P2P Provider Octoshape Hires Scott Brown As New CEO For U.S.

Scott Brown, formerly from Turner Broadcasting has been named the new CEO in the U.S. for P2P provider Octoshape. Earlier this week, Turner and Octoshape announced that Octoshape's P2P technology was used by Turner for live stream offerings for both the 2008 elections (CNN) and their live sports coverage from TBS.

The P2P solution is running on the Highwinds content delivery network and while the release says that "Octoshape broke several streaming records", no actual numbers were disclosed. The real test is going to be in the next few weeks when CNN will use the technology during the presidential inauguration.

Roku Announces New Content Partner, Amazon Video On Demand Store

Amazon just announced that in "early 2009" they will enable more than 40,000 commercial-free movies and television shows to be viewed with the Roku player. This marks the first new content partner for the Roku device which to date, was only capable of playing content from Netflix.

While the release states that all content will be encoded with H.264 and streamed up to 1.2Mbps, it sounds like HD quality content from Amazon won't yet be offered on the Roku, even though the Roku box is capable of getting HD quality streams.

While it's good to see Roku start to add more content partners, I think they need to add a lot of video content that you can't already get on your TiVo, XBOX 360 or PS3. While most seem to be focusing on the mainstream content offered by Netflix and Amazon, I think that much of the content outside of the mainstream movies is really what would make the Roku box even more interesting. Especially since that for only $100 more than a Roku, you can now get an XBOX 360 and do more than just stream movies.

Times Online and Sky News Announce New Video Project, Will Use Brightcove

This morning, Sky News and Times Online announced they are teaming up to develop video content to be shared between the Times online and Skynews.com websites. Starting today, Times Online articles will include daily co-produced and co-branded videos. Sky News says the new co-produced videos will focus on two areas: business and home and foreign news. With Sky's expertise in video production and the Times editorial staff, it is a smart use of both company's resources.

For the new video service, I have confirmed that they will be using the Brightcove 3 platform. This is another big customer win by Brightcove who last month also won a large deal with AOL. For Brightove, they continue to lock up the UK market for online news sites with the Guardian and Telegraph already using their system and now the Times online, which does 20 million monthly unique viewers.

With so many new customer wins being announced by Brightcove, the company should see some very good revenue growth next year. And while some want to predict that Brightove will not be profitable by mid 2009, like CEO Jeremy Allaire said they would be, I'm willing to bet that Brightcove can be profitable in the next 6-8 months

Level 3 Opens Broadcast Encoding Centers: Ecosystem Offering Now In Play

This month, Level 3 officially opened their two new broadcast encoding centers and has already started signal acquisition, content ingestion and video encoding services for customers in their content markets group. The two broadcast centers, located in Manhattan and Tulsa, now enable Level 3 to market to customers a unique offering, controlling customers video content from creation to distribution.

While many content delivery networks (CDN) are trying to figure out how to get out of the commodity business of shipping bits and are talking about the "ecosystem", Level 3 has now deployed one of the most unique ecosystem offerings in the market. The new broadcast centers allows level 3 to provide support for encoding up to 24 simultaneous live events in Windows Media, Flash or Move Networks formats. And with both broadcast centers tied into Level 3's Vyvx offering, the company can also ingest video directly from customer's locations and downlink and uplink video from nearly 95% of the world's satellites.

Why many will say that in the bigger picture, these services are not a huge money maker for Level 3, the point of this offering is to enable content owners to be able to get more content online faster and easier. Moving forward, this new offering will also enable Level 3 to become one of the premiere CDNs in the market for live events since they can do more than just deliver the bits. I got my start in this industry as a webcaster and understand the need customers have when it comes to live broadcasting, a trend we are seeing more of on the web. For live events, it's all about the production, getting the signal from one location to another, encoding the video into the right formats and distributing it to the right partners. Not to mention do it all at broadcast quality and with complete redundancy. With live events, you get one chance and once chance only to get it right. And while Akamai and Limelight still retain control of the most of the large scale live events on the web, Level 3 is quickly catching up.

While not announced, Level 3 is already broadcasting many professional sports events in Europe and other locations and has over 700 Vyvx customers. Add in the fact that Level 3 gets more than 20,000 requests for short term Vyvx accounts each month, mostly for sporting events and breaking news, and it does not take a lot of math to figure out how quickly this business will ramp up for Level 3.

To support live events, most other CDNs currently use partners like iStreamPlanet, Origin Digital, or OnStreamMedia to handle the signal acquisition and encoding needs for events. And while those companies and others do a good job, the vast majority of customers, especially in the broadcast vertical, are looking for one company to handle it from end-to-end. For most customers, calling a CDN and asking for live event help, outside of delivery, is a painful process. Typically they are told to call a partner or find someone who does live event production and then call the CDN back when they have it all worked out. While CDNs are very good at delivering live streams, they are pretty poor in handling all of the others pieces of a live event and assigning a live event manager who can assist with things not under control of the CDN. That hands-on approach is what makes a live event successful. And if we think about where video is going with higher bitrates, longer form content and HD video quality, the process of ingesting and encoding video is going to be harder to manage and become more important to major content creators.

While Level 3's broadcast encoding centers are primarily handling one-off events right now, in the first half of next year, Level 3 expects to make much of their live event services available on a self-provisioning model. Clients will have the ability to reserve encoders and ingest and encode their own streams on the fly, without having to call into Level 3. While most content owners are content to have someone else do it today, there is a shift going on in the industry as those in the media, entertainment and broadcast verticals take more control of their content. As online and broadcast divisions inside a company merge, more are shifting resources to where they want to provision encoders and live event solutions themselves. That logic is part of the reason why Level 3 acquired Servecast last year so they could layer some of Servecast applications on top of the Level 3 infrastructure.

For the past year and a half, I have been saying that Level 3 is going to become a serious player in the content delivery arena, offering more than just pushing bits. And while they still have a few pieces of the solution to bring to the market, like better reporting and some of the front-end applications, 2009 should be a good year for Level 3's content delivery business.

NFL Offers HD, Full-Screen Streaming, But Only Outside The U.S.

After my post last week entitled "NFL's Live Streaming Leaves A Lot To Be Desired: Capping Users, Poor Video Quality", someone wrote into me to point out that the NFL already has a HD full-screen video streaming service called Game Pass HD, a subscription based offering that is only available to users outside the U.S. and Canada.

Game Pass HD offers all of the functionality and quality that I would expect the NFL would want to offer for their Sunday Night Football Extra offering, especially since they are quoted in so many places as saying that the "user experience" is what's most important to them. The Game Pass service has excellent video quality, in what looks to be up to a 2MB stream using Move Networks and allows for full-screen mode. You can see a demo of the service on the NFL's website here.

While I don't know exactly why the NFL would offer one video stream in better quality than another, you have to wonder if this is another example of content owners not putting their content in HD due to the added costs of distributing HD quality video. For those paying for the stream, higher quality is offered. But for the free stream, why deliver HD quality when the content is not being monetized? That's the debate the industry should be discussing instead of focusing on the technology of HD.

I know that some will say that HD quality means longer engagement periods which then provides the ability to deliver more ads or branding, but at what cost? I have yet to see anyone provide a breakdown on how many additional ads can be delivered in an HD stream and how that offsets the additional bandwidth costs associated with HD video delivery. If all it takes to deliver more ads and generate more revenue is an HD quality stream, then every content owner would be encoding their content in higher bitrates or in HD quality. Yet so far, HD quality video on the web is still not the norm and in my mind, this still all comes down to cost. Delivering HD quality video is still too expensive for the majority of content owners when their content is not generating any revenue.

NFL's Live Streaming Leaves A Lot To Be Desired: Capping Users, Poor Video Quality

When the NFL announced it would be streaming seventeen games this year on NFL.com and NBCSports.com, dubbed "Sunday Night Football Extra", many were excited to see what kind of video offering the NFL had in store for their fans. With the NFL having now completed nearly half of their broadcasts, the user experience has been anything less than what I would call a quality offering for a variety of reasons.

For starters, I can't figure out why the NFL puts people into a waiting room? In a conversation with the NFL yesterday, they explained that in order to provide the best user experience, they are limiting the number of users who can watch the game at the same time. They also commented that since the wait time is usually very short, I waited between 3-5 minutes this past Sunday, it's not that big of a deal. But the question is, why cap the number of people at all? Through the first four broadcasts, each NFL game averaged around 125,000 total unique viewers online. That averages out to about 50,000 simultaneous users online at any given time. Considering the NFL is streaming the games between two content delivery networks (CDN), Limelight and Akamai, why the limitation? Akamai and Limelight combined can clearly support way more than fifty thousand streams and capping users is not providing any better experience for those who are already watching. Is the NFL simply trying to reduce their cost to broadcast the games, by capping users and keeping their bandwidth bill lower? To me, the rational for capping users just doesn't make sense.

In addition to the strange capping policy, the video feed is also being encoded using less than optimal settings that reduce the quality, not improve it. The NFL confirmed that the encoding is a multi-bitrate file, up to 980Kbps and I have confirmed from others it is being done in H.264. No problem with the H.264 part, but why is the video letterboxed? They are simply wasting bandwidth and video quality with the black bars at the top and bottom of the video window. And if you remove those bars, the aspect ratio of the video window is 490x280. The average aspect ration for a video that is being encoded up to 980Kbps would be 640x480. So why is the NFL not converting the broadcast signal correctly before encoding and why is the window size so small for such a high-quality bitrate? They should be taking the anamorphic feed and stretching it back to the 16:9 ratio and cropping out the black in the encoder to not waste bandwidth.

In addition, as many bloggers have stated before, why is there no full-screen option? For a 980Kbps feed, you could get some fairly decent full screen video quality. But even at the window size they stick to, the video quality for me last weekend was poor. I could not read the numbers on the bottom of the video screen that gave the score and there was way too much pixelation. And being on a 20Mbps FiOS connection and a new MacBook Pro, my connection and computer were not the problem.

As some have pointed out previously, switching between camera angles is a pain as you have to watch a video ad before it switches. So if you want to switch angles in the middle of a play, then you are out of luck on seeing how the play ends. What incentive is there for users to then switch between all of the angles? Why have the different angles as an option if you are going to make switching between them such a bad user experience?

I know that from day one, the NFL has clearly stated that this online video offering is an "experiment" to test the idea of potentially bringing more games online down the road. But even as an experiment, you would think the NFL would want to provide the best quality user experience possible? All they keep saying is that the steps they have taken, like the capping, is to increase the "user experience", yet it's doing the exact opposite. What do you think of the NFL's streaming experience to date?

SM West Keynote Video: Roku CEO & Founder, Anthony Wood Talks About Open SDK

On day two of the Streaming Media West show last month, Anthony Wood, Founder and CEO of Roku gave attendees a preview of how future content will be consumed on the TV. He also discussed about how Roku will soon offer a software development kit to allow their Roku box to be opened up to additional content besides Netflix movies.

Almost all of the conference sessions and keynotes from the Streaming Media West show last month are now available online at www.streamingmedia.com/videos.

SM West Keynote Video: Albert Cheng, Disney ABC TV

On day two, Albert Cheng, EVP of Digital Media for Disney ABC Television Group opened the Streaming Media West show with a keynote discussing the current state of the online video advertising market and ABC's strategy with their video player. Albert's presentation also gave details on CPM rates amongst some of the major content portals and he discussed the impact long form content will have on ad revenue in years to come. You can download his entire slide deck here.

Almost all of the conference sessions and keynotes from the Streaming Media West show last month are now available online at www.streamingmedia.com/videos.

Upcoming Webinars: "Successful Live Event Streaming" and "The CDN Ecosystem"

StreamingMedia.com has two upcoming webinars I will be participating in, including answering questions from attendees during the event. The first, sponsored by Limelight Networks, is this Thursday, Sept. 18th at 2pm EDT and is entitled "Successful Live Event Streaming". You can get more details and register for the free webinar here.

And on Thursday, Oct. 2nd, Internap is sponsoring a webinar entitled "The CDN Ecosystem: Going Beyond Content Delivery". You can get more details and register for the free webinar here.

If you have any questions on either of these topics, you can e-mail them to me in advance or put them in the comments section below.

Market Overview For Video Transcoding Services

When it comes to delivering online video, content owners continue to need more services than just pushing bits across a network. The real struggle moving forward is trying to solve the entire ecosystem of video creation, ingestion, transcoding, management, storage, distribution and tracking. Not to mention all of the other sub-categories of management like authentication, meta data, business rules, etc.

The question I often get asked is who's in the transcoding market and what segments of the market are they going after? In a recent conversation I had with Ripcode, they shared with me one of their slides that breaks out the different vendors in the market and the segments or verticals each vendor is going after. While I am sure there are a few more vendors that could be listed, especially for mobile transcoding, the slide does a good job of capturing who's in the market today and what they are focusing on.

While transcoding is a small market today, it's only going to grow larger as more content owners place more videos online, in more formats, for more devices. Over time, transcoding is going to become a mainstay functionality of the CDNs and we are already beginning to see more content delivery networks think about the ecosystem for video, including transcoding. In addition, some content owners have the ability and resources to do their own transcoding and for some, it makes sense to keep it in-house. The transcoding solutions on the market today are a lot cheaper and more efficient than they were three or four years ago and provide the ability to turn around videos very quickly for content owners who have the internal manpower.

Last year, Frost & Sullivan released a report entitled "Video Encoders and Transcoder Market" which contains a slide that shows the revenue forecasts and growth rate for 2005-2014.

The Frost & Sullivan report details that over the next few years, while the size of the transcoding and video encoder market continues to grow, it will so do at a slower rate, due to competition driving prices down and product saturation down the road. They still have the market growing but at decreasing rates as digitization becomes well established globally over the forecast period.

While transcoding is not a service you hear many people talking about in the industry, it is a topic that you hear raised quite often when speaking to a large number of customers. Over time, transcoding should become a technology that is built into the network layer of content delivery and hopefully will be seen less as a stand-alone product offering. The key thing to remember is that if content owners can't get their video into the right format, for the right device, they content can't be delivered.