While many will call me crazy, (it wouldn't be the first time) I do in fact think that the $65 I spend on cable TV each month provides me with the best choice and video quality for the money spent. Of course, that's not fashionable to say as these days, the media and many in the online video industry take advantage of every opportunity they get to complain about how expensive their cable bill is or their perceived lack of content choices. But the fact is, cable TV provides an experience online video will never replace.

Of course some will be quick to comment that I sound like an out of touch cable exec or someone not watching what's taking place in the market. But the fact is, I routinely consume online video via almost thirty devices, use every online video subscription and pay-per-use service in the market and test many of these products, platforms and services before they even come to the market. I eat, sleep and breathe over-the-top video. But right now, I don't see any combination of devices, services and platforms that are even going to come close to replacing cable TV in the next few years. Disruption? Yes, but only to a limit and not replacement.

Of course some are going to point to the number of "cord cutters" and will be quick to point to stats that show these cord cutters to be in the six-figure range. Yet these same people never talk about what percentage of the overall market these cord cutters make up, which is well less than 1% of cable TV subscribers today. Of course cable TV is not for everyone and in some cases, it is a waste of money if you don't watch a lot of TV, care about sports, live news or only care about watching one or two shows. But for the vast majority of the 100 million plus cable subscribers in America, who pay on average $75 a month for their cable, they do find it worth the money.

Of course I know many will disagree with me and that's fine. I love hearing people's opinions on the topic but I can't stand the fact that right now, anyone who says they like paying their cable TV bill is thought of as someone who does not "get it". This was the same mentality that permeated the market when in 2000, the entire industry was talking about "convergence" and how in a few years the TV and Internet would be one platform. And if you didn't agree with that consensus back then, you were though of as an idiot. Yet eleven years later, all we have is a fragmented TV platform with many, many years of work ahead of us before it really comes to fruition. Lets stay grounded in reality this time.

The fact remains that for $65 a month, cable TV provides me with more content choices and better video quality than I can get online, over-the-top or via any of the online video subscription and pay-per-use services. I pay Verizon $95.99 a month for a FiOS triple play bundle of phone, 25Mbps Internet service and cable. Of that $95.99 a month, the cable portion of my bill is $57.99 a month and rounds out to around $65 with taxes. When I turn on my TV I never have to wonder what the quality will be or if I can find the show in HD. The fact is TV is convenient, it always works and that's why so many people pay for the service each month. The same can't be said for over-the-top services and other forms of online content.

The last time I went to the movies it cost $28 for two tickets. At that rate, I could go to about two movies a month with my wife, or have cable TV for 30 days. Of course lots of folks talk about over-the-top services replacing cable TV, but if I got subscriptions to Netflix, Hulu, MLB and bought two shows a week on iTunes, that would cost almost $64 a month, the same as my cable bill. And I still would not be able to get local MLB games, other live sports, news or many of the shows I want in HD.

Over-the-top video services will always be subject to potential quality issues, buffering, lack of an HD source or many of the other things that plague these Internet based services. The Internet is not capable of supporting the kind of quality and viewership that cable TV supports, period. Of course that's something that many want to debate by saying that P2P protocols or some other kind of technology will fix the problem, but it won't.

Cable is all about convenience. I have dozens of channels and hundreds of shows all in one place and many stored on my DVR. I don’t want to have to buy shows from multiple sites, or subscribe to multiple services, nor do I want to have to use my PC to find shows to send to another box connected to my TV. I want to sit down on the sofa, pick up a remote to navigate through a simple program guide and DVR interface (TiVo) to choose the shows I want to watch. Easy. I also don’t like the idea of buying or leasing episodes of a show from iTunes that I may or may not like. With cable I can simply change the channel.

I watch a lot of TV, have about 50 season passes in my TiVo and for the money I spend each month, there is no other video service that even comes close to what cable TV offers in the way of choice and quality. Some in the industry are going to say that my role in the industry is to promote the adoption of online video and the value it provides in the market. And while they are right, my first job is to set expectations properly. And today, for the average consumer, cable TV is still one of the best choices in the market for quality and convenience.

Last Friday, Cisco announced it would acquire privately held Inlet Technologies in a deal valued at $95M. With so many companies getting acquired lately for far less than the money they raised, it great to see that there are still companies in the industry that are worth something. While one of the print newspapers covering the deal called Inlet a "startup", the company has been around for almost ten years and the deal valued Inlet at about two and a half times revenue. Co-founder and former CEO Neal Page, who passed away in 2009, would of been very happy to see Inlet's technology be brought under the fold of Cisco.

Similar to the acquisition Cisco made of Extend Media, valued at around $80M last year, Cisco plans to use Inlet's technology for Cisco's recently announced Videoscape platform. Cisco is betting big on Videoscape with the intent of getting service providers and MSOs to use their platform to deliver video, both on-demand and live, along with social features and other applications. Cisco's big play is to enable MSOs to build their own cloud-based CDN to enable the delivery of all kinds of content, for multiple devices including TV and mobile. It's too early to say if Cisco can be successful with Videoscape, but with the solutions they already offer from their service provider group and the combination of Extend Media and Inlet's technology, Videoscape is clearly going to compete in the market.

The big question is, who will Cisco acquire next? In a call I had with the company last week, Cisco would not comment on what other pieces of the ecosystem they are looking to fill, but if I had to guess, I would think the next acquisition would come from the analytics space. Videoscape has all the functionality it needs when it comes to enabling content owners to ingest, transcode, store, manage and deliver video, but the tracking and analytics piece of the platform still needs to be addressed. Maybe Cisco will just end up building that in-house, but I would not be surprised if they bought someone to fill that need instead.

Over the past week, I got a few calls from industry people telling me that a P2P company has been acquired. The name of the company I keep hearing is Octoshape, but I have not been able to confirm that and as expected, Octoshape had no comment on the rumor. Octoshape has been trying to sell the company for a few years, but so have many of the other P2P vendors. I know of one company selling some P2P assets, but not their entire company. If anyone has any details on the news, you can put it in the comments section below.

Google's Program Manager for Peering and Content Distribution in EMEA did a presentation last month where he outlined some of the challenges of scaling a CDN, talked about how peering fits in and what some of the trends in content delivery are today. The presentation also included some details on Google Global Cache and what different CDN platforms look like. You can download a PDF copy of the presentation here. Updated Feb 3rd: At the request of the presenter, the slides have been removed. While earlier permission was given to post them, since it was a presentation in public, I feel that the person who actually did the presentation overrules that if they don't want it available for download.

Here's an interesting development in the CDN space. Back in November I was hearing that AT&T was looking at possibly stopping development of their own in-house CDN platform and looking to license EdegCast's software to run AT&T's CDN. While both companies declined to comment for this post, I have been able to confirm that AT&T has in fact done a deal with EdgeCast and is in the process of using EdgeCast's CDN software to build out AT&T's retail CDN offering.

This is an interesting shift in thinking for AT&T but one that I think is really smart. It is similar to AT&T's recent reseller deal with Cotendo where AT&T decided they could get to market much faster by working with a partner as opposed to spending the time and money trying to build everything in-house. While EdgeCast might technically be considered a competitor to AT&T, the two companies are really going after different sized CDN customers and an increasing portion of EdgeCast's business over the coming years will not be just CDN delivery, but rather the licensing of their platform to other telcos and carriers.

AT&T has been making some interesting moves over the past couple of months and I do think that in the long term, they have a real chance at competing with Akamai for a good portion of Akamai's business. It won't happen over night, but AT&T does have all the pieces they need to compete with Akamai if they execute properly. In the past, I didn't think AT&T was capable of executing fast enough in the market since they were trying to build out everything themselves. But with their recent deal with Cotendo, and now their new deal with EdgeCast, AT&T is going to be bringing products and services to the market a lot faster and these services are going to be built on top of platforms that have already proven themselves in the market.

There's not much to not like about the Roku, but one of the big missing pieces was support for playback of local content via USB drives. While it was technically supported in beta mode, it wasn't the easiest to implement and the avergae user probably didn't know how to do it. That all comes to an end today as Roku has rolled out a new firmware version (2.9 build 1529) giving users the official "Roku USB Media Player" channel. In addition, Roku has also added support for the MKV format and the company plans to add support for additional formats later this year. The Roku USB Channel currently supports drives formatted in FAT16, FAT32, NTFS and HFS+. I'm giving away a free NETGEAR Roku, the drawing ends today so enter quickly if you want a chance to win.

Related Roku Posts:

– Apple TV and Roku Go Head-To-Head, Here's The Winner

– Device Comparison: Apple TV vs. Roku vs. WD TV Live Plus vs. Sony SMP-N100

– In Case Santa Didn't Bring You A Roku, I'm Giving One Away

Two weeks ago, StreamingMedia.com hosted a live webinar on the topic of HTML5 video and we had more than 900 attendees to the event who asked well over 100 questions. Of course we couldn't get to all of them in the hour, so I followed up with the webinar presenter, Jeff Whatcott, SVP of Global Marketing from Brightcove, to provide answers to some of the of the most commonly asked questions about the current state of HTML5 video.

Webinar materials are available here: Slides and Recording. StreamingMedia.com also recapped the event here. These were some of the most common questions we received:

Question: Do I really need to worry about supporting HTML5 today? What's the rush?
Whatcott: Today, HTML5 is essential to serving video to audiences browsing the mobile Web. HTML5 doesn’t apply to mobile app development, but if you are hoping to reach viewers on iPads and iPhones that are landing on your website, HTML5 and H.264 are the runtime/format combination that you have to support. And while the mobile market is fragmented, those iPhone and iPad users represent an attractive audience demographic of early-adopting, technologically-savvy users that tend to fall into higher income brackets. So yes, if you care about mobile Web video at all today, you’ll need to consider an HTML5 support strategy.

Question: What encoding settings should I be using for HTML5 video?
Whatcott: HTML5 video tags work with the following: H.264 video created with the MPEG4 codec, WebM video made with the VP8 codec, or Ogg Theora video. H.264 and WebM offer better video quality, and WebM is open source. At Brightcove, we recommend encoding in H.264, with 2 pass H.264 encoding with keyframes at least every 6 seconds. For more detail, check out our video source file specifications and recommendations.

Question: What are the current limitations of HTML5? Are there features that work in Flash that won't work in HTML5 playback?
Whatcott: We're still very early on in the adoption cycle, so there are a number of advanced features that are fully integrated in Flash that still need to be built into HTML5 playback environments. Because HTML5 video is still in its infancy, the following holes remain for the time being:

• Analytics: We have basic viewership reporting today, but drill-down in to engagement and social sharing and geography are still to come.
• Ad Integration and Ad Rules: Ad servers and ad networks are gradually adding support for HTML5 experiences, but it is taking a while to get everything working.
• DRM: The HTML5 spec does not cover or contemplate DRM to prevent content theft.
• Live Streaming:  The HTML5 spec does not cover or contemplate live streaming.  Apple offers a proprietary method, but that only works for iOS devices. 
• Captions: A workable solution for captions is not covered in the spec, and so it falls on developers and online video platforms to implement this as a feature.

In many ways, HTML5 is today where Flash video was in 2002. Replicating the massive industry ecosystem of ISVs, tools, services, and developer communities that have grown up around Flash will not happen over night. That being said, integration of these features is a top priority on our roadmap at Brightcove. Until then, Flash will remain the preferred default platform for desktop experiences, and HTML5 is really just an immediate solution for reaching mobile audiences on devices that do not support Flash, which is how our Smart Players are designed today.

Question: Will HMTL5 increase the cost of supporting video for publishers?
Whatcott: Generally, building a webpage with video that will playback on the Web and on mobile devices for every OS will require some duplication of efforts. If you wanted to do it by hand, you would need to build something that right now would probably default to Flash and then switch to HTML5. It's doubling the transcoding work, and increasing the complexity of a build for developers.
The good news is that the cost of doing that for Brightcove customers is nothing. Our Smart Players do all that development work for you by reading an end-user environment and sending the appropriate file type, codec and rendition. And Smart Players are available to all levels of our service, even down to the Express product which is targeted at lower budgets for smaller publishers.

Question: How will Google Chrome's announcement that it longer plans to support H.264 codecs for HTML5 playback impact HTML5 adoption?
Whatcott: I read this as an indication that online video is going to continue to get more complicated and fragmented before it gets easier. Because HTML5 in Chrome will require WebM codecs, we believe you'll see a lot more folks defaulting to Flash for the time being (which will still be able to support H.264 video files). The net-net of it is: this WebM announcement will result in further entrenched use of Flash for Chrome desktop and mobile environments because it works today, and will continue to work for the time being.

Question: What effect does this fragmentation of standards and codecs have on the online video ecosystem?
Whatcott: The fact that practically each major browser is supporting a different format (Chrome:WebM; Firefox, Opera:Ogg; Safari,IE:H.264) isn’t making online video delivery any easier for publishers today. However, we at Brightcove are energized and motivated by this news, because our goal has always been to shield publishers from the complexity of delivering video to an diverse ecosystem of devices, codecs, variable bandwidth profiles etc. In the near future, that will mean a publisher can continue to upload one source file to Brightcove, and we'll transcode it to multiple rendition sets in both H.264 and WebM formats to be used wherever appropriate. Our aim is to prevent customers from having to make risky either/or technology bets, and instead allow them to focus on their business strategy for video. So we're ready for the challenge, and we will continue playing that role in online video delivery.