Adobe has just made available from their website the long awaited 10.1 version of their Flash player, which is no longer in Release Candidate status. I've only been using it for a few hours now, but so far on my MacBook Pro, it has been very stable and I haven't seen any poor performance issues. Adobe hasn't put out an official release on the news as of yet, but I'm sure that any moment now, we'll see one of the Adobe blogs give us a full rundown of all the improvements in the new player.

Updated: As expected, Adobe's blog now has all the details on the new features of the 10.1 player as well as a post about HTTP dynamic streaming.

This morning Akamai announced it has acquired privately held Velocitude, which operates a platform for customers using mobile video for commerce and marketing purposes. Terms of the deal were not announced but I would not be surprised if Velocitude’s business was valued at under $15M.

While many seem quick to want to compare Akamai’s acquisition of Velocitude to Limelight’s acquisition of Kiptronic last year, they are two completely different solutions. Kiptronic’s platform is focused on helping content owners in the media and entertainment vertical monetize their video content by using amongst other things, campaign managers and ad servers. Velocitude’s platform is focused on helping content owners in the retail, government and enterprise sectors display and deliver mobile video for commerce and marketing purposes and is not used today for delivering ads to mobile devices.

Akamai clearly uses the word enterprise in the release, three times in fact, and never once uses the phrase media and entertainment. So why some posts are mentioning Netflix in their coverage of this news makes no sense. If Akamai wins Netflix’s business for delivering video to the iPhone when it is released later this summer, that won’t be as a result of the Velocitude acquisition. One has nothing to do with the other.

Akamai’s acquisition of Velocitude really comes as no surprise since the company continues to forge ahead in the enterprise space developing and deploying more and more services specifically targeted for enterprise and retail customers. Akamai’s focus has been and will continue to be on the enterprise vertical and while they aren’t giving up on the media and entertainment space, or ceding ground in that market just yet, enterprise services are clearly how Akamai plans to grow the company moving forward. This is quite different from Limelight’s focus which while still targeting customers in the enterprise and retails verticals with a limited product set, their main focus is still solutions for content owners in the media and entertainment verticals.

I don’t know what the size of the enterprise mobile video space is or what the market opportunity is projected to be, but I would expect that we’ll see Akamai give out some details on this segment of the market sometime after their integration of Velocitude’s platform is complete.

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 June 30th. 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!

For as far back as I can remember, nearly every video clip on the web has given the viewer the option of deciding if they want to do fullscreen and have the video fill their monitor. This option has been considered the norm in the industry for many, many years, yet for some reason, Apple does not allow videos played back in the browser via the QuickTime plugin to support fullscreen.

When you watch any of the videos on Apple.com that give product demos or visit their popular movie trailer website, there is no option to watch any video in fullscreen unless you first download the video to your hard drive. Why isn't Apple allowing web based videos to go fullscreen? For all the talk Apple keeps doing about "standards", fullscreen playback of videos on the web has been a standard for more than a few years. Maybe not a standard in terms of a programming language like the term is widely used today, but it is a standardized function that's supported by all plugins for video playback, except Apple's.

It's logical to think that Apple was originally doing this simply to force people to pay $29.99 to purchase a QuickTime Pro license, but that only solves the problem for local media. Much of the content on the web can't be downloaded to your hard drive so even if you have a QuickTime Pro license, you still can't make any videos played back in a browser fullscreen. And starting with the QuickTime 7 player, Apple made fullscreen one of the options supported in the free player. So this does not seem to be about pushing people to the pro licenses anymore.

For all the talk Steve Jobs does about the great "experience" you get from Apple products and platforms, that's not the case when it comes to QuickTime videos on the web. Watching videos from the Apple movie trailer page on only a quarter of my 15" screen, when the content is encoded for HD, is not my idea of a great web experience. It's no wonder that content owners don't use the QuickTime plugin for playback of their web based videos. Steve, you need to fix this. We deserve fullscreen video.

Yesterday, Australian based Telstra announced the initial launch of their new content delivery network across their IP backbone with nine nodes deployed around Australia. The company also detailed their plans to spend $14M over the next three to five years to further expand their CDN and cloud computing efforts by building out twelve "network and media centers" at some of their existing ethernet aggregation points. The company's new CDN was deployed over the past nine months with help from Cisco.

Telstra executives commented that the new CDN will enable them to reduce their backhaul costs, lower their network latency and give them a footprint to put content closer to the customer. Michael Lawrey, executive director of network and technology at Telstra Operations was quoted as saying, "We also have flexibility building our own CDN that we wouldn't have with the likes of Akamai."

While some might interpret this quote as an indication that telcos and other carriers are moving away from using or working with the pure-play CDNs, that's not the case. For a regional carrier like Telstra, who only delivers content in Australia, it makes a lot of sense for them to build their own CDN in-house. Setting up a CDN to cover one region is not that costly nor difficult for a company that already own the network. But trying to do it on a global scale, across many different product lines, that's a completely different story. I expect we will continue to see more announcements of regional carriers and ISPs building out their own CDN services, but we have yet to see any indication in the market that the global carriers and telcos plan to follow suit. From what they are saying, that's still a few years off.

This morning Sonic Solutions, best known for the backend white-label platform that powers Blockbuster and Best Buy, announced plans to acquire DivX in a cash and stock deal valued at $323M. The deal, which is subject to approval of the shareholders of both companies is expected to close in September.

For DivX, it marks the end of a long effort to find a buyer for the company and potentially positions their technology as part of a larger service offering in the market. The biggest concern with a deal like this is that both Sonic and DivX
are relying on the studios in order to be successful. Studio executives need to change their thinking and start offering
movies in the quality consumers want, at the price they want, and for
playback on multiple devices, but have so far been reluctant. While
DivX has a great track record of getting on lots of devices, their
commercial success has been limited by the fact that content owners have
not exactly made a lot of their content available for purchase in the
DivX format. It's been less than a year since some of the major studios
finally put some content online, but there hasn't been much mentioned
from any of the companies since then.

While I do think that there are some synergies for both companies on paper, some of the benefits that Sonic lists in their press release don't make sense to me. I see the value to Sonic in wanting to get their platform on devices, something DivX has been successful at, but don't agree that it now provides them with a, "more extensive solution for Internet video delivery including the dominant tools for content preparation in the cloud." DivX has never been successful as a stand alone video format on the web and that's not a market it can win. In fact, for all the video I watch each day, I've personally never had to download the DivX player to see any of it.

For DivX, web based video not been their focus and their success has really been on the device front where they say their technology, "resides on over 300 million devices shipped into the global market". The "cloud" based services that Sonic mentions in their release simply refers to where content is stored and how it is delivered, but that's not an area DivX has ever been involved with. Sonic may use DivX's technology to try and get into that market, but I suspect they will be best served only focusing on using DivX's deep relationships with the CE manufactures to get their RoxioNow platform on devices.

The thing that worries me when I see a deal like this though is how the release and associated documents that go with it make it look like the two companies now cover 100% of the market and somehow rule the world. The Sonic press release mentions over-the-top (OTT) video, cloud based services, retail storefronts and every type of device you can think of. I get the sense they want to be everything to everyone, for every device that can play back video.

On paper, some of the synergies between the two companies clearly makes sense. But Sonic's success or failure as a company is going to come down to whether or not the studios are willing to truly adopt digital offerings and start listening to consumers. Today's video offerings are not being held back in any way because of technology or any kind of platform limitation but rather by the studios themselves who still have not truly embraced digital.

Related:

– Sony's Day-And-Date Strategy: Stream Movies For $24.95, For 24 Hour Rental

– This Is Just Stupid: Digital HD Downloads Still Cost More Than DVDs

– Movie Studios Just Don't Get It, Part IV: Pay More For Movies On USB Drives

As a FiOS customer, I’ve been a big fan of Verizon’s service and have written about my experience with the product many times over the past few years. Recently, Verizon has been using quotes from my blog in their marketing materials for direct mail pieces as well as on the Verizon.com website. And recently, I started guest blogging on Verizon’s website and Verizon sent a video crew to my house to film how I use my FiOS service to consume video to all the different broadband-enabled devices in my living room.

With a series of three video commercials now showing up on the web, I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately from folks asking me if I now work for Verizon. It’s a fair question and one that’s easy to answer. I don’t work for Verizon in any capacity and don’t get any free services in exchange for them using content from my blog or highlighting my use of streaming in their commercials. Of course, that’s going to have some asking me why I spend time promoting a service from a vendor I’m not getting paid by? The easy answer is that Verizon’s FiOS service is just that good and frankly, I can’t think of another technology innovation over the past five years that has had such an impact on how I work and how I use the Internet as a consumer. So I’m happy to promote something that works so well.

On a day when the FCC says the average residential download speeds are typically only half as fast as the maximum speeds advertised by U.S. broadband providers, it’s nice to know that with FiOS, consumers never have to worry about what they are getting. Thanks to Verizon spending billions to bring fiber-to-the-home (FTTH), their FiOS service always delivers what they say. So while I don’t work for Verizon, I’ll continue to do anything to help promote their FiOS service as long as it stays as good as it is now.