliver a message from an executive, but I can't recall the last time I saw a company use video on it's website to explain why something happened and how they were going to fix it. Seems like a no-brainer to do, but it does not seem to be done often. Have you seen other companies using video this way?

Should Online Video Really Be Called Internet TV? I Say No.

I've been debating this for a long time with lots of people and it seems everyone has a different opinion. Many vendors have been describing their services as being that of "Internet TV". But is that really the right term to be using? For years now, many of us online video folks have been explaining over and over how the TV and video on the Internet are not the same. We're always giving examples of how different the user experience is, the way content is distributed etc.... but still, Internet TV seems to be the phrase put forth by many.

Personally, I think it's incorrect. We are so many years away from being able to truly think of the video we see on the computer as being compared to the video we see today on TV. Some of this is a good thing as we don't want the video we see on TV to be the same via the Internet. The whole point is that online video is changing the way the TV industry thinks about content, advertising and eyeballs, which is a good thing. But I still think combining the words Internet and TV together, at this stage in the game, just sets expectations incorrectly.

I'd love to hear your take on this subject in the comments section.

Magnify.net Raises $1.2 Million - Will Showcase Tools At SM East Show

Last week, Magnify Networks (www.magnify.net) announced that it has closed on an investment of $1.2 million to accelerate the growth of its search-and-sort platform for Internet based, user-generated video channels.

Founded by industry veteran Steve Rosenbaum, who some say is widely regarded as the "Father of User-Generated Video" from his ground-breaking work with MTV Unfiltered, Magnify.net enables publishers to create their own video channel featuring targeted content for their niche communities.

Magnify.net was one of the companies featured at the Demo 2007 Conference and Steve will be doing a demo of the Magnify platform at the Streaming Media East show in May along with demos from VideoEgg, and Motionbox among others for the "User-Generated Content Tools" session.

Network Neutrality Debate Still Needs To Be Watched and Fought

You haven't heard a whole lot lately about the network neutrality debate that was widely covered in the press months ago. Aside from the FTC conference discussing the topic last week, in which nothing new was really talked about, the topic seems to have disappeared from people's minds that I speak to.

Someone gave me a call the other day and asked why StreamingMedia.com has not delivered a strong opinion on the matter on our website aside from the articles we have written about the subject. While I have always had a strong opinion on it and feel that neutrality is crucial, it's also important for our readers to know that nearly no one will talk to us on record about it. To me, this is a big mistake. Too many companies are willing to tell me off-the-record about how it will hurt them but they won't make that info public. If you think this is really bad for your business, which is would be, then stand up and make that clear in a public forum. Better yet, get together all of the other vendors in the industry and pool your press and media resources to get the word out to the media and tell them just how bad this is for your business and for consumers.

Many network companies are all working together to try and make this idea sound rationale and so far, only the big guys like Google, Yahoo! etc... are the only ones publicly opposing this. The smaller guys have just as much say in this if not more. To the vendors I say, how long are you going to wait before you start to really fight this? There is strength in numbers and the time is now.

 

SM East Session: From the Web to Your TV: New Media Delivery Revolution

We have some great sessions at the Streaming Media East show in May talking about Internet TV.

One of the sessions, moderated by Jose Castillo (who has a great blog at thinkjose.com) will discuss how AppleTV, TiVo, Slingbox, and a host of other hardware and software products are starting to deliver new media content from the Web to TVs. The session will discuss what latest devices are being used to deliver consumer content and how content creators big and small are utilizing these new tools. Also discussed will be how online content is being treated differently from traditional broadcast content and what potential business models are being created for the monetization of consumer content. The panelists include:

- Tara Maitra, VP, GM, Programming, TiVo
- Bijan Sabet, General Partner, Spark Capital
- Jim Funk, VP, Marketing, Akimbo
- Fred McIntyre, SVP, AOL Video

What topics or points would you like to see discussed at this session? Please include them in the comments section.

Why is U.S. always last in line for new phones?

That's the question that's answered in an MSNBC.com article by Michael Rogers. There's nothing new in the article we haven't heard before in regards to the factors that stop the progress in the U.S., but the article is a good read none the less. Some of the factors Michael talks about are:

• "Early on, most of the world decided to all use the same technical standard — GSM — for their mobile phones.  In many countries, the government actually enforced that decision. In the U.S., on the other hand, free enterprise ruled and multiple standards competed, with GSM initially only a small part of the market."

• "...high-speed cell phone networks — generically called 3G — are finally rolling out across the U.S., with Web surfing at speeds approaching that of home DSL (assuming customers are willing to pony up for the new services).  But there may also be some price competition to keep those services affordable: this year, a new technology service called WiMAX will appear, initially from Sprint and a start-up called Clearwire."

• "Another kind of new signal is coming to U.S. cell phones this year: direct broadcast television. In the U.S., Verizon will be the first to introduce this new television service later this year, and in Barcelona AT&T announced they will do the same. The good news is that unlike the early days of the U.S. cell phone market, both carriers will actually use the same technology, which should make a bigger market for cool handsets.  The bad news is that, once again, the Americans have chosen a form of mobile TV broadcast that’s different than the one most of the rest of the world has adopted, so it could be a bit like the GSM situation revisited."

Michael sums it all up by saying "While choice is generally a good thing, it has unquestionably slowed progress."

I think I have to agree. What I wish the carriers in the U.S. would tell us is real numbers for video usage on their networks. If they are not going to share them, then stop trying to tell us how successful your service is. Because every time I ask for real data and numbers, the response I always get back from them is a response like "it's wildly successful".

Verizon's FiOS Service Will Change The Game For Video Delivery

I've been a Verizon FiOS customer for over a year now and I have to say I am still amazed at how good it is and how good a job Verizon does at supporting it. I know, it sounds odd to say a phone company is good at anything, and over the years I have had nightmares with Verizon for DSL. But when it comes to their FiOS offering, it really does seem too good to be true.

For those who don't know, FiOS is Verizon's fiber-optic technology where they run a dedicated fiber line from the street into your house. In my town in Westchester it currently supports only data and voice  but in other cities around the country, it also supports Verizon TV. A year ago, I signed up at $45 a month for 15MB down and 3MB up. About 6 months after it was installed, Verizon upgraded me to 20MB down and 5MB up - at no charge. Since when do phone companies give away anything for free?!? If you ever need to call tech support, you get a special number that puts you directly in touch with the special FiOS department. I've called support 3-4 times over the year with various random questions, (not service outages) and every time I got someone who truly knows what they are doing and they even knew how to support a Mac user!

At the end of Q4 of 2006, Verizon had 687,000 FiOS customers out of the 4.8 million homes that can get FiOS for a penetration rate of 14 percent. While that is not a lot of households when it comes to market penetration, imagine what FiOS can do for content owners when adoption truly takes off and more people become aware of the service. Content companies will then have the ability to mesh TV and Internet video distribution on a real scale. Verizon could very easily and very quickly become a content syndicator capable of reaching consumers that it knows has the ability to consume high-quality video. Today, we all talk about "broadband" video as being this great high-quality file yet it is typically encoded at 300Kbps or 500Kbps, which is nothing if you have a 20MB connection. I can't even find any content encoded above 750Kbps and feel like I'm only getting 10% of what my connection is capable of.

For any product or service to be truly adopted by the masses it needs to be easy to understand, cheap, easy to buy and have good support. So far, Verizon truly has all of this with its FiOS service. 20MB fiber connection for $45 a month? Many people pay more than that for DSL or cable for speeds ranging from 3-6MB. I can't wait till FiOS does some content deals and I'm able to see videos encoded at a couple of Megs a second.

I think FiOS is a service to really watch over the next few years. It is the one Internet offering above anything else that truly has the ability to change the market for consumers and content owners. Do you have Verizon FiOS? Are you as happy with it as I am?

73% of U.S. Companies Say They'll Advertise in New Media

The American Advertising Federation released a report last week that says 73% of U.S. companies say They'll advertise in new media. Some of the findings:

• Seventy-three percent of respondents said that one to twenty percent of their budget is reserved for experimentation and new media properties. Significant, however, is the finding that 12.37 percent of respondents list 21 to 40 percent of their budget as reserved for these items.

• In 2006, the most expected innovations in the media landscape were 1) the availability of TV programs on the Internet, 2) the mass adoption of text messaging in the United States, and 3) the importance of social media/networking as part of the communications plan.

The real question is, what percentage of that will be allocated to media that incorporates online video? What numbers are you seeing?

Sprint Offers Full-Length Pay-Per-View Movies on Mobile Phones - Why?

This one has me stumped. I know this was announced in Q4 of last year, but I've just being doing some reading up on the service and frankly, I don't get it. Who in the U.S. is going to pay to watch a two-hour movie on their cell phone? We all know that short videos to mobile devices, for the right application has some potential. But full-length movies? When are technology companies going to understand that just because you can do something technically, does not mean that consumers want it? All that matters is what's adopted and there is no way consumers in the U.S. are going to adopt the idea of watching full-length movies on a mobile. They don't even watch movies downloaded to a PC in any large quantity.

That being said, what applications are you seeing in the market for short videos to mobile that does show promise and has some traction?

Does p2p Really Have Any Traction In The States?

A few days ago, I added a new session to the upcoming Streaming Media East show in May that's going to talk to p2p distribution and whether or not it will ever have any mass-market adoption in the U.S. I'd love to hear in the comments section what you think the session should focus on. What are the p2p topics that people need to know about?

Here's my thinking. I don't know of any company besides the movie studios who use p2p to distribute content. And the only sales pitch I ever get from p2p vendors is that it "reduces the cost of bandwidth". Is that really all they have to sell? Reducing cost? And if so, why haven't more companies adopted it? What is reporting like when it comes to p2p delivery? Does it support live streaming? I'm no p2p expert, but for all the talk I hear of p2p, I still can't name any customers who actually use it. And no matter who I ask, they don't know of any companies either besides the movie industry using BitTorrent, which launches it's legit video store when?

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Update: Christopher Levy from the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) just let me know about the organization and what they are up to. The DCIA is a voluntary organization representing all sectors of the distributed computing industry. This includes content providers, software developers and distributors, and service-and-support companies. The DCIA is engaged in developing standards-and-practices to advance this innovative consumer-based distribution channel. Good to see, I didn't know they existed.

The 17 Most Talked About Online Video Companies and How They Differ

SplashCast Media posted a great video that talks about the differences between all of the consumer facing video sites on the web today. The companies compared include:

• blip.tv
• Brightcove
• Veoh
• Vimeo
• Mixpo
• Panjea
• Revver
• YouTube
• Metacafe
• Daily Motion
• MySpace video
• iFilm
• Joost
• ClipSyndicate
• Grouper
• VodPod

The ones I see missing from this list are VideoEgg, AOL and Yahoo's video offerings. Who else would you put on this list?

SM East Session: Performance Metrics for Online Video Advertising

We have some great sessions at the Streaming Media East show in May about the online video advertising market.

One of the sessions, moderated by Kate Kay, Editor, News and Special Projects for ClickZ News talks to what criteria, beyond impressions, will publishers be held accountable for as video advertising matures. The panel will be discussing topics like pre-roll vs. post-roll, ideal commercial length, and ad formats (interactive components, companion banners, etc.) are just a few of the applications that must still be studied for their relative effectiveness in driving performance for both brand and direct response advertisers. The panelists include:

• Christine Peterson, Associate Media Director, Carat Fusion
• Rob Aitken, Online Video Product Manager, AP
• John Ellis, VP, Product Management, ValueClick Media
• Beth Higbee, SVP, Interactive Brands, Scripps Networks

What topics or points would you like to see discussed at this session? Please include them in the comments section.

A List Of 62 Video Sites For Creating, Discovering, Sharing, and Storing Videos

A nice detailed ist from eConsultant.com with a comprehensive list of 62 video sharing and video community websites for creating, discovering, searching, sharing and storing videos.

Will be interesting to see at the end of this year how many of these sites are still around. What do you think will be the number one downfall when it comes to sites like these aside from the lack of a clear business model?

Flash Video Coming To Mobile Phones

At the 3GSM World Congress, Adobe announced that support for video will be included in the next generation of their Adobe Flash Lite software. Flash Lite 3, expected to be available in the first half of 2007, will bring the Adobe Flash Player video format to mobile phones and devices. Beet.tv has a video about the news story on their blog.

It was only a matter of time before this happened and it will be interesting to see how Adobe competes with others in the market, including Microsoft and RealNetworks, who have long integrated their video platforms into handsets. Since Flash games are so widespread on phones, you'd have to think that Adobe is going to be able to get some good traction when it comes to the development community. I think the deciding factor though will be the licensing cost from Adobe to the phone manufactures and carriers.

How much video do you currently watch on your mobile?

Searching For Consumer Videos Is Still Too Hard

Why is the ability to search videos on the net still so hard these days? In enterprise video deployments, search is considered a standard function. But search for consumer-based content on the web is still very hit or miss. Google will only search content from it's own Google Video site or from YouTube. Does anyone know if this will change now that Google has announced that Google Video will become a video search engine? AOL's and Yahoo's search function will only give you content from their networks and while there are some small sites out there that index some videos, most of it is only content from YouTube.

It seems that blinkx has a lock on the market and quite frankly, I can see why. Their search function works very well and seems to be the only site you can go to that has indexed a large amount of video and gives you the ability to display it easily. Seems to me like there is only one game in town when it comes to search and that blinkx has a lock on the market. They seem like a natural acquisition for someone looking to integrate their technology into a content offering or search engine.

Anyone track any other companies out there when it comes to searchable consumer content?

Nortel CTO: Video On The Net could break the Internet - That's Laughable

Online video is not taxing the Internet. Anyone in the industry that deals with content delivery knows first-hand that while there is more demand for and consumption of video, traffic on the Internet is not being broken by video. Some of these network operators, who don't actually deliver content but rather sell or lease pipe, talk as if the Internet is in danger of crashing due to video.

Nortel's CTO John Roese told Reuters "Soaring demand for games, video and music will stretch the Internet to its limits" and Nortel expects service providers will make big investments in its technology to avoid a crunch.

The second part is true. Networks are making investments in servers and bandwidth to increases their capacity to be able to handle the delivery of video. But speak to any of the content delivery networks today, and they will all tell you that adding capacity is not an issue. Most of them currently have somewhere in the range of 30% of their current network un-utilized, a common practice in the space to allow for surges in traffic.

What do you think could be the biggest factors that would slow the growth of online video consumption?

Vendors, It's QuickTime, not Quick time and RealNetworks not Real networks

I have been noticing this for years and can't understand why many vendors still don't get it right. In many of your press releases, marketing sheets and on your website you spell QuickTime and RealNetworks, among other companies names, incorrectly. It's QuickTime, one word, not two, with a capital Q and T. Same with RealNetworks, one word, capital R and N.

You pretty much throw all of your credibility out the window when you print and publish materials that don't highlight company's names correctly. Especially when this mistake is on a press release announcing how good your product and service is or even worse when it is in a research report on the industry and the first page talks to the "expertise" of your organization.

It may seem like something trivial, but if I get a release from a company and they have it wrong, I don't even read it as I feel the release is not legit. And while we are on the subject of press releases, when you send out a press release, PUT THE WEBSITE OF THE COMPANY IN THE RELEASE! I get so many release where there is no URL and I have to hunt on the web to find the website. What is the point of putting out a release if you're not giving the media the ability to visit the company's website?

Analyst says Wal-Mart's entry to video downloads will kill the DVD

I don't personally know Rob Enderle, an independent analyst at the Enderle Group, in fact I had never even heard of him until I read this article on Reuters talking about the Wal-Mart movie download service. But I really have to wonder what these analysts are thinking.

He's quoted as saying Wal-Mart's download offering is a "game changer" that will help set off "a long decline" for DVD sales. "We are talking about the beginning of the end for DVDs." The end of DVD's?!? How can you make a blanket statement like that to the media and expect anyone to take you seriously or think that you have any expertise in the online video market?

The fact that Wal-mart has movie downloads is not going to change anything unless they make it a service that works and is friendly and more importantly, a service that consumers adopt. It does not support Mac users, the website can't be viewed in either the Safari or Firefox browsers and nowhere that I can find does it say how these movies are compressed. What is the quality? And why can't you transfer a download to the media center, iPod or another device or burn yourself a copy? Because that technology is currently "limited" as a Wal-mart executive was quoted as saying.

Of course, Wal-mart is under the belief that their new service is revolutionary Kevin Swint, Wal-Mart's divisional merchandise manager for digital media said, "...this is an unprecedented offering of video content, features and capabilities currently unmatched in the market". Really? Back it up with facts that support those statements then. Bambi Francisco from MarketWatch has a video interview with him on her blog.

Isn't this the same thing Wal-mart said when they came out with the DVD rental service and tried to complete with Netflix? And that lasted what, maybe a year? So far, to date, consumers in the U.S. have not had the desire to get their movies via downloads. Will that change if the services on the market are easy, affordable and provide options customer's want? Yes. But movie downloads are never even going come close to affecting the traditional DVD business.

Why I Started This Blog

While there are a lot of blogs out there already, none of them really focuses on the business aspects of the industry or they cover other subjects not pertaining to online video. As you well know, there are a lot of exciting things going on in the industry but it seems many of them get overlooked and the majority of what you end up hearing about is YouTube. The goal of my blog is to focus on all kinds of online video technology (not just streaming) and the business associated with it. I also plan to use the blog to include profiles and mini interviews with other executives in the industry and will use the blog to highlight conference sessions at the Streaming Media East, West and Europe shows so that I can get feedback on topics people want to hear about.

For me, this blog is yours just as much as it is mine. I welcome you to send me topics you want to see discussed and I will post them on your behalf with your name and company. I look forward to your involvement.