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.

Thanks to the generous folks at Logitech, I am giving away a Logitech Harmony One Advanced Universal Remote to one lucky reader of my blog. This is the same model remote I use myself to control dozens of broadband-enabled devices in my home and as far as I am concerned, it the best remote on the market today. To enter the drawing all you have to do is leave one comment on this post with a valid e-mail address and I'll pick one lucky user at random at the end of the month. Drawing is only open to those with a U.S. mailing address. A big thanks to Logitech for the gear. Good luck!

Two professors from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the Technical University of Bari, Italy have released a white paper detailing their testing of Akamai's HTTP-based adaptive video streaming technology. The paper includes a lot of charts and graphs on their testing methodology as well as the results. They analyzed the client-server protocol employed in order to actuate the quality adaptation algorithm and they evaluated the dynamics of the quality adaptation algorithm in three different scenarios. Some of the highlights of their findings are:

• video is encoded at five different bit rates and each level is stored at the server
• the video client computes the available bandwidth and sends a feedback signal to the server that selects the video at the bitrate that matches the avail- able bandwidth
• the video bitrate matches the available bandwidth in roughly 150 seconds
• a feedback control law is employed to ensure that the player buffer length tracks a desired buffer length
• when an abrupt variation of the available bandwidth occurs, the suitable video level is selected after roughly 14 seconds and the video reproduction is affected by short interruptions.

The same authors have also released their findings in another paper on the subject of Feedback Control for Adaptive Live Video Streaming. I am not a networking expert or engineer and don't know the technologies down to this level. So while I am not endorsing the findings of either of the papers I'm sure others who know more about this than I do will have some comments to share.

Netflix's domination is about to truly go global. While Netflix has been saying that they will expand internationally in 2011, the company has yet to release any info about which location they plan to target next. While I don't have all the details or know all the specifics, it looks like South America is the next territory that Netflix will launch their streaming based subscription service.

In order for Netflix to expand their business and keep up their current rate of growth, the company needs to enter countries that have a large population capable of getting a 2-3Mbps video stream. While not every country in South America fits that bill, many do, and they have huge populations with large Internet penetration rates:

• Argentina: As of March 2010 the country had a 64% Internet penetration rate with 26.6M users with an average broadband speed of 3.33Mbps. 
• Brazil: As of Dec. 2009 the country had a 37.8% Internet penetration rate with 75M users with an average broadband speed of 4.46Mbps.
• Chile: At the end of 2009 the country had a 50% Internet penetration rate with 10M users with an average broadband speed of 6.62Mbps.
• Colombia: In mid 2010 the country had a 48% Internet penetration rate with 21M users with an average broadband speed of 4.32Mbps.
• Mexico: In 2010 the country had a 27% Internet penetration rate with 30.6M users with an average broadband speed of 3.54Mbps.
• Peru: As of June 2010 the country had a 27% Internet penetration rate with 8.8M users with an average broadband speed of 4.62Mbps.

In 2010, South America had a estimated population of just under 400M with 156M Internet users. Central America had a estimated population of 154M with 38M Internet users. Depending on which territories exactly Netflix launches in, the company has the potential opportunity of expanding into a new market with a combined population of more than 500M users, with just under 200M of them online, with a combined average broadband speed of 3.2Mbps.

From what I am hearing, the new Netflix service is already being tested in certain regions and is expected to launch shortly. Last week, on Akamai's earnings call, the company commented that they had signed a "new" deal with Netflix saying that they, "expect to work closely with them to leverage our globally distributed network to their market expansion." While Akamai has been doing caching of small objects for Netflix for some time, to date, Netflix has not had a reason to deliver content outside the U.S. or Canada. Netflix's new contract with Akamai, which I don't believe to be exclusive, is just another sign that Netflix is about to launch out into International markets very soon.

There are a lot of questions about what type of content Netflix will offer and while I don't know those details, I do know that some content will be in-country and other content will come from the U.S. and be streamed to the new territories. From what I am hearing, it sounds like we should see the new service launch Internationally before the end of March.

* Data on broadband penetration, population and download speeds were compiled from Wikipedia, the US Census Bureau, AMIPCI, ITU, eMarketer and SpeedTest.net

Note: I didn't contact Akamai asking for a comment as I knew they would not be able to give out any information and while Netflix did return my inquiry, they were not willing to confirm or deny anything.