Can We Stop Talking About 3D TVs Already? It's Nothing But Hype

I don't know about you, but I am so sick and tired of hearing about 3D TVs and all the hype that surrounds them. For a product that barely exists in the market, I'm seeing way too many articles, quotes and marketing fluff surveys talking about how the 3D industry is going to be this huge business. Sure, 3D TVs might be a big business 5+ years from now, but it won't have any series impact on the market in the meantime. In fact, most analysts who track the market predict that only between 30-40M 3D capable sets will be sold by 2014. That's a very small number and nothing to get excited about.

Of course, that's not stopping companies like Sony who make the sets to predict that by next year, there will be a 3D TV set "in every home", referencing a specific region in Europe, not the U.S. But even still, how can Sony possibly think this? Consumers aren't even buying $150 Blu-ray players in large volumes yet, but Sony and others think people will drop a few grand for a 3D set sometime in the next few years? Most 3DTV sets won't even be out until late 2010 and you're going to have to wear glasses at all times to see anything in 3D. And the sets that don't require glasses, Panasonic says it will be, "at least 10 years before the technology is advanced enough to provide a similarly robust 3D experience without glasses". Ten years? Remind me why I am suppose to be excited about 3D TVs today?

Even with all those facts and numbers, I continue to see more and more surveys, like this one, that say consumers want 3DTV content. Duh. Of course we want better viewing experiences, but none of these surveys ever seem to say what consumers are willing to pay to get it. Depending on which analyst report you look at, the penetration rate of HDTVs in the U.S. isn't even at 50%, but we're suppose to be excited over 3DTVs and what might happen five or more years from now? The SMPTE isn't even suppose to deliver a 3DTV standard until sometime in 2011, although other organizations like CEA are working on their own standards as well.

3D TVs look great at CES and in product demos, but they do not represent what the average consumer is going to purchase anytime soon. How many consumers who spent $1,500 to upgrade to an HDTV this year are then going to be willing to spend another $2,000 three years from now to get a 3D experience? That's not realistic. 3D TVs may be the "future" but that future is not anytime soon. Weren't Internet connected TVs suppose to be the future as well? No question they have a better shot at adoption, but even their sales projections are low, under 5M sold in the next three years.

I'm tired of the TV manufactures and content owners trying to convince us what the next kind of technology is that we want, what we should be excited about as consumers or what we should be buying. We are the consumer, we decide with our wallets what we want. If content owners and TV manufactures continue to make big bets on 3D TVs being adopted in the next few years, they are going to be really disappointed when they lose.

Limelight Networks To Acquire EyeWonder, $200M In Combined Revenue Next Year

This morning, Limelight Networks announced an agreement to acquire privately held EyeWonder in a cash and stock deal valued at $110M. The deal is expected to close sometime in the first half of next year. After DoubleClick and maybe Pointroll, EyeWonder is one of the largest rich-media ad platforms in the space, billing about $35-$40M in revenue for this year. With Limelight's 2009 projected revenue of $140-$150M this deal should easily make the combined companies into a $200M+ organization in 2010.

For Limelight, this is a smart move and the immediate affect is two fold. It increases their revenue by a third and more importantly, they are acquiring a company that has 70%+ margins on their business. EyeWonder's overhead is low since they are not in the infrastructure business and this will allow Limelight to diversify their revenue with a product line that's not competing solely on price, like we have seen in the CDN space for so long.

Already I am hearing some say that the combined EyeWonder and Limelight ad solution will compete with Akamai's advertising solution, which is not the case. Akamai acquired acerno to get into the behavioral targeting business. EyeWonder is a platform that allows for rich-media ads on the web and within video games. Two very different ad solutions, solving two very different problems for content publishers.

Of the $110M in purchase price for this deal, Limelight is paying for $62M of it in cash. This leaves Limelight with about $100M left in the bank and I would not be surprised if we saw them make a few more smaller acquisitions in the near term.

Free Product Giveaway: Microsoft Expression Studio 3 ($599 retail)

The drawing is now closed. Thanks to Microsoft I have two copies of Expression Studio 3 to give away. All you have to do is leave one comment on this post telling Microsoft what you'd like to see in the next version of the product. If you are a newbie to the product, no worries, just leave your contact details. Make sure you use your real name and a valid e-mail address and I'll pick two lucky users at random at the end of the month. Winners: Lon Van W. from Boise, ID and Logan D. from Seattle, WA.

A big thanks to Microsoft for giving me two copies to give away.

Free Giveaways: Xbox 360, Flash Media Server, Roku, Expression Studio, Flip Cameras

Thanks to many generous vendors, I have a bunch of products I'm giving away this month to readers of my blog. Since I have so many items, I'm leaving the drawing open for all of them until the end of the month. Good luck!

The winner will get one Xbox 360 Pro console, a 12-month Xbox LIVE membership, 1600 points and an Xbox 360 Messenger Kit. Enter here.

To celebrate the launch of Brightcove's new Express offering, Brightcove has nicely offered to give away 25 Flip Mino cameras to the first 25 readers of my blog who sign up for a Brightcove Express account. Details here.

One lucky reader of my blog will get a copy of Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5. This is an incredible giveaway as the software retails for $4,500 from Adobe's website. Enter here.

Last month Roku announced the launch of their new Channel Store and in celebration of the launch, I'm giving away one Roku HD-XR unit. Details here.

Thanks to the Silverlight team, I have two copies of Expression Studio 3 to give away. Each of these retails for $599 from Microsoft's website and will go to two different winners. Enter here.

Amazon's CloudFront Now Offers Flash Streaming, This Will Disrupt The Market

This morning, Amazon announced that their CloudFront content delivery service now supports Flash streaming as long as the videos are stored on Amazon's S3 service. Amazon has deployed version 3.5.2 of Adobe's Flash Media Servers in 14 edge locations globally and now supports RTMP, RTMPT (HTTP tunneled), RTMPE (encrypted), and RTMPTE (tunneled and encrypted) flavors of RTMP. In addition, Amazon says they will support live Flash streaming sometime in 2010.

While Amazon's CloudFront service for on-demand video never really disrupted any of the larger CDNs in the market, this latest announcement drastically changes things. While Amazon is not going to take any large customers away from the CDNs, think MLB or Hulu, Amazon does have the potential to take many of the mid-sized customers who spend between $3-5k a month on video. That's Amazon's sweet spot and there are a lot of those customers in the market with the major CDNs. In addition, while Amazon still needs to flush out the other ecosystem pieces for video, their offering already ties in with transcoding solutions from Encoding.com and Bits on the Run. Additional third party developers are already working on other apps that will help enhance Amazon's offering including reporting.

While some might say that the downside to CloudFront is that it does not have an SLA, Amazon does have two levels of premium support that costs between $100-$400 a month for customers who want 27x7 phone support. Right now, I don't see the lack of an SLA for CloudFront as a negative for the customers they are targeting. The trend I am seeing in the market is that content owners want more control over their content, want to be able to do self provisioning and don't want to have to call their CDN every time they need something done. Amazon requires no commitment, no contract, no overages and has up-front pricing with no additional cost for Flash streaming. You can setup a CloudFront account right now and be streaming in about five minutes. What's not to like? If some still want to argue that delivering video on the Internet is not a commodity, Amazon's announcement should make them think again.

Free Product Giveaway: Flash Media Interactive Server ($4,500 retail)

The drawing is now closed. Thanks to Adobe, I have one copy of Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5 to give away to one lucky reader of my blog. This is an incredible giveaway as the software retails for $4,500 from Adobe's website. Winner: Sean D. from New York, NY.

Because I don't want someone winning this and simply re-selling it on eBay, this drawing is only open to companies. To enter the drawing, you must leave one comment on this post with your real first and last name, a valid email address AND the URL of your company. I'll pick a winner at random at the end of the month and mail it out to the user at no charge. Keep an eye on the blog as later in the month, I'll have another Adobe Flash product to giveaway.

A HUGE thanks to Adobe for allowing me to give this away on my blog.

Comcast's TV Everywhere Service Goes Live, Poor Video Quality, Lots Of Buffering

Today, Comcast officially launched their much-hyped TV Everywhere service to customers who subscribe to the company's broadband Internet service and digital cable TV offering, which appears to be around 10-12M consumers. Comcast is doing a press announcement on the news now so hopefully there will be some more details to come and some more specifics on the numbers.

Users who want to access the content will have to download the Move Networks plugin and the Adobe AIR app. For me, the user experience is not a lot better than what I saw back in October when I got to get hands-on with it when it was still in the trial. While Comcast is rolling out the service nation wide, it's still being called a "beta" offering and it shows.

The quality of the videos I checked out today took up to ten seconds to buffer, with lots of pixelation and really poor frame rates. I'll keep checking out the service today but frankly, Comcast is going to have to do a lot better than this quality wise of they want anyone to take it seriously.

How To Calculate Your Cloud Computing Costs

When it comes to calculating your content delivery or cloud computing costs, there are a bunch of calculators in the market that let you do this. But very few of these calculators produced by vendors are easy to find online and most are very basic and don't allow much customization.

Last week, Amazon launched an Excel spreadsheet that so far, is the best I have seen in the industry for calculation costs associated with cloud computing. You can read more about it at Amazon's Economics Center website and you can download the Excel file here.

The Business Of Blogging Is Ruining The Medium

I know some bloggers are going to take offense to this post, but over the past few years, it's my opinion that the business of blogging has really ruined the medium. It used to be that many bloggers were writing every day because they wanted to tell a story and had passion for what they were covering. But these days, fewer bloggers are telling stories and are simply re-hashing news from a press release.

While I am a blogger, I'm also a reader, and just like everyone else I like reading in-depth analysis about many subjects. It use to be that bloggers were interested in really offering insight into news, trends and technology and took a great deal of time to research a subject and really convey a story to the reader. Many posts use to tell the entire story from both sides and would go into details on what the potential impact could be on the market.

But today, most blog posts don't tell stories, don't give the full picture and too many bloggers write for headlines. The trend I keep seeing in the RSS feeds I follow is that the vast majority of bloggers are more concerned with getting their post up first, as opposed to getting it right, or providing any real analysis into the subject. Too many bloggers write for headlines, keep their posts under 800 words and many times, only care about page counts.

Google's New DNS Service Has One Major Flaw, Poor Performance

Last week, when Google announced on their blog that they were getting into the DNS business, many people on the web wanted to debate whether or not it would give Google too much control over the Internet, by questioning how Google would use the data that's collected. While I don't disagree that it is a valid concern, since no one is being forced to use Google's DNS offering, to me, that's not the real story.

What we should be discussing as an industry is the performance of Google's Public DNS service, something I haven't seen much written about. I've been using Google's DNS over the past week and at least for me, the performance has been worse than Level 3's DNS or my local ISP, Verizon. While Google is not going into details on where their DNS servers are located, other networking companies in the industry gave me a list of their locations which are; Atlanta, Reston, Seattle, California, Brazil, Taiwan, Germany, Netherlands, Ireland and London.

With that much coverage, you'd think their service would be at least up to par with the others, but in most cases, I'm getting results where Google is 30% slower than competitors. On the Google blog, they say the reason the industry needs their Google Public DNS service is, "to make users' web-surfing experiences faster, safer and more reliable." While that sounds nice, frankly no one is buying it and so far, the results I am seeing don't back it up. Clearly Google is looking at DNS services from the business side and knows that many companies already gladly pay for these services on the open market.

But the real question is, just what does Google think they can accelerate about this, anyway? Google's claimed interest in this is to "speed up the web", but are ISP DNS proxies really the weak link in the whole process? I don't see how they can remove that much latency from the process for a large ISP, like Comcast or Verizon, who not only more than likely has a sophisticated DNS proxy infrastructure of their own, but who also has a large user population. This means that the vast majority of DNS queries they get from users are handled via cached results from a previous user query, so no benefit would be achieved by "pre-caching" DNS responses in the vast majority of cases.