December 2009

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.

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.

I understand that’s how the blogging business works, but that’s not a model that can sustain itself in the long run. Bloggers want to fight with other bloggers over who broke the news first, how good their sources are or who got an “exclusive”. I think using the term “exclusive” to define any blog post is just silly. While someone might be the first one to write about the news, it does not mean they are the only one to know about it. While there are many news stories that are big that every blogger always wants to follow, many times I think they write something up just because they feel pressure that if they don’t, they will be seen as not being up on the news. I don’t agree with that pressure. This is why if you are like me, and monitor 100+ RSS feeds, you’ll literally see two dozen posts all on the same news item, each day. The problem with that is 95% of them don’t tell you anything different than what the others said. Most of them don’t take the time to do anything more than report on the news, but provide no real analysis.

I know some bloggers feel that as long as they talk to someone at the company who put the news out and get a quote from them that they did their job. But if you look at the quote, many times it’s the same quote you see in posts by other bloggers as well. It’s simply a canned quote. You’ll also notice that when it comes to new product announcements, many bloggers all use the same images, provided to them by the vendor releasing the product. This tells me that most bloggers never got hands-on with the product, never took their own screen shots, didn’t take the time to use it and really have no insight into how the product works. Of course this is not the case when it comes to gadgets, but look at just how few reviews are out there of non-hardware items. I suspect some bloggers might respond to this post by saying that’s the nature of the blogging business. They have to get a lot of content online each day and don’t have time to write long pieces or really tell a story. They are going to say that it is a volume based business and that’s just the reality of the market. While I understand that’s how the blogging market has evolved, the real question to ask is if that’s good for business? To me, that kind of writing is not how you capture and maintain loyal readers.

Blogging is suppose to be about the community and getting feedback from readers. But how many of the blogs you read even allow you to comment on a post without having to register with the website or create an account? That defeats the whole purpose of having blog to begin with and is one of the reasons I see no comments on many of the blogs I read. These blog sites need to make it easy to comment, not harder. I’m a reader of blogs more than a blogger myself, since blogging is not my full-time job. I blog because I enjoy it, I love the online video industry and more importantly, I enjoy trying to tell stories and getting feedback from readers. Sure, I could be better, my grammar needs work and I have no editor for my blog. But as a reader, I wish there were more in-depth stories on the online video space, the vendors in the industry and the impact that business, technology and content will have on the market. I’m interested to hear what others think on the subject.

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.

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The drawing is now closed. Last month, at the Streaming Media West show, the generous folks from the Xbox team provided us with a bunch of great giveaways. While the items went fast, I still have one Xbox 360 unit that was never given away which will now go to one lucky reader of my blog. The winner will get one Xbox 360 Pro console, a 12 month membership card to the Xbox LIVE service, 1600 Microsoft points and an Xbox 360 Messenger Kit. Winner: Douglas S. from Austin, TX.

In order to make sure the unit goes to a reader of the blog and not some high-school kid who happens to come across my blog, you must leave one post in the comments section below with you name and a link to your company website, LinkedIn page, Facebook page etc… something that proves to me your not some kid just trying to strike it rich. I will pick one lucky reader at random at the end of the month and ship it out. The drawing is only open to U.S. residents.

A BIG thanks to the Xbox team for the great giveaways and for making this possible!

– Xbox 1080p Streaming Quality Is Incredible, Hands-On, With Video

– Review: Hands-On With Netflix Movies On The Xbox 360, HD Included

– Xbox 1080p Streaming Uses IIS, Smooth Streaming, But Not Silverlight

– Xbox Shows Off New Netflix Browsing Feature, Improved Video Quality

– Netflix Streams 1.5 Billion Minutes Worth Of Videos To The Xbox 360

Over the past year, cable companies such as Comcast, Time Warner, and Verizon have all announced what they call "TV Everywhere" trials. The premise behind these trials is based on the notion that one day, the cable companies will give subscribers the ability to view on their computers the same content they get to their TV set.

While many want to proclaim that such TV Everywhere offerings will be the future of the cable industry and that the cable companies will be forced to offer such a service, it's not at all clear that this will indeed become a reality. Such a service would be interesting and valuable to many consumers, but no cable company has yet to figure out how the service will be paid for, who will manage the content, what video platform will be used, what type of video quality viewers can expect, and how this content will be delivered with scale and performance. Too many questions still remain about the service and, to date, the trials that are taking place are extremely small-in some cases, as few as 5,000 cable subscribers.

There has been a lot of talk in our industry of consumers cutting their cable TV services in favor of online video content offerings, but that's more myth than fact. Yes, some consumers who don't watch a lot of TV or only watch shows that are available over-the-air (OTA) or with a Netflix subscription may be canceling their cable. But for the vast majority of consumers, getting rid of cable TV is not an option, and the number of cable TV subscriptions is actually going up, not down. Some are predicting that as long as the cable companies can offer the service for free with the knowledge that consumers will use it, the value proposition for the cable companies is that it will allow them to retain their subscribers.

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Today at 2pm ET I’ll be moderating another StreamingMedia.com webinar on the topic of enterprise video challenges. Sponsored by Internap, we’ll also have a presenter from Microsoft and will be talking about new multicast and adaptive streaming technologies. There will also be an extensive Q&A session after the presentation so bring your questions and we’ll get to as many of them as possible. You can register here to attend this free webinar and one luck attendee will win a Flip video camera.

When Apple launched Snow Leopard in late August, it included a new version of the QuickTime player simply called QuickTime X. While it looks nice and has some new features, one of the major problems is that it can't authenticate to streaming servers or video being delivered via HTTP, which is bad since Apple has been focusing on HTTP support as one of the key advantgaes of the new player.

When you try to play a video the player gives you a message of "unauthorized" and other Mac folks I have asked to check, have gotten the same message. The only work around I can find for it is deleting it and re-installing version 7 of the QuickTime player using the custom install option from the Snow Leopard DVD.

Anyone from Apple care to comment on when this will be fixed? I see a few others have noticed the problem as well and have been talking about it on Apple's discussion list.