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.

Today at 2pm ET I'll be moderating another StreamingMedia.com round table webinar entitled "Developing Your HTML5 Strategy". With many organizations embracing HTML5 to deliver video to the iPhone and iPad, there has never been a better time to learn how and why adding HTML5 to your video strategy can improve the video experiences you deliver. Whether you’re thinking about HTML5 or already incorporating it into your video strategy – this webinar is an opportunity to learn key developments for HTML5 video delivery.

Join Jeff Whatcott, SVP Global Marketing from Brightcove and Jan Ozer, Author of ‘iPad and HTML5 Adoption’ for a discussion on what companies need to think about when incorporating HTML5 into their video strategy. The webinar will cover:

• The drivers behind the growing use of HTML5
• Creating a holistic video experience
• Real world examples of how some companies are using HTML5 as part of their video strategy
• Key considerations for working with HTML5
• Trends for broad industry adoption of HTML5
• What you need to think about to launch or improve your video strategy

You can still register and attend for free at this link.

Netflix’s domination of Apple devices is now complete. This morning, Netflix released their streaming app for the iPhone and iPod Touch which joins the iPad and Apple computers that are now capable of streaming Netflix videos. I’ve downloaded the app for the iPod Touch and have watched a few clips and overall, the quality of the video looks pretty good. Some of the older movies are really letterboxed which wastes a lot of pixels on the iPod Touch screen, but with newer content you have the ability to fill the entire screen.

With Netflix saying they expect 100 different devices to have support for Netflix by the end of this year and for those devices to have an install base of 100M, Netflix continues to lead the market with their device penetration.