While many vendors talk about Europe and Asia as the regions of the world they are expanding into, Latin America is going to quickly become the next go to hot spot. In specific countries like Brazil and others, online video consumption has increased significantly in recent years. Just take a look at some of these recent stats:

• Video market in Brazil is one of largest worldwide – viewing audience of 43 million people monthly and penetration of 82.2% among internet users (Dec/12);
• Internet is the #2 in advertising spending;
• Brazil ranks as the 5th largest internet market globally.
• Brazilians spent $12.2 billion in online retail sales in 2012 – and will spend over $25 billion by 2017.
• Brazil will host the two most important sport events, World Cup and Olympics, receiving over $30 billion on investment from the Brazilian government.
• Local Government will invest $ 9 billion in broadband in the next 4 years.
• Latin Americans spend 56% more time on social networking sites than the worldwide average.
• People in Latin America spent $3.62 billions in digital ads in 2012 – 112% increase in just four years.
• In 2013, Latin America will be #2 in the world in digital ad spend.

While not every country in Latin America has a large population capable of getting a 2-3Mbps video stream, many do, and they have huge populations with large Internet penetration rates:

• Argentina: As of March 2010 the country had a 64% Internet penetration rate with 26.6M users with an average broadband speed of 3.33Mbps.
• Brazil: As of Dec. 2009 the country had a 37.8% Internet penetration rate with 75M users with an average broadband speed of 4.46Mbps.
• Chile: At the end of 2009 the country had a 50% Internet penetration rate with 10M users with an average broadband speed of 6.62Mbps.
• Colombia: In mid 2010 the country had a 48% Internet penetration rate with 21M users with an average broadband speed of 4.32Mbps.
• Mexico: In 2010 the country had a 27% Internet penetration rate with 30.6M users with an average broadband speed of 3.54Mbps.
• Peru: As of June 2010 the country had a 27% Internet penetration rate with 8.8M users with an average broadband speed of 4.62Mbps.

For all of Latin America combined, we’re looking at a population of roughly 600M with more than one-third of them online, with a combined average broadband speed of more than 3 Mbps.

Investments in companies involved in providing video services in the Latin American market are also starting to pick up, the latest being Brazilian premium video ad network Samba Ads, who announced last week that they have raised $500k in seed funding and Level 3’s purchase of Global Crossing at the end of 2011. We have also seen more content services launched in Latin America in the past few quarters with Deezer rolling out in 35 countries, Netflix launching in 43 countries and OTT offerings like Total Movie continuing to expand. I’m also seeing new tradeshows and conferences popping up in countries like Brazil and Columbia with Sportel Rio being a good business venue for high-level sports and new media vendors and Andina Link, which is Latin America’s premier trade fair for the broadband and cable television industry.

While you may not hear much about the Latin American market for streaming media services yet, you will soon. Over-the-top video has launched in several Latin American countries (with at least a dozen countries poised to follow), offered by no less than six digital media operators. We see it as being such a large opportunity for vendors that we hosted a whole panel on the topic at last year’s Streaming Media East show, with speakers from Telefonica, Total Movie, Bazuca and DLA. You can check out a video of that session here.

If your company is based in Latin America and offers streaming media services, please put the name and website URL of your company in the comments section below so I can keep track of vendors in that region.

I’ve started planning the agenda for the fifth annual Content Delivery Summit, taking place Monday May 20th in NYC and like past year’s, I’m looking to highlight new startups or products pertaining to the infrastructure of web, acceleration and media delivery. We cover a wide assortment of technologies including the FEO, DSA, transparent caching, licensed/managed CDN, web acceleration platforms, mobile content acceleration and service provider deployments amongst others. Check out the home page at www.contentdeliverysummit.com for a deeper overview.

In previous years, companies like Cotendo, Qwilt, Deepfield, Cedexis, Yottaa, Aflexi, BNI Video and Conviva have all been featured as startups at the show. This is a great opportunity for stealth or startup companies to get some time on stage to showcase what they are working on and what problem they are looking to solve. If selected there is no fee to present and you’ll have 20 minutes to present.

If interested, reach out to me directly and let me know a bit more about your company and what you looking to showcase. I will be picking companies over the next 2-3 weeks, so contact me ASAP if you are interested.

And if you haven’t already seen the news, Ken Florance, VP of Content Delivery at Netflix will be the opening keynote speaker at the summit. So come join telcos, carriers, ISPs, MSOs, major content owners and CDNs to see and hear case studies on real-world deployments, see demos of new technology platforms and discuss business model considerations for web acceleration and media delivery.

I’ve gotten my hands on an extra Boxee TV along with a Mohu Leaf Plus antenna and am giving it away to one lucky reader of my blog. They come brand new in the box. To enter the drawing, all you have to do is leave one comment on this post and make sure you submit the comment with a valid email address.

The drawing is open to anyone with a mailing address in the U.S. and I will select one winner at random in two weeks. Good luck!

Product Link: Boxee TV – Product Link: Mohu Leaf Antenna

This morning Western Digital announced a new streaming player called the WD TV Play. The device is similar to the $99 WD TV Live, but is cheaper and retails for $70. One key thing that I see most members of the media missed in their posts is that in exchange for saving $30 you do sacrifice some functionality. Primarily support for MPEG, MPEG1, MPEG2, MPG formats and no support for DTS audio. Like the WD TV Live the Play device supports local content playback including:

• Video: AVI (Xvid, AVC, MPEG4, VC-1), MKV (h.264, x.264, AVC, MPEG4, VC-1), TS/TP/M2T/M2TS (MPEG4, AVC, VC-1), MP4/MOV (MPEG4, AVC), WMV9, FLV (AVC)
• Audio: MP3, WAV/PCM/LPCM, WMA, AAC, FLAC, MKA, AIF/AIFF, OGG, Dolby TrueHD.

The WD TV Play supports all the same video channels as the WD TV Live including YouTube, Hulu Plus, Netflix, Vudu, AOL HD and the SlingPlayer. The only new channel added to the WD TV Play is “Tweet,” which is a custom-built Twitter app developed by Western Digital. For consumers looking to stream content with local playback, the WD TV Play fits the bill nicely and seems to be directly targeting Roku’s mid-level box, the Roku 2 XD.

The WD TV Play still has to add a lot more content support like Amazon, HBO GO, MLB, NHL and NBA if it wants to be on par with the Roku 2 HD, but the WD TV Play does have support for YouTube and SlingPlayer, something Roku does not. And Roku’s playback of local content is extremely limited while the WD TV Play with handle almost any format you throw at it. And if more support is needed, you can easily upgrade to the WD TV Live.

Picking and choosing which box is best in the market all comes down to what each consumer’s specific content interests are and what they want to do with it. So blindly calling one box the best would be wrong. The WD TV Play is currently available for purchase, but only via Western Digital’s website.

The WD TV Play joins new boxes recently released in the market by ASUS, Netgear and Hisense, giving consumers a ton of choices in price and functionality. Here’s my updated list of streaming boxes currently in the market and there are more coming that have yet to be made public:

• Apple TV
• ASUS Qube with Google TV (coming March 2013)
• Boxee TV
• D-Link MovieNite Plus
• Hisense Pulse with Google TV
• Microsoft Xbox 360
• Netgear NeoTV (3 models)
• Netgear NeoTV PRIME with Google TV (coming Feb 2013)
• Nintendo Wii U
• RCA Streaming Media Player DSB772E
• Roku (4 models + Roku Streaming Stick)
• Sony PlayStation 3
• Sony SMP-N200
• Sony NSZ-GS7 Internet Player with Google TV
• Vizio Co-Star with Google TV
• Western Digital WD TV (3 models)

You can check out my comparison chart of streaming devices at www.streamingmediadevices.com. The chart is currently undergoing an update and I’ll be posting the latest revision shortly.

Last May, at the Content Delivery Summit event I organize each year, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced support for dynamic content delivery, also referred to in the industry as dynamic site acceleration (DSA). (video presentation here). Since the launch, Amazon has been pretty quiet on what they have been working on so I spent some time with the company to get an update on where their support for dynamic content stands. For those not familiar with DSA technology in general, dynamic site acceleration is a suite of technologies and products that deals with optimizing dynamically served content across a network. Traditional DSA services often include TCP optimization, route optimization, connection management, on-the-fly compression, SSL offload and pre-fetching functionality amongst other technologies.

Amazon is targeting customers with their dynamic content delivery service for two distinct applications: content that changes frequently, e.g. sports scores, weather updates, stock quotes, etc., but may be cached for short periods of time, and content that represents the interactive or personalized portion of a website, created on-the-fly for each user and generally cannot be cached. To coincide with their new dynamic content delivery product, Amazon’s CDN CloudFront launched several new features to support their DSA offering.

These features include configurable minimum time-to-live (TTL), query string caching, support for multiple origins, and URL based cache behaviors. With configurable minimum TTLs, dynamic content can either be cached at the edge for very short periods of time or not cached at all. With query string caching, customers can cache dynamic web pages, such as search results pages, product pages, etc., at the edge for any amount of time. With support for multiple origins, customers can point at different origins for different types of content on a single website – e.g. Amazon S3 for static objects, Amazon EC2 for dynamic content, and a custom origin for third-party content. In addition to these new features, all previous Amazon CloudFront features (e.g. private content, invalidations, default root object, etc.) are also available for Amazon CloudFront accelerated dynamic websites.

Since May, Amazon’s been busy improving their dynamic content offering and CloudFront has added a number of new features to enhance the dynamic delivery. These features include:

• Cookie support. Just like query strings, cookies are also used by customers to return dynamically generated content. With Amazon CloudFront, customers can now configure cookies to be part of the cache key so that the origin can personalize web pages for each viewer based on specific actions – e.g., response to a web form or after the viewer has logged in. See: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/09/amazon-cloudfront-cookies-and-more.html.
• Front-End-Optimization. AWS partnered with Strangeloop Networks to offer front-end-optimization (FEO) for dynamic websites. A joint customer already using this solution is Outrigger.com, as referenced in the AWS blog: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/11/cloudfront-strangeloop-greatly-reduced-page-load-for-outriggercom.html.
• Lower Pricing. On February 1, 2013 AWS lowered the price of data transfer from AWS Regions to Amazon CloudFront edge locations for “origin fetches”, in some cases by as much as 83%. This includes data transferred from Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 to any Amazon CloudFront edge location.
• New edge locations. Since May 2012, AWS added 9 new Amazon CloudFront edge locations, including new markets – Madrid, Spain and Sydney, Australia – to help improve performance for all Amazon CloudFront customers around the globe.

While Amazon has been busy improving their dynamic content offering, they still have a long way to go before it has a lot of the functionality Akamai’s DSA offering has, including support for commerce customers. But as with all of Amazon’s Web Services, it usually takes the company 18-24 months before their service competes for a large percentage of the market. One of the biggest reasons companies have taken note of Amazon’s new dynamic content delivery service is the fact that Amazon doesn’t charge a premium for their service, something most other vendors do. Amazon’s dynamic content pricing is the exact same price as their CloudFront CDN pricing. There are also no platform fees, setup fees, overage charges, and many customers find that they don’t need to use expensive professional services to configure dynamic applications, further decreasing the cost of using CloudFront for dynamic content delivery.

Since launching eight months ago, Amazon says thousands of customers have adopted Amazon CloudFront’s dynamic content delivery features. The company won’t discuss the breakdown of their customers, but I know that for now, they are mostly small customers who don’t pay a lot each month. But these customers represent a variety of use cases, including news portals, sporting websites, local/weather applications, targeted advertising systems, as well as social and gaming applications. For many of these customers, accelerating their entire website (including the dynamic portions of their site) was cost prohibitive in the past because they weren’t large enough to use a service from someone like Akamai. But with its cost-effective pricing model for dynamic content delivery, Amazon CloudFront is helping democratize this market for small customers and it’s only a matter of time before they start targeting and attracting much larger customers.

Just as AWS has done in the past, they plan to continue to rapidly add new functionality to their existing dynamic content delivery capabilities based on customer feedback and further additions to the service will be rolled out later this year. This includes performance improvements as well as adding new features and more edge locations around the globe.

Many have been quick to imply that Amazon’s dynamic content delivery service is too bare-bones to be able to compete for business from large media and enterprise customers looking for DSA services, but that’s a dangerous assumption to make. When Amazon’s CDN product CloudFront launched, it was in a beta stage for about 18 months with little functionality and many suggested it would never compete for the large RFPs in the market. But 18 months after launch, Amazon rolled out tons of additional product functionality to CloudFront, added in an SLA, lowered pricing multiple times and by my estimates (as well as their competitors), did more than $100M in revenue last year. So while Amazon still has some ways to go with the product, they’ve entered the market quickly and have the skills and resources to compete for the long-term.

Amazon’s dynamic content service will be no different. Sure it’s missing a lot of the functionality that Akamai and others offer today, but give it time. Amazon is in no hurry and can roll out more features and functionality in a steady and systematic way. Amazon’s not trying to dominate the market in the short-term, they are setting up the foundation to compete for a large portion of the market over time and they have all the resources to be able to accomplish it. So while many may write them off today, they won’t in the future.

What impact Amazon could have on DSA pricing in the market and how that could affect someone like Akamai, who dominates the industry with DSA and web optimization services, is still unknown. I’ll have more thoughts on that topic in another post. But one thing I would not do is bet against Amazon or not take them seriously as that would be a mistake. They have the resources and skills to impact any market they enter, including the web acceleration industry.

The next Streaming Media Europe show will take place at the Park Plaza Victoria in London on June 18-19. The call for speakers is now open and will close at the end of the month. If you are interested in speaking at the event, submit your request via the website. If you’ve got an idea for a thought-provoking panel, an insightful paper presentation, or an innovative “how-to” session, submit your proposal now, before it’s too late-the deadline for submissions is Thursday 28 February. Please note that I am not involved in the European event or the speaker selection process, so if you have questions about the speaking process please contact the event chairman Eric at erics@streamingmedia.com

Last Thursday, privately held Strangeloops Networks, which focuses on web optimization, announced they had been acquired by Radware (RDRW). Terms of the deal were not announced but multiple industry folks say Strangeloop was valued at under $20M.

Strangeloop is one of the leading companies offering a front-end optimization service in the market and was working with Amazon to give AWS customers the ability to make their sites perform faster by using FEO. Strangeloop has also been working with Level 3 for some time and the joint Level 3/Strangeloop solution was one of the main reasons Akamai was forced to go out and buy Blaze, an FEO competitor to Strangeloop. I haven’t had the chance to catch up with the Strangeloop folks but Radware says they will use Strangeloop’s technology to target e-commerce and enterprise customers. On paper it’s a good fit for Radware as the company already focuses on web acceleration technologies, specifically application delivery and application security solutions for virtual and cloud data centers

FEO might sound similar to another subject I have written about lately, dynamic site acceleration (DSA), but it’s very different. DSA’s focus is to bring network resources closer to the user by pre-fetching or caching files. FEO makes the content itself faster. DSA makes page resources download faster. FEO reduces the number of page resources required to download a given page and makes the browser process the page faster. Companies offering FEO technology have been really hot as of late with four FEO vendors all recently being acquired. Strangeloop is now owned by Radware, Blaze got bought by Akamai, Limelight acquired AcceloWeb and Riverbed acquired Aptimize. Another up and coming small player in the FEO and web acceleration space is Yottaa.

If you want to learn more about FEO technology and why it is so important to CDNs, read my post entitled “Why Web Applications And Mobile Browsing Are Making The Front-end A Major Performance Bottleneck“.