Kontiki confirmed for me this morning that the rumors I have been hearing about a change at the top are true. Eric Armstong, who had been at Kontiki for eight years and was most recently their President and CEO has left the company. Kontiki’s board of directors has been interviewing potential replacements for the past few weeks and hopes to announce a new CEO shortly. Kontiki said Eric’s departure has no impact on the company’s recent B round of funding in the ammount of $10.7M.

Updated 1:13pm: Eric is now the VP of Sales in North America for Harmonic.

Updated 4/1: I’ve also learned that Kontiki’s VP of Worldwide Sales, Jacco van der Kooij, has left the company and taken a new job with Qumu.

We are very excited to announce that Eric Kessler, Co-President of HBO will kick off the Streaming Media East conference and exhibition on Tuesday, May 10th as our keynote speaker. Eric's focus of late has been on the launch of HBO GO, HBO’s new authenticated streaming service and during his keynote presentation, Eric will demo the latest version of HBO GO and sit down with me for a Q&A discussion after his presentation.

You can get access to Eric's keynote with a free exhibits pass, so go online and register today. You can also get $200 off the conference ticket price using the promo code DAN and if you register for a gold pass before April 8th, we'll even throw in a free Roku HD.

Today at 3pm ET I will be presenting a Frost & Sullivan webinar on the topic of Broadband-Enabled Devices for Over-the-Top Video. As a principal analyst in Frost & Sullivan's digital media group, three to four times a year I present free webinars and take questions on different topics in the digital media landscape.

In today's presentation, I will highlight multiple streaming devices detailing which content platforms they run, how they compare to one another and which ones have the best chance at winning in the crowded over-the-top video market. I'll also be doing a live Q&A with attendees so sign up here and bring your questions. This webinar is free to everyone and you don't have to be a customer of Frost & Sullivan's research in order to attend.

Late last night, Netflix took to their blog to announce that users in Canada now have the ability to reduce the quality of Netflix's video streams in an effort to combat the bandwidth caps from Canadian ISPs. Netflix streaming in Canada will now default to a 625Kbps video stream for what Netflix calls the "good" setting. Selecting "better," users will get a maximum 1300Kbps video stream and customers who select the "best" quality video setting will get up to 4800Kbps.

It was about a year ago that Netflix stated that ISP caps would not impact their business, yet here they are having to reduce the quality of the users experience due to ISPs. It also interesting to note that Netflix is now using the lowest quality video setting as default, meaning many users who don't know they can increase the quality of the video are going to question why it looks so poor. No matter how Netflix spins it, caps are going to have a negative impact on their business and it's no wonder that so far, Netflix does not allow most of the streaming boxes that work in the U.S to stream in Canada. Trying to watch a video encoded at 625Kbps from a box that is hooked up to a 42" TV will look horrible.

For the past fifteen years the entire streaming media industry has been talking about ways to improve video quality and creating a better user experience and now Netflix has to reduce the quality of their video in Canada, due to something they can't control. This is simply bad news for everyone involved and if caps get lowered in the U.S. or ISPs start enforcing them, our video experience as consumers will get worse, not better. This is a step backwards and we have many of the ISPs to thank for this who are complaining about all of the video traffic on their networks, yet in reality, are simply trying to cash in on it.

The agenda for the Streaming Media East show, May 10th-11th in NYC, is coming along nicely with about 80% the speakers now placed. While I still have a lot of companies who have confirmed but not yet sent me their speaker's info, here are the spots I am still looking to fill. If you are interested in any of these, please contact me asap. Also note that I am paying $100 referral fee to anyone who introduces me to someone I place on a panel, with the exception being vendors placing customers.

Tuesday May 10th, 2011 (session descriptions can be found here)

• Cost Savings From Enterprise Streaming: How The Conversation Has Changed (2 speaking spots open. looking for end-users)
• The Future of Video In Education (3 speaking spots open)
• Challenges, Opportunities, and Best Practices of Enterprise Social Video (1 speaking spot open)
• Transcoding: In-House Or In The Cloud? (2 speaking spots open. looking for end-users)
• Enterprise Video: Phase Two (1 speaking spot open)

Wednesday May 11th, 2011 (session descriptions can be found here)

• The Potential For Monetizing Over-The-Top Video (3 speaking spots open)
• Building A Content Brand Using Social Media (3 speaking spots open)
• Monetization And Video Advertising Formats (3 speaking spots open)
• HTML5 And Web Video Standards (3 speaking spots open)

Telcos, MSOs and service providers are hard at work deploying content delivery solutions inside their network for video distribution and over-the-top services, a hot topic that we will be talking more about at the Content Delivery Summit on May 9th in NYC. Three vendors have just put out new white papers on the subject of telco CDNs, which I have highlighted below.

• Octoshape has released a white paper about breaking the constraints of scale, quality, cost, and global reach in content delivery. It's a really detailed white paper, one of the better ones I have seen of late and makes for a great read. You can download the white paper here.

• Jet-Stream released a new document about what they are calling the six trends in CDNs and how their technology addresses these trends including: from best effort to premium, from global to regional, three screens, video, global CDNs and telco CDNs, mobile delivery. You can download the white paper here.

• Skytide's new white paper entitled the 4 keys to telco CDN success talks about the relationship between quality of service, cost advantages, new business models and customer success. You can download the white paper here.

We'll be talking about Service provider platforms; transparent caching; application acceleration and dynamic site acceleration; build versus buy strategies; mobile video deployments; future trending costs; and more at the Content Delivery Summit on May 9th. You can register online for only $395 using the special discount code DAN and I'll be sharing all of the program details shortly.

Today at 2pm ET is another StreamingMedia.com webinar, this time on the topic of the video transcoding workflow and tools to ensure you are maximizing the performance of your video content for as many devices as possible. Presenters from Telestream, Wowza Media Systems, Microsoft and Harmonic will discuss the following:

• Understanding device capabilities and translating them to best practices for encoding/transcoding
• Embedding metadata to deliver best possible experience across all devices
• Understanding your audience and their technical requirements
• Integrated, rules-based, and automated quality control
• Creating a common file for multiple uses
• Transcoding settings that can save you time
• Utilizing shared transcoding resources
• Automated transcoding workflows

Time-saving and cost-saving processes and technical considerations are the focus of this open forum Q&A and discussion with industry experts. Register here and bring your questions for the presenters for the live Q&A portion of the event.