Yesterday in NYC, Limelight Networks held their first financial analyst day showcasing some new products and more importantly, shared with the industry some of the trends they are seeing in the market. While I was not able to attend in-person, I was able to watch the live webcast, which has now been archived on their website along with the slides from their presentations.

Many of the slides contain some good details on market trends, the growth rate of certain verticals as well as details of video consumption on mobile devices. One of the slides I liked is the one below that shows a breakdown on the type of traffic on the Internet and the total percentage of volume it accounts for.

Limelight’s presentation also includes details on the mobile video market including a breakdown on the install base of different platforms as well as market sizing and other data. Some of the numbers displayed aren’t new to the industry, but Limelight did a good job of pulling together data from a lot of different sources and analysts all into one place.

Today at 2pm ET I'll be moderating another StreamingMedia.com round table webinar entitled, "New Horizons In Enterprise Video". Corporate video today is more than just talking-head webcasts of executive presentations. Video communication is now accessible to everyone from the boardroom to the mailroom. What's more, today's enterprise video solutions offer more interactivity, functionality, and reporting options than ever. Hear success stories from enterprise video deployments and learn about the technologies behind the scenes. Topics to be covered with our presenters from Kaltura, MediaPlatform, Internap and TalkPoint will include:

• Video for training, marketing, PR, and both internal and external communications
• The importance of asset management and searchability
• How to make corporate video more engaging with interactivity
• Measuring outcomes with reporting and analytics
• Real-world case studies of successful enterprise video initiatives

Be sure to bring your questions, because there will be plenty of time for Q&A with leading industry professionals. You can register here for the free event.

I've just spoke to someone at Akamai who has confirmed that they are delivering today's live stream of Steve Jobs's keynote. While there was a lot of talk about Apple delivering this event from their new data center in North Carolina, that's not happening, not yet at least. Apple will be bringing a lot of their content delivery in-house, but that won't happen overnight.

Update: The quality of the live stream has been pretty good, but towards the last 15 minutes of the event, my stream had a lot of stuttering for close to ten minutes. There were also a few instances where the stream skipped back a few seconds and repeated what had just been shown.

EPIX just announced the launch of EPIX Live, a new online forum powered by Clipsync that allows fans to interact with their favorite artists via thirty-minute Q&A sessions. EPIX's press release says that, "viewers can submit and have questions answered in real time, interact, share and comment with one another and broadcast their participation to their friends via integrations with Twitter and Facebook". If you want to check out EPIX's streaming service, the company is giving away free trial codes good for one week of streaming via EpixHD.com at epixhd.com/invite

I first reviewed EPIX's streaming service when they launched last year and since then, the video quality and user experience on EpixHD.com is still excellent.

(UPDATE: the drawing is now closed) With all the fragmentation amongst device manufactures and content providers, I still think the one device to beat in this market is the SlingBox. With a Slingbox, you can access your full linear TV lineup wherever you go from your computer or mobile device. And with a dedicated SlingBox app for the iPad to be released shortly, for TV Everywhere,
nothing beats a Slingbox.

And thanks to the very generous folks at Sling Media I have another Slingbox PRO-HD unit to give away to a lucky reader of my blog. To be entered into the drawing, just leave one comment on this post with your full name and a valid email address and I’ll pick one lucky winner at random on Sept 15th. You must have a U.S. postal address as I will not ship these overseas. Congrats to Jim Doyle who won the last drawing. HUGE thanks to Sling Media for the boxes! Congrats to Steven M. from Washington who won the drawing.

With all the talk of Apple devices, the Flash platform and the H.264 codec, there has been a lot of speculation in the industry on what MPEG LA planned to do when their current H.264 licensing terms expired in 2015. Today, MPEG LA put part of that speculation to rest as they have announced that they will not charge royalties for Internet video that is free to end users. That's certainly good news for many content owners but does not address the market for what the royalties will be a few years from now for subscription based content services and device manufactures who will still have to pay. The news also does nothing to address what I consider to be a bigger issues which is the need for browsers to give us a single codec we can call use. Companies like Mozilla and Opera are still going to have to pay for a license if they want to support H.264 which means we are not any closer to have much in the way of video standard on the Internet.

For more on the story, check out StreamingMedia.com's coverage.

This morning, Cisco announced that it intends to acquire privately held Extend Media with the deal expected to close in the first half of Cisco's fiscal year 2011. Someone inside Cisco's Service Provider Video Technology Group, who didn't want to be named, told me that Cisco valued Extend Media at "around $40M". Cisco's PR department declined to comment on that number and said that they "aren't discussing financial terms of the deal." While the $40M number comes from someone inside Cisco who would know the details, the valuation seems high to me.

Updated: I have learned that the deal is actually worth about $80M. While that number initially seems high since that would give Extend Media a 4-5x multiple on revenue, as it was pointed out to me, Cisco paid more than usual due to competitive reasons. Extend Media and thePlatform are really the only two companies in the space with carrier grade solutions and with Comcast already owning the platform, Extend Media was really the only other company for Cisco to acquire for which they had to pay more of a premium.

Extend Media did have some well known customers but their customer count was small. The company which had raised just over $30M in VC funding was not profitable and like many smaller companies in this space, faced a tough choice of trying to raise another round, or find a suitable buyer. In this case, Extend Media made the right move as raising a fourth round in today's market would have been very difficult, especially with the industry being so competitive with numerous vendors. The sale to Cisco now gives Extend Media the resources they need to grow their business and Cisco gets a platform that does have some good functionality, but will require Cicso to make an investment into scaling out the platform.

Lots of folks are asking me if Extend Media was considered an online video platform (OVP) and if so, are there other companies similar to Extend that might be attractive to other large players like Cisco. The term OVP is very generic these days but Extend Media would not be classified as an OVP. Most OVPs provide solutions directly to publishers and content owners and Extend Media focused on selling their platform to telcos and carriers. Extend Media is a software play deployed inside the carriers network whereas OVPs offer their services via a SaaS based offering. Some of their customers include Bell Canada, AT&T and Verizon.