Yesterday at the D10 conference Apple's CEO said that so far this year, Apple has sold 2.8M Apple TV units. If you combine that with the 2.7M units Apple sold from September 2010 to December 2011, Apple has now sold a total of 5.5M second (720p) and third (1080p) generation Apple TV's. It originally took Apple 16 months to sell 2.7M units and now they are selling that same volume in 1/3 the time. While it's good to see the growth, the problem is that Apple still has no real presence in the living room and selling 5.5M Apple TV units in 21 months time really isn't that spectacular.

While Apple won't call their Apple TV device a failure since they always thought of it as a "hobby" to begin with, the fact is, they have yet to even get 10% of users who buy an iPad to also purchase an Apple TV. Between the fiscal Q1 of 2011 up until Apple's Q1 of 2012, the company has now sold almost 60M iPads and even more if you count those sold before 2011. So even for those users who have selected Apple's ecosystem, less than 10% of them have purchased the Apple TV. And if you factor in users like myself who have multiple Apple TV units, the percentage of unique users Apple is reaching in the living room is well under 5M.

Naturally, you don't expect Apple to sell many Apple TV units to consumers not using the Apple ecosystem and the content available via the Apple TV doesn't even come close to the variety of content offered from Roku, for the same $99 price. But Apple can't even crack the 10% mark with iPad users and if you combine all of the iPhones sold with the iPad, the Apple TV isn't even reaching 2% of the total iOS market.

Of course these numbers aren't going to stop all of the crazy analysts and media people who are already declaring Apple as the winner in being able to disrupt the traditional TV and broadcast market with a product that does not yet exist (an Apple TV with a screen) and has been speculated about for more than three years with nothing yet in the market. These are many of the same analysts who said that when the first generation Apple TV came out in 2007 it would kill off DVDs. Deutsche Bank went so far as to say that the new Apple TV would, "cannibalize a good chunk of the U.S. DVD player market in the next several years".

Five years has passed since that statement and the Apple TV hasn't cannibalized or disrupted anything in the market. At the same time, when Apple TV hit the 1M sales mark, other analysts were quoted as saying, "one million is a real benchmark". Really? We're now judging the success of a device based on selling only 1M units? Clearly, most of the analysts and media really don't understand these streaming devices or their real impact on the over-the-top video market. They don't get how they really work or have any idea what you can or can't do with them. All I keep hearing about is how good AirPlay is, yet about half the content apps I have on my iPad don't even have AirPlay functionality built in. For instance, TNT's iPad app is AirPlay enabled, yet TNT's iPhone app isn't. And you still can't get something as basic as Hulu on the Apple TV.

To think of it another way, the Apple TV is nothing more than a $99 adapter that lets you mirror what is on your iPad/iPhone on your TV, if the app supports it. That's all it is. And for all of the raving by the media and analysts about how "disruptive" the Apple TV was suppose to be, Apple has yet to even sell it to 10% of their installed iPad base. These are same analysts who are saying the new iTV or whatever it's going to be called, if/when it is released, is going change and disrupt the TV and broadcast markets, which in truth, is as far from reality as you can get.

Note: Here is an interesting analysis on how much revenue Apple might be generating from their Apple TV product.

In February, Boston based Yottaa (pronounced "Yo-ta") announced a new dynamic site acceleration service aimed at the small and medium sized business (SMB) markets with the goal of trying to fill the void left in the market for DSA services, due to Akamai's recent purchase of Cotendo. This week, the company raised $9M in a Series B round and has now raised $13M to date.

For those not familiar with dynamic site acceleration, it is a suite of technologies and products that deals with optimizing dynamically served content across the network. Traditional DSA services often include TCP optimization, route optimization, connection management, on-the-fly compression, SSL offload and pre-fetching technologies.

In addition to offering DSA services, Yottaa also offers mobile content acceleration and content delivery for small objects, not video. The company also announced that they have been granted two patents in the areas of web performance optimization (WPO), Front-end Optimization (FEO), web security and cloud routing. While Yottaa has a long way to go to become the next Cotendo, the company in on track to do under $10M this year, (Cotendo did $24M in 2011) Yottaa did say that in the last month, 5% of the Internet population has visited sites accelerated by the their network.

Yottaa was one of the presenters at last week's Content Delivery Summit and you can see their presentation here that they did with Mocospace, which is one of the largest entertainment destinations on the mobile web with 25 million registered users, spending over 1 million hours per day playing games and making friends.

The company now employees 40 people and current investors General Catalyst Partners, Stata Venture Partners and Cambridge West Ventures combined for the second round of funding, along with additional undisclosed investors.

A lot of news came out at or during the Content Delivery Summit and Streaming Media East shows last week, here’s a rundown of all the news I got sent or saw on the wire.

• Amazon CloudFront Adds Dynamic Site Acceleration Capabilities
• Yottaa Launches Solution for Mobile Acceleration
• Harmonic Sets the Bar for High-Volume Multiscreen VOD Transcoding With New ProMedia Xpress
• Jet-Stream Collaborates with Oversi for a Converged CDN Solution
• Imgur Sees Over Two Billion Page Views a Month on the EdgeCast Network
• Sorenson Releases Squeeze 8.5 at Streaming Media East
• Limelight Video Platform Announces New Features and Capabilities for Online Video Publishers in Summer 2012 Release
• Revision3 Replaces In-House Encoding — Moves to Encoding.com’s Cloud-Based Turbo Encoding
• Globecomm Chooses RealNetworks Helix Universal Media Server to Power
• Limelight Networks Introduces Orchestrate – Industry-Focused Solution Framework to Streamline and Simplify Digital Media Publishing
• Polycom RealPresence Video Content Management Solutions Deliver Live Video Streaming and Video Recordings to Android and Apple Devices
• Skytide Announces Insight for Content Delivery Networks Version 3.0
• WeVideo to Expand Online Video Ecosystem With Third Party Solutions
• Mixmoov Announces Full HD Support and thePlatform Partnership at Streaming Media East
• Scala Integrates Scala Content Manager with Polycom RealPresence Media Manager
• KnowledgeVision 2.0 Raises the Online Presentation Analytics Bar
• Discover Video Announces NIMBUS Live Transcoding and Streaming Service
• Telestream Extends Live Video Production Capabilities for Partners
• TalkPoint Announces Convey, the First SaaS-based, Self-service Webcasting Tool
• EZWebPlayer Announces White Label Service at Streaming Media East
• Streambox Releases Automated Hybrid HD/SD Software Encoder with Low Delay Multi-Path Protocol and Apple Thunderbolt Support
• Brightcove Transforms Web Experience Management with Video Cloud CMS Integrations

There's a lot of webcasting deployments taking place inside the firewall of enterprise corporations and for anyone who may be looking to build out their internal webcasting team, three experienced professionals from Lockheed Martin (Richard Banse, John Hohenstein and Brian Rooney) are looking for new gigs. Over the last few weeks, Lockheed Martin has been doing layoffs and some members from their core enterprise video team are now looking for new opportunities.

Some of them have presented at our StreamingMedia.com shows in the past and these guys have helped build the internal multicast streaming capability at Lockheed Martin, handled a lot of the audio visual hardware, transcoding, media management and a host of AV related tasks. I have included all three of their resumes below, so that anyone who may be looking for this kind of skill set can reach out to them directly.

Richard Banse
Manager of Creative Services
Lockheed Martin IS&GS
View Richard Banse's Resume

John Hohenstein
Multimedia Production Analyst
Sr. – IS&GS Media Services
Lockheed Martin IS&GS
View John Hohenstein's Resume

Brian Rooney
Multimedia Design Engr Sr
Lockheed Martin IS&GS
View Brian Rooney's Resume

Hopefully someone out there is hiring for these kinds of positions and can put them back to work.

At last week’s Content Delivery Summit, I presented my findings from a recently completed CDN pricing survey, with data collected from over 800 customers that use content delivery networks for the delivery of video. Later this week, I will post all of my slides from the event along with details on how pricing has changed as well as expected growth forecasts for traffic volumes.

I’ll be breaking down the pricing based on small customers who spend under $100K-$250K per year, medium sized customers spending $250-500K per year, and large customers who spend more than $1M per year. I also have data from those who spend less than $100K per year and use resellers and regional service providers. Here’s a video interview I did with Andy Plesser from Beet.tv talking about what the pricing data showed.

Thanks to everyone who helped make last week's Content Delivery Summit such a success. The rooms were packed, the presentations and discussions on-point and I heard a lot of very positive feedback from the attendees. Lots of great information was shared and various CDN technologies showcased. The summit will be back for it's 5th year in 2013, with the event scheduled to take place on May 20th – so mark your calendar now.

We had attendees from all over the world, carriers and telcos from many different countries and presenters gave out a lot of really detailed info on current video traffic trends, federated CDN models, transit and CDN pricing, DSA and transparent caching technologies and we had a lot of great customer presentations from those deploying these web acceleration technologies. Companies also announced some new services at the event and I'll have a list of all the news from the Content Delivery Summit and the Streaming Media East show in another post.

All of the presentations from the summit can be downloaded from the CDN Summit website and we're working on getting all of the sessions up for video on demand viewing. I'll have a bunch of posts over the next two weeks about things I saw and heard at the CDN Summit that I found interesting including Amazon's new DSA service and details on my CDN pricing data. If there is any kind of post-show help you need or something you'd like me to follow up on with you, please don't hesitate to call or email me at anytime.

It’s that time of year again when we partner up with the NY Video Meetup group to co-host a special mega-session in conjunction with our Streaming Media East show at the Hilton hotel in New York City.

The Meetup will start at 5 PM with complimentary beer, wine, and hors d'oeuvres in the Streaming Media East Expo Hall and will then move to the presentation room for the Meetup demos. We're expecting hundreds of online video enthusiasts and attendees and you can visit the Meetup page for more details or contact the Meetup chairman, Steve Rosenbaum.

Attendees to the meetup will have also the chance to win some nice prizes from companies like Apple, Roku, Google, Samsung and others. #nyvideo – #smeast