I've been a little behind on blogging lately as I have been hard at work finalizing the advance program for the Streaming Media East show, taking place May 15-16 in NYC. I'm happy to say the program is now done and speaker placement will start today. You can see a PDF of the program here and all sessions in red are open. I now have to sort through hundreds of submissions and work with moderators to place speakers over the next eight weeks. If you see a session in red you want to be involved on, send me an email.

One thing you may notice is that we have a lot of stand-alone how-to presentations by single presenters this year and we also added a fourth track to the conference. For those that may be wondering where all of the sessions are pertaining to infrastructure related topics, we'll be covering that segment of the market the day before the East show at the Content Delivery Summit, taking place Monday May 14th. I have just started working on the advance program for that show and will have something to share in a few weeks.

If you want to propose a speaker for one of the sessions on the program you are welcome to do so, but please keep in mind that I get hundreds of submissions. So sending me an email saying you want someone to speak but don't include any bio on the speaker, company background, details on what previous conferences they have spoken at or which topics they can speak to, is a sure way not to be considered. If you are serious about placing them on a panel, please detail why they are an expert on that particular topic and what they bring to the table. As always, all vendors who bring customers will always get picked before vendors that don't bring customers.

For all talk from the studios about how much they are "embracing" digital, they really aren't. Consumers are asking for more choices when it comes to being able to get first-run content in digital form, for multiple devices, yet the studios continue to launch services that are limited in playback, with pricing that's too expensive.

The latest example comes from Paramount which has just started offering the streaming of films from the cloud, using the UltraViolet platform, and are charging between $22.99 for HD and $12.99 for SD. Support for Android and Windows Phone are not possible and while it works on iOS devices, HD quality isn't possible, only SD. It also doesn't work on set-top boxes and on average, the DVD of these movies they are selling cost 2/3 the price of digital. On the ParamountMovies.com website, a recent movie from 2010 costs $22.99 to buy rent in HD, yet a movie that is thirteen years old is only $3 cheaper and still costs $19.99.

What studio executive thinks consumers are going to pay $22.99 to stream a movie when we can buy the DVD for $7 or rent it for less than $2? The economics don't make sense for how the studios price digital content and the fact they are keeping Netflix and others from even renting physical discs, only so they sell more DVDs, clearly shows where their true interest lies – and it's not in digital. At some point, the studios are going to get burned just like the music industry did and while they spend a lot of time complaining about piracy, they need to wake up and realize that consumers are demanding digital content, for a fair price. So far, the studios are not willing to give it to them and over time, are going to see their business models crumble as of a result. They own arrogance is going to be the death of their legacy business.

All sessions from the Streaming Media West 2011 show in LA this past November are now online and available for on-demand viewing at www.streamingmedia.com/videos

You may re-purpose these videos as you wish. Due to some technical issues we had with the recordings, one session entitled, "Making a Living on YouTube" was not able to be archived and two of the recorded sessions have less than ideal audio levels. I apologize to those speakers that have archived sessions  affected.

On Monday May 14th, the day before the Streaming Media East show kicks off, we have four workshops that provide hands-on instructional classes. All workshops are three hours in length and I currently have two workshops confirmed on the topics of "Planning Online Video Deployment for HTML5 and Flash" and "Encoding for Flash, Mobile, and HTML5".

I am looking for two more workshops and am open to topic ideas and suggestions. Instructors will be paid and I am looking for those who have experience in doing hands-on classes. These aren't high-level discussions taking place but rather actual classes that show and explain to attendees how to do something. I am not looking for vendor workshops on how to use a particular product, but showing off multiple products and platforms is ok. I am looking for technical topics pertaining to anything in the video ecosystem that would be interesting to a large portion of the market.

If you would like to be considered for one of these workshop presentations, please contact me this week. I will be making a decision within the next few days.

Here are the stories I found interesting over the past week or so on the Web. I've tried to highlight ones that didn't get picked up as much and might have been missed since they weren't caught by mainstream outlets.

• "The World of Pain that is HTML5 Video" – bit.ly/zNZNX4 – @flashfreaker

• "Lies, Damn Lies, Ad Industry Growth Forecasts" – bit.ly/zlpIoP – @JackMarshall

• "Netflix: Auto Scaling in the Amazon Cloud" – bit.ly/yoQHRX – @netflix

• "Who Buys All Those Google Ads? An Infographic Breakdown" – bit.ly/A0ceQv – @johncabell

• "90 minute end-to-end look at Windows Azure" (video) – bit.ly/AmBTLR – @scottgu

• "Trouble finding HD or captioned titles on Netflix?" – bit.ly/AaXfJX – @TechOfTheHub

• "How MSNBC Customizes Videos For Various Platforms" – bit.ly/xAvwdX – @TimSiglin

• "The TV Business Keeps Getting Stronger!" – bit.ly/AaFRDN – @mcuban

• "One-on-One With YouTube's Content Boss" (video) – dthin.gs/z2WR99 – @pkafka

I will try to publish a list like this every week and all of these stories come from my Twitter feed. So if you want to see what I am reading in real-time, follow me on Twitter (@DanRayburn).

While not officially announced from Sony corporate, I have been able to confirm via a Sony Store and multiple calls to Sony's sales number that Sony has stopped producing their Sony Internet TV with the built-in Google TV platform. Over the past few weeks I've been noticing that Sony's Google TV model has disappeared from nearly all supply channels and Sony's own website now lists the 24", 32" and 46" models as "no longer available". Sony has a few of the 40" models left, discounted down to $599, and only a handful of refurb units.

Retailers like Amazon who use to sell these direct are out of all models and are only selling them via third party sellers who combined, have a total of 13 units left in inventory. As a result, prices on these TVs have shot up with many asking $900 for a 40" model that most recently sold for $599. And the few 24" models that I have located on eBay or other third party sites are asking $500 for a TV that use to cost $295. Sales reps at Sony that I spoke to said the TVs never sold very well and they were quick to suggest buy a TV with Sony's connected TV platform instead.

Last week at CES, Sony announced a new stand alone Blu-ray box that will come with the Google TV platform, due to ship later this summer. While Sony didn't announced any new TV models that would ship with the Google TV platform baked in, they never mentioned that they are no longer producing their line of Internet TVs with Google. The news really isn't surprising considering there has been a lot of hype around Google TV, but so far, very few TV manufactures seem to really be backing it. At CES, Google mentioned Samsung as a new partner on their website yet Samsung didn't do any media outreach at all promoting the Google TV platform on their devices. At the same show, LG only announced two models that will support Google TV baked in and Vizio three models.

For all the talk in the industry about how consumers don't need stand-alone boxes and want TVs to be smarter, with more platforms, it looks as if the TV industry doesn't want to allow Google to become the dominant platform. They are all competing with Google for their own connected TV software and it's clear they see the Google TV platform as a threat. Frankly, I think this is a shame as I like choice in the market. I have a few of the Sony Internet TVs with Google TV and with the launch of version two of the Google TV platform, the unit works quite well.

A big part of Sony's problem was that they charged far too much for these TVs when they launched in the market. Trying to charge $599 for a 24" TV just because it had the Google TV platform, which was in beta, was a bad idea. Over the course of last year, Sony slashed prices on the TVs twice and really only started selling their inventory when they were priced 40% cheaper.

In December, during an on-stage interview at the Le Web show, Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt said that "by the summer of 2012, the majority of the Televisions you see in the Televisions stores will have Google TV embedded in it." Not sure what he was referring to there as so far, between LG, Vizio and Samsung, combined those companies have only announced a total of five models that will have the Google TV platform embedded in them. To date, none of them have said when they will come out or how much they will cost, but considering the sets are all at least 47" in size and also have 3D functionality, they won't be cheap. So if you're looking for new set under 47" in size with the Google TV platform embeeded, it doesn't look like that's going to happen any time soon, if ever.

At the end of this month I will publish the advance program for the Streaming Media East show, taking place May 15-16 in NYC. One of the changes I am making this year is that 50% of all the sessions will be stand-alone instructional how-to presentations. I've also added a fourth track this year so we will have a total of 35 sessions, half of which will be all how-to presentations.

While it's great to talk about a lot of streaming media topics like encoding, video players, webcasting production etc. attendees want to do more than discuss these topics, they want to see them in action. So we're going to have more hands-on sessions at East than ever before. Many of these sessions are already decided on, but I have room for a few more. So if you have an idea of a how-to session you want to do at the show, reach out to me now. I already have the following how-to sessions confirmed: (to clarify, I am not looking for presenters for the below sessions, these are sessions that already are scheduled and have presenters)

• How To: Optimizing Video for HTML5 and Flash
• How To: Battle Of The $99 Streaming Boxes
• How-To: Technical Set-Up of Live Streaming Production
• How To: Encoding Video for iDevices
• How To: Choosing An Enterprise-Class Video Encoder
• How To: Social Video 101—Techniques to Make your Videos Go Viral
• How To: Multi-bitrate & Multiscreen Streaming with Flash Media Server 4.5
• How To: Video Player Development Across Multiple Screens
• How To: Encoding Video For HTML5
• How To: Enterprise Video Case Studies
• How To: Low-Cost, Live Captioning for Webcasting

I'm open to all how-to suggestions and topics and but could definitely use more on HTML5, the video ecosystem and preparing video for mobile and tablets. The spots will go fast so please reach out to me right away if you have a suggestion.