Today at 2pm ET I will be moderating another StreamingMedia.com webinar where Microsoft will detail how you can transition from the legacy Windows Media Encoder to Microsoft's new video production tool, Expression Encoder. They will discuss how to effectively use your Windows Media Encoder knowledge with Expression Encoder, how to migrate your Windows Media content to Silverlight, and how to take advantage of new capabilities in Expression Encoder.

Microsoft will also detail tips and tricks to maximize your encoder settings and we'll be taking a lot of your questions during the live Q&A portion of the event. So sign up here, bring your questions and get ready to learn how you can improve your encoding workflow.

In 2009, when Apple was building out their new North Carolina data center, I blogged that someone at Apple told me that once their data center was up and running, Apple would starting using it to deliver a lot of their own content, relying less on third party CDNs. [Updated: I am speculating that Apple will rely less on third party CDNs when their data center is up and running since they said they would deliver some of their own content. But my source never said that automatically means Apple will in fact rely less on third party CDNs for content delivery, that's my speculation.] While no details were available at the time about what type of content delivery Apple would bring in-house, at today's shareholder meeting Apple confirmed that come spring, the new data center will support their iTunes and MobileMe services. In my check with someone today who knows more details, they confirmed for me that video content will be part of what Apple plans to deliver on their own.

While it will take Apple some time to get up to speed and bring a lot of their content delivery in-house, it's only a matter of time before this impacts Akamai and Limelight. This move by Apple is very similar to the one that Microsoft did where over the course of three years, Microsoft pulled 60% of their content delivery away from third party CDNs. For those that might be worried that this is a new trend of companies bringing their video delivery in-house, it isn't. You have to be the size of a Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, or AOL in order for it to make sense.

I have read comments from some who suggest that Apple has to use third party CDNs for video delivery as Apple won't be able to provide good quality video delivery from only a East and West coast data center. In some cases that is accurate in that Apple has a global customer base and I expect them to always have to use third party CDNs for regions of the world where Apple is not in. But right now, the vast majority of Apple's content, especially video, is delivered within the U.S. and with Apple using the HTTP protocol to deliver this content, it's not nearly as hard to deliver good quality video as it use to be, especially in just one geographic region.

But for Akamai and Limelight who deliver an unknown portion of Apple's content, it's clear that over time, Apple's new North Carolina data center will impact the volume of bits they deliver on behalf of Apple. In the near term it won't have any impact and in fact, Apple recently renewed their contract with Akamai for an even larger commitment than before. But the writing is on the wall with this one and we can expect to see Apple take on much more control of their video delivery amongst other content.

Based on this news, some are going to ask me what percentage of Akamai's revenue comes from Apple and how much potential business is at stake? Honestly, I have no idea and don't even have an estimate since I have no data to go off of. Clearly it's in the millions of dollars but whether that's single digits or double digits, I have no idea.

Over the past 24 hours, I've read a lot of blog posts about Amazon's new Instant Video streaming offering available to Amazon Prime subscribers, yet there are a bunch of really important aspects about the service no one seems to be discussing. When detailed it is clear that over time, Amazon will absolutely compete with Netflix for the digital delivery of movies and TV shows and become a dominant force in the market.

For starters, I don't see anyone talking numbers when it comes to Amazon Prime subscribers or the potential revenue Amazon generates from it. While Amazon has not publicly said how many Prime members they have, analysts on Wall Street all seem to agree that there are about 10M Prime members. Of those, it is estimated that 60% are paying members. If that's true, and it sounds rational, Amazon brings in $474M a year in revenue from Prime subscriptions.

If Amazon could add 5M paying Prime members this year, they would generate nearly a billion dollars in revenue from about 10M Prime members. That's a lot of money they can then use to license content and Amazon would very quickly be at half of Netflix's subscriber count. While some of the money from Prime would have to go to offset the cost of shipping physical goods, numbers I have heard suggest that Amazon's Prime members buy more than 4x more goods than non Prime members. As a long time Prime member myself, I can say that definitely rings true since I always check Amazon first knowing I get free shipping.

While there seems to be a lot of talk around Amazon Prime being cheaper than Netflix's streaming only option, that's really not a big deal. The bigger point is that anyone who signs up for Amazon Prime immediately sees it as a way for them to save money. To date, that's the only reason why someone would become a member. Spending $79 means you will end up saving more than that in shipping each year. Very simply, Prime has always been all about a way to save money.

Of course, for a small percentage of Netflix customers that is the same reasoning since some members use Netflix streaming in place of other more expensive video services. But with Prime members, that's the case for all of them. It's a very easy sell. Add in the fact that you now get free streaming of movies and TV shows and Prime has a lot more value than Netflix. When compared to Netflix, the selection of content in Amazon's Instant Video streaming service is about 25% of what Netflix has today. The quality of video with Amazon's service is not as good and Amazon's Instant Video offering is not yet on a lot of devices. But the fact is, these were all of the same shortcomings Netflix had in the market when they first started their streaming offering.

Amazon can and will get on devices very quickly and one has to remember that Amazon is not starting from scratch. They have had their Amazon Video On Demand application on devices like the Roku and TiVo for years and Amazon does not lack the technical expertise or resources to get Prime streaming to more platforms. It won't happen overnight, but it won't take years like it took Netflix when the broadband-enabled device market was still just starting out. And with the success Netflix has had in the industry, there are plenty of device manufactures and platform providers who are going to be very eager to work up with Amazon to add more content choices to their devices.

When it comes to the argument that Amazon's video quality is not as good as Netflix, that's a valid one, but one that will be short lived. I don't know if anyone has noticed yet but Amazon is not using their own CloudFront CDN to deliver the Prime videos. So far, of all the videos I have traced they are all coming back to Limelight Networks. I know Limelight was doing a large majority of the delivery for Amazon Video On Demand, and it's clear they are also delivering videos for Prime. This is relevant because Limelight is one of the same CDNs that Netflix uses. So when it comes to the quality of videos being delivered, the difference between Amazon and Netflix simply boils down to the encoding specs.

While I have seen some folks like CNET say that Amazon's streaming is "comparable to Netflix HD", that's factually not accurate. There is something to be said for one's own interpretation of what defines quality, but Amazon has given out the specs on their encoding for Prime streaming and it maxes out at 1.3Mbps, far lower than what Netflix encodes for. Amazon does offer higher quality streaming at 720p, but not for free videos via Prime as of yet. Updated: Amazon has confirmed that they do offer up to 720p video quality for Prime streaming, but for some reason I still can't get above 480p when I watch content.

As most folks already know, Netflix uses Amazon's Web Services for a substantial portion of their web-hosting and video transcoding infrastructure. In a recent filing, Netflix warned that any disruption of Amazon's service would have an impact on the company. In the filing Netflix said, "While the retail side of Amazon may compete with us, we do not believe that Amazon will use the AWS operation in such a manner as to gain competitive advantage against our service."

That's an interesting statement from Netflix and while they are talking about a technical advantage, Amazon already has a competitive advantage over Netflix when it comes to cost since Amazon owns the infrastructure that Netflix is leasing from them. And at some point, Amazon will most definitely use CloudFront to deliver their videos and move away from using third party CDNs. That's another cost advantage Amazon will have over Netflix, who is estimated to spend more than $50M this year just in video delivery across third party CDNs.

Amazon has a big advantage over Netflix of being able to allow their core business drive the growth of their streaming service without having to worry about how many members they sign up each quarter, which is exactly what Netflix is so dependant on. The company has the ability to essentially subsidize the streaming service for quite some time, allowing Amazon to spend money on licensing more content and quickly expanding their inventory. Anyone who thinks Amazon won't spend the kind of money Netflix does to license more content is seriously underestimating the company.

Another big advantage Amazon has over Netflix that no one seems to be discussing is the fact that Amazon also sells and rent digital copies of movies and TV shows. Adding a subscription service now gives Amazon three different ways to get in front of the consumer and multiple ways to generate revenue. More importantly, the multiple distribution models are something the content studios love and want to see more of.

Studios I speak to say all the time that they wish Netflix would also offer a pay-to-own download service for newer content, as the studios want to leverage the audience base Netflix has built. For Amazon, they have already this business model in place and one would expect that their free streaming of content will absolutely drive the sale of more digital content for the studios, especially considering how easy Amazon's 1-Click option makes it to purchase content.

And just imagine the disruption Amazon would create in the market if they released a Kindle capable of playing video or subsidized the cost of getting Prime members a broadband-enabled device? The thing about Amazon that I think most people miss is that they own the entire ecosystem of distribution for video, something Netflix can't do. Amazon still has a long way to go before their Instant Video streaming offering is considered on par with Netflix, but anyone who thinks it is going to take Amazon year's to compete with Netflix is truly underestimating the company.

Video platform provider Ooyala has announced a new multi-faceted deal with Yahoo! Japan giving Ooyala access to the largest and fastest growing portal in the region as well as the world’s second largest population of Internet users.

Under terms of the multi-year deal, Yahoo! Japan will standardize all of their online properties on Ooyala’s platform for video delivery, subscription and advertising services. Yahoo! Japan will also resell Ooyala’s platform on a white-label basis and provide end-user support for all of the publishers using Ooyala. Financially this is a big deal for Ooyala as they get paid twice by Yahoo! Japan; once from Yahoo!’s own internal use of the Ooyala platform and also every time Yahoo! Japan resells it.

According to Ooyala, Yahoo! Japan serves 40% of all the online video in Japan using Yahoo’s own content delivery network with the average user in Japan watching 12.5 hours of video each month according to comScore. Yahoo! Japan will deploy Ooyala’s platform inside their CDN and while financial terms of the deal were not discussed, Ooyala’s President and CEO Jay Fulcher said that the value of the deal is based on certain thresholds of traffic. While it will take time to get Yahoo! Japan up to scale, I think this deal could bring in a substantial amount of revenue for Ooyala twelve months from now. By substantial I mean multi-millions, especially since Yahoo! Japan’s stream count is in the billions each year. Ooyala also mentioned that they expect to share more major news of this kind in the next couple of weeks.

In the online video platform space, the market is currently dominated by Brightcove, Ooyala and Kaltura in terms of market share. For some time I’ve thought that it would be very hard for any company to really give Brightcove a run for their money, but Ooyala seems to have really picked up a lot of momentum as of late and this deal is probably one of the largest seen in the OVP space. Kaltura has been growing very nicely as well, but they are really a different kind of OVP targeting their open-source platform to a somewhat different segment of the market.

Since all of these companies are private and don’t discuss revenue, it’s really hard to know if any one vendor is truly taking wallet share away from another or if the market is simply growing fast enough that all of them are seeing growth based on new business. One thing that is clear though is that Ooyala is clearly a force to be reckoned with and the competitive landscape for all three of the major OVPs continues to heat up.

This morning, enterprise video provider VBrick announced is has acquired online video platform provider Fliqz. While terms of the deal were not disclosed, I've learned that VBrick paid well less than $20M. By my estimates, Fliqz had about $10M in revenue (Updated: VBrick has now gone on record to say Fliqz had $5m in revenue in 2010) from 600 paying customers and over the last five years, the company raised three rounds of funding totaling just over $12M. For the original investors in Fliqz, they basically broke even on this deal.

Fliqz has been offering a SaaS based video platform targeting small and medium sized customers and also offers free accounts. Of the 40,000 websites that Fliqz counts as customers, VBrick said the company has about 600 core customers that account for 95% of Fliqz's revenue. Some of those large enterprise customers using the self-service platform include MLB, Monster, Rackspace, WebMD, Expedia, Sony, VH1, T-Mobile, Nokia, New Balance and others.

Fliqz's business was at a point where they needed to raise another round of funding to support their continued development of the platform, which would of been pretty hard for them to do in today's market. VBrick plans to continue to offer the stand alone platform to the SMB market and also integrate some of Fliqz's functionality into VBoss, VBrick's fully managed video ecosystem platform.

When I initially heard VBrick was making an acquisition, I was not expecting it to be a SMB based video platform. One might think that the SMB market would not be a fit for VBrick since they focus on the enterprise, government and education markets. But with VBrick now having a cheaper self-service option to go along with VBoss, something their partners like HP have been asking for, VBrick expects to be able to really ramp the Fliqz business via resellers and third parties.

It's also a great way to get in the door with enterprise companies, giving them access to a self-service platform and thenhaving the ability to upsell them to something more feature-rich like VBoss. For the price they paid for Fliqz and knowing how well the Fliqz platform works, I think this was a good deal for VBrick.

The next NY Video Meetup is taking place tonight at 6:30pm at AOL's HQ in NYC, located at 770 Broadway, 6th Floor. Each month local startups, content producers and big media companies demo in front of hundreds of peers followed by bi-directional Q&A. Pizza and beer after the presentations thanks to AOL. Go to nyvideo.org for all the details and to RSVP.

The Streaming Media East show is taking place May 10th and 11th in NYC and with the new HTML5 video track, I have a total of 140 speaker and presenter spots to fill across more than 40 different sessions. While I already have over 800 speaking submissions and get a lot of help from PR and speaker placement companies, I'm still always looking for more help. Maybe times getting an introduction or referral from someone else in the industry is one of the best ways that I get new speakers.

So take a look at the advance program, look through your contacts and please let me know if there is someone you think would be a good fit for a particular session. You can make an intro to me via email, Twitter or send me their details and I'll call them up. Anyone I place gets you $50 per speaker which is paid out via check or in Amazon Gift Cards. And if you end up helping me place multiple speakers or they are from companies that don't speak often, I'll pay even more.

The speakers I am looking to place are from content companies, studios, broadcasters, ad agencies, mobile device manufactures, publishers and enterprise corporations.

I know a lot of people and companies in all of the different segments of the market but I am always looking for more contacts and there is a good chance you know more people than I do in verticals I am not as well versed in. If you can help in any way, I am interested.

Please note: The referral fee will not be paid to speaker placement companies, PR firms or vendors who are placing their own customers.