Back in November, Sony lowered the price of their Sony Internet TVs by $200 and in the past few weeks, Sony has lowered the price on them again. If you are looking to upgrade your TV or get one for kids going back to school, these Sony models are one of the best deals I have ever seen on a Internet connected TV, with full support for 1080p. The 24" model is now just $295, down from the $599 price when it originally launched. New pricing on the 32" model is $498, the 40" model is $723 and the 46" model is $961, which is $400 cheaper than last year. (Note: these are the current prices from Amazon – with free shipping.)

Sony confirmed for me that a new lineup of Sony Internet TV's with the Google TV platform are not about to be released and that they simply lowered TV prices to grab more market share. That said, later this summer, Google will launch version two of their Google TV platform, built on Android 3.1, and all of these Sony Internet TV models will be getting that software upgrade. While we all know the Google TV platform still needs a lot of work, once the Google TV software update does comes out, the combination of Sony's set and the Google TV platform will be one of the best combinations in the market, for broadband enabled TVs. And at $295 for a 24" set, you can't go wrong.

I will try to and buy a 24" model in the next few days and raffle it off here on the blog to one lucky reader. I am currently giving away a free Logitech Revue with Google TV, so enter here if you want to try and win that.

It was a busy day on Monday for some of the content delivery companies in the industry. He's a recap:

Limelight Misses Earnings: Limelight reported earnings after the market closed and missed their forecast by $2M. Limelight said they lost $1M in revenue due to one of their customers having a security breach in the quarter and while Limelight didn't want to mention the customer by name, clearly the customer was Sony. With the Sony PlayStation Network (PSN) outage, Limelight lost about $1M in expected revenue towards their CDN business. The other $1M in lost revenue was a lower booking of revenue due to a delay in Limelight rolling out a new version of their EyeWonder platform, which has now been pushed back to Q1 of next year.

Limelight also forecast Q3 revenue below analysts expectations and their stock is getting hammered after hours, trading down to $2.40 a share. Considering how bad the entire market has been over the past week, it was the worst possible timing for Limelight to miss guidance. That said, if Sony didn't have the network outage, Limelight would have met their revenue projections for their CDN business, which is 60% of their revenue, so the revenue miss is not a sign that the CDN market in general is having problems or slowing down.

But, at no time on the call did Limelight reinforce the comments they made earlier in the year when they said their CDN business could grow 12% in 2011. It's still possible, but being we're already six weeks in the the third quarter I think Limelight would have mentioned if they were already starting to see an uptick in traffic, which they didn't. It now appears that 12% growth for their CDN business for the year might be high, with a more realistic expectation being about 10% growth in CDN.

While I don't normally blog about vendors earnings, I'm already hearing that Limelight is in discussions to be acquired and now, with Limelight missing earnings and their stock being close to their at an all-time low, this is the ideal time for someone like Verizon or AT&T to come in and acquire the company. I think we'll hear more about what the company is up to sometime this month.

Akamai Has An Outage: Late in the day on Monday, Akamai experienced a DNS related outage on their network forcing many of their customers websites, including apple.com and others, to be unavailable for about 30 minutes. While outages like this are never good, the positive thing to note is that I can't remember the last time Akamai's network had an outage of this magnitude.

The company emailed me more details on the outage late last night saying that the cause of the outage was as a reuslt of, "a configuration change to take some DNS servers out of service started to propagate to the production network. This otherwise routine change caused some DNS servers to restart repeatedly. The change was introduced at 19:12GMT, and at approximately 19:18 GMT, alerts promptly fired in the Akamai NOCC. A response team identified the issue and reverted the configuration change. The configuration change was reversed at approximately 19:42 GMT. The DNS issue lasted approximately 30 minutes from first impact to return to expected service. We do not anticipate that it will cause further issue."

Amazon Has An Outage: Late on Monday night, a portion of Amazon's EC2 service went down affecting quite a large number of customers, including Netflix. Amazon acknowledged that they were, "investigating connectivity issues for EC2 in the US-EAST-1 region" when the outage was reported and the company resolved the issue about 45 minutes later.

One thing the Akamai and Amazon outages should prove to everyone is that even though all the CDNs always talk about the redundancy built into their networks, ALL networks have outages at one time or another. There has never been a network that hasn't had a major outage and there is no such thing as 100% up-time, no matter what any CDN claims or guarantees in an SLA.

XO Settles With Level 3: When Level 3 announced their intentions to acquire Global Crossing, XO Communications raised concerns with the FCC and made it well known that they were against the pending merger. Apparently that's all behind them now as on Monday, both Level 3 and XO Communications filed a joint document with the FCC saying that the two companies have "reached an agreement that addresses all of XO’s concerns raised in its comments to the Commission about Level 3′s acquisition of Global Crossing."

I'm working on a post with more details on what the Global Crossing acquisition could mean to Level 3 as well as an update on their CDN business from my recent chat with Level 3's CEO Jim Crowe.

There are a lot of choices in the market when it comes to devices that stream video to the living room. Dedicated streaming media boxes, broadband enabled TVs and Blu-ray players and tons and tons of tablets. Even for those of us in the industry, it really is a full time job trying to keep track of what content is offered on each device, the business model offered and the quality of the platforms that power the content experience. (see www.StreamingMediaDevices.com for help)

So just imagine what it is like for a consumer who doesn't write about these technologies and platforms every day. The fragmentation in the market continues to increase and it won't get better any time soon, only worse. While stores like Best Buy and Costco should be educating consumers, they really aren't. When was the last time you walked into a big box retailer and tried out an Apple TV or got hands on with Boxee's platform before you purchased it? Broadband enabled TVs on display are rarely hooked up to the Internet and you can't sample any of the content choices available on the device.

Even Costco, a store I really love for devices, has the Samsung Galaxy Tab on display, but inside a lucite case, locked down to a shelf, that keeps anyone from being able to touch the screen or device in any way. You can't see the ports, thickness of the device or what the backside looks like. TVs on display don't call out which content platforms are bundled with the sets and those that are broadband enabled, list those specs in small lettering alongside tons of other info. None of them are actually connected to the Internet. Go to any Costco and spend a few hours in the TV aisle and you'll hear the kinds of questions consumers are asking as they try and make their choice. Most will even let you help them pick the right device, even if you don't work there, as the Costco employees typically have never used Google TV or a Roku.

Retailers are missing a huge opportunity to sell more devices and as a result, are hurting the growth of our industry. I can't tell you how many times I have personally helped someone buy a device at Costco who said they would have not bought anything had I not happened to be in the aisle to help them. This is a service that these stores should be offering and having even one employee who knows the device space well would pay off big time for someone like Costco. I guarantee they would sell a lot more merchandise as I literally help sell something every time I go to their store, and I don't even work there.

All retailers should also have a few computers connected to the Internet so that any shopper can read reviews of the devices from websites and decide which model is best. I know retailers don't want you doing comparison shopping online in their store, but a retailer like Costo almost always has the lowest price on any electronic device they carry and they double the manufacturer's warranty when you buy from them. There are more positives of helping to educate the customer with reviews than negative ones.

My friend was recently down south and said the Tiger Direct store he was at had rows of devices, all connected and ready for any consumer to try out before they buy them, so it sounds like they are doing a good job. Are you listening BestBuy and Costco? If there was a Tiger Direct around here, you'd be getting your butts kicked on electronics.

I don't plan to open up a retail store any time soon, but what I would like to do is open up a small location in NYC that would be stocked with all these devices and any member of the media or person from the industry could come by and use any device, free of charge. These days, so many members of the media are writing stories about devices and platforms they have never used or even seen in person and it shows. I think it would really help our industry to have one place where the media could get hands-on help, do side-by-side comparisons and better understand what they are writing about.

I could stock the place with devices, get support from the manufactures and probably get Verizon to install a FiOS connection. The real issue would be the space, which is not easy to come by in NYC, but I think this would be something a lot of people could benefit from and I'm game to try it if anyone wants to help. We've had Bloomberg, FOX Business News and other TV stations come to our Streaming Media shows just to be able to film some of these devices in action, so I could also see this location being used for a lot of on-air interviews. Not to mention, a lot of device companies come to NYC to do road shows and demo their devices and this location could be used by any company in the industry and would have the kind of private setup they need.

Maybe I am thinking too big here, but I think setting up something like this is completely doable and I see tons of upside potential for the industry, the media and all of the content, platform and device companies in the space that would benefit from it. If you think you can help or know of a better way to do this, I'd love to hear from you.

The drawing is now closed. Congrats to Joey Cossack from Corona, CA who won the device. On Sunday, the price of Logitech's Revue box with Google TV, officially dropped to $99. But I'd got an even better deal for you – FREE! One lucky reader of my blog is going to win a brand new Logitech Revue, still sealed 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. 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. 

And keep an eye out on my blog as August is going to be the month of giveaways with some new Roku's up for grabs, a Western Digital WD TV Live box as well as a Netgear Roku.

Limelight Networks will launch a new version of their website tomorrow and one of the biggest changes the company is making is re-aligning all of their products, which will now be broken out based on services and verticals. You can see a screen shot of the new site below.

This is a smart move for the company and one that should have been done sooner. Customers don't buy products, they buy services and solutions and showcasing what business challenges can be solved by solutions, specific to a vertical, makes a lot of sense. It's how Akamai has been selling their services for years, by targeting specific verticals with specific solutions. In addition, Limelight Networks will also be dropping the work networks from their name marketing, and going forward will simply be known branding themselves as Limelight, a clear sign that the company is trying to move away from being thought of as just a CDN.

Here's how Limelight's services are now broken out:

The company also announced today that their Q2 earnings call will take place on Monday August 8th.

I didn’t have a chance to cover this when it happened, but on July 1st, Amazon announced they were lowering the pricing of their CloudFront CDN delivery service. By my count, this is now the fifth time Amazon has lowered their pricing since launching CloudFront in November of 2008. If you need any more evidence of just how quickly CDN pricing has declined, when Amazon’s service launched, the lowest pricing they offered on their rate card was nine cents ($0.09) per GB delivered. Today, their lowest rate card pricing is two and half cents ($0.025) per GB delivered and I’ve seen Amazon quote a penny ($0.01) per GB delivered for large volume deals. Here’s a chart of their new pricing and data tiers compared to their previous pricing.

Amazon also announced that customers no longer have to pay for any inbound data transfer and they introduced new pricing tiers for their high volume users for what they call “Reserved Capacity Pricing, classified as customers doing more than 5PB of delivery per month. While Amazon does not yet have the suite of services labeled as “value add” by other CDN vendors in the market, it’s pretty hard to argue with the fact that Amazon has helped commoditize the basics of storing and delivering video over the Web.

While Amazon does not break out their revenue for their suite of Amazon Web Services, including their CloudFront offering, based on my estimates and from having talked to others in the CDN space who know Amazon’s customers and traffic, I estimate that CloudFront will contribute about $75M in revenue to Amazon this year. If that number is accurate, it makes Amazon close to being the third largest CDN in the market based on revenue.

One thing Amazon’s revenue shows is that it takes any new vendor in the CDN space a long time, meaning more than 2-3 years, to get revenue into the $100M+ range. If Amazon grows their CDN business by 25% next year, which is a lot, it would have taken them 4 years to reach the $100M number. The same could be said for Level 3, based on their current growth. It took Limelight Networks five years to grow revenue from $20M to about $150M. Entering the CDN space takes a really long time, lots of money and is not as easy as some suggest. Back in 2009, Microsoft said it cost them “several hundred million dollars” to build out their CDN and bring about 70% of their traffic in-house by the end of last year.

While some are quick to say that Amazon is only competing for the commodity portion of the market and won’t compete with any value add services, think again. Amazon has some pretty ambitious plans for their AWS platform and a lot more services are on the way, including ones the market would classify as value add.

Two weeks ago, during a StreamingMedia.com webinar I moderated on the topic of Adaptive Streaming & HTTP Delivery, Cisco gave out some great details on managing adaptive bitrate resolution and encoding profiles. While I've included three of their slides below, the first slide really gives a great visual on what the aspect ratio or size of the video window should be based on the encoding bitrate and bits per pixel.

You can download all of Cisco's slides from the webinar as well as the slides from all the other presenters here.

Also check out these posts on the subject, "Comparing Adaptive HTTP Streaming Technology From Apple, Microsoft and Adobe" and "New Data Released On The Performance Of Akamai's HTTP-Based Adaptive Streaming Technology."