Apple’s live webcast of the launch of their new iPad mini was a failure today after multiple users, including myself, had problems getting the stream to start or staying connected to the stream once it began. I tried the stream in the Safari browser at 1pm ET and got the spinning wheel with the player trying to load, but it took till 1:14pm for the stream to work. Once it did load, it worked for a few minutes before I lost all audio. When the audio came back, the video looked bad with lots of pixelation and twice the video re-wound and went back to a point in the stream it had already played. At 1:26pm, the stream died for me completely and I could not get it back.

Akamai was delivering the live stream for Apple and clearly had problems. While I hear from customers all the time that Akamai’s HLS delivery is often not reliable, I’ve now experienced it for myself. While I only tested it on Safari, other viewers I was live chatting with during the event also experienced problems on the iPhones and Apple TV. Looking at Akamai’s chart at 1:43pm ET that shows the number of real-time connections to their network for live and on-demand videos showed 943,000 concurrent live video streams, for all of their customers combined. And their 24-hour peak was 1.3M. So either Akamai was not counting Apple’s live stream numbers in their chart, or it shows just how few people were able to get the live stream as Apple’s webcast alone should be in the multiple millions of concurrent connections.

As an industry, we’ve been streaming live events since 1996. This technology has been around for 16 years now and there is no excuse whatsoever for a live webcast not to work. Yet this is the same technology that Akamai and others keep talking about that is supposed to rival broadcast TV in terms of quality and reach? I don’t think so.

There has been a lot of discussion around how to provide measurable metrics for online video, with many companies such as Nielsen and comScore evolving to be the standard. But, with an industry overflowing with data, perhaps the issue is not that there aren’t measurement methods, rather there is no online video “currency” that is currently accepted by all. At the Streaming Media West show next week, (#smwest) one session will explore the efforts behind qualifying audiences for agencies and advertisers, and how it translates back to its effect on delivering streaming video to consumers. Confirmed speakers include:

• Moderator: Andrew Wallenstein, TV Editor, Variety
• Brent Horowitz, VP, Corporate Strategy and Business Development, FreeWheel
• Stephanie Fried, VP, Research Insights & Analytics, VEVO
• Frank Besteiro, Head of Business Development, AOL On Network
• Roland Hamilton, U.S. Managing Director, Dailymotion

It’s not too late to get a pass to the show and readers of my blog can register using my own personal discount code of DRF1, which gets you a two-day ticket to the show for only $595. That’s $300 off the regular ticket price and it gets you access to both keynotes, 35 sessions and how-to presentations, 100+ speakers and all the networking events, including the special MPEG-DASH event.

At the Streaming Media West show next week, (#smwest) social TV and smart TV guru Jeremy Toeman (see his Future of Smart TV news feed), who is also the CEO of Dijit, is moderating an entire track on the challenges cable, studio and digital distribution executives face when it comes to the connected TV landscape. Jeremy’s leading 5 sessions on the topics of:

• Social TV: Where’s the Money?
• Is there a Killer App for TV, Or is TV the Killer App?
• Smart TV or Dumb TV?
• Deconstructing Content Offerings for the Second Screen
• Virtual Coffee Tables and TV App Graveyards

Some of the questions that will be discussed include:

• In a world cluttered with badges, check-ins, stickers, hashtags, likes, plusses, apps, and so many other terms, is there any real money being exchanged in the world called Social TV?
• What are the current content, distribution, and consumer-facing challenges of TV in an app world?
• Can  second screen offerings really complement some content, like sports and reality TV shows?
• Is there a one-size-fits all answer or approach to TV apps? Is there an uber-TV app coming, or are we destined to have a dedicated app for each TV show we like, each network we watch, each movie we see, etc?
• Do people want smart TVs, or do they just want “feature” TVs? Will fragmentation kill the industry before it even really gets off the ground?
• TV is inherently a social medium, and people are tweeting and liking things, so there’s some smoke – but where’s the fire?

With speakers from Roku, Sling Media, Turner Sports, Snappy TV, Trendrr, DirecTV, Revision3, LG, Sharp, 2nd Screen,  BET Networks, the Connected TV Marketing Association, and others, the Streaming Media West show is the place to be in LA next week. And if you can’t make it to the sessions, stop by the show floor on Tuesday October 30th for the networking event. It’s free!

It’s not too late to get a pass to the show and readers of my blog can register using my own personal discount code of DRF1, which gets you a two-day ticket to the show for only $595. That’s $300 off the regular ticket price and it gets you access to both keynotes, 35 sessions and how-to presentations, 100+ speakers and all the networking events, including the special MPEG-DASH event.

As the industry rushes to make HTML 5 video available on more devices, there are many things to consider when attempting to do this in a scalable manner. At the Streaming Media West show next week, (#smwest) Brian Griffin, VP of Video Product Management, Global Digital Media, for Viacom Media Networks will present the end-to-end life cycle of building and deploying HTML 5 video solutions across multiple properties. Attendees will learn about GUI considerations, integrating advertising, reporting, attribution and QoS solutions, and secure content delivery. In addition, technical details of building and compiling HTML 5 video code, managing encodes, and distributing to multiple platforms will be covered.

It’s not too late to get a pass to the show and readers of my blog can register using my own personal discount code of DRF1, which gets you a two-day ticket to the show for only $595. That’s $300 off the regular ticket price and it gets you access to both keynotes, 35 sessions and how-to presentations, 100+ speakers and all the networking events, including the special MPEG-DASH event.

At the Streaming Media West show next week, (#smwest) Nathan Dye, Software Development Manager at Amazon Web Services, will demonstrate the best practices for measuring and monitoring the quality of your videos streamed to end-users. Nathan will provide practical guidance using external agent-based measurements and real user monitoring techniques, and discuss CDN architectures and how they relate to performance measurement. Finally he’ll walk through real-world CDN performance monitoring implementations used by Amazon CloudFront customers for video delivery.

It’s not too late to get a pass to the show and readers of my blog can register using my own personal discount code of DRF1, which gets you a two-day ticket to the show for only $595. That’s $300 off the regular ticket price and it gets you access to both keynotes, 35 sessions and how-to presentations, 100+ speakers and all the networking events, including the special MPEG-DASH event.

At the Streaming Media West show next week, (#smwest) Dylan Armajani the Streaming Manager for HuffPost Live we will present a case study of the recently launched HuffPost Live, which generates 12 hours of live programming five days a week. Attendees will learn about the challenges faced in launching a long form community driven live streaming platform. Learn about live streaming workflows, quick VOD turnaround, community based collaboration technology, and Huffington Post’s attempt to break away from standard broadcast methods.

It’s not too late to get a pass to the show and readers of my blog can register using my own personal discount code of DRF1, which gets you a two-day ticket to the show for only $595. That’s $300 off the regular ticket price and it gets you access to both keynotes, 35 sessions and how-to presentations, 100+ speakers and all the networking events, including the special MPEG-DASH event.

On Tuesday, Boxee introduced a new $99 box called the Boxee TV that has dual-tuners, WiFI, ethernet and connects to Boxee’s cloud based DVR platform. Consumers can get local unencrypted basic broadcast channels over-the-air, record them in the cloud with no storage limitations and also stream video from premium content services like Netflix and Vudu. Launching on November 1st in eight major cities in the U.S., the monthly DVR service will cost $14.99 a month and Boxee also plans to offer what they are calling a “freemium” option, allowing users to get a limited number of DVR cloud recording hours and streaming hours to devices, before they have to sign up for a monthly service.

While there has been a lot of talk about the new hardware, little has been mentioned about how the service will record, store and stream content. Boxee’s been working on the new cloud-based service for 18 months and has an exclusive partnership with Amazon, building out their entire video ecosystem using Amazon’s platform. Unlike previous cloud based DVR services from cable companies that simply recorded everything in the cloud on their own, Boxee is relying on end-users bandwidth to record and upload content to Boxee’s network. Boxee’s says they have spent a lot of time optimizing the way they buffer the stream being sent into their network and the way they optimize the upload and storing of content. Boxee says that as long as consumers have 1Mbps of upload throughput, the Boxee cloud system will work in a very reliable fashion.

Video will be recorded using the H.264 codec, at 720p and playback will be somewhere between 1-4Mbps using HLS and delivered by Amazon’s CDN service, CloudFront. Boxee says they won’t initially use adaptive bitrate streaming, but will move to that over time. Playback will take place using a HTML5 web player, which means Boxee won’t need to develop apps for any mobile devices. While Boxee will still offer support on their current Boxee box by D-Link, the company will officially stop selling the unit. Boxee plans to offer a special promotion to existing Boxee Box customers for the new $99 Boxee TV to make the transition easier, the details of which will be announced shortly.

As to how many $99 boxes Boxee expects to sell, the company isn’t saying. But in a discussion I had earlier in the week with Boxee’s CEO, the consensus is that Boxee hopes to sell a few million boxes in the next two years. That’s a number I was happy to hear them tell me as it means Boxee’s management is being very realistic about the market opportunity and setting correct expectations. With Roku having sold under 4M units and Apple around double that to date, I think Boxee has a very good shot at selling at least a few million in the next 24 months.

Updated 10/22: Boxee said that there will be a limit on how long recordings are stored for non-paying users, but that paying subscribers will be able to keep their recordings in the cloud for as long as they like. Also, Boxee will enable 5 concurrent streams per account, so multiple people in the household can all stream different content at the same time.

Boxee will release additional details shortly on where the box will be sold and which big box retailers and online websites they have partnered with, with some being an exclusive partnership.