It seems every few months the blogsphere gets all worked up whenever a report comes out saying that Hulu's going to offer a subscription based model. Frankly, I don't see why it continues to get so much press as we already know Hulu plans to offer a subscription service. The company has already confirmed that it has been part of their plans from day one. Until they actually release it in the market, how many times can you write about or speculate on the same topic?  While today's report from the LA Times says the price will be $9.95 a month, the real debate should be what kind of quality consumers expect when paying for online video.

Of course, for any subscription based service, the inventory of content that's available is important. But there is no way consumers are going to pay for content on Hulu unless the company offers a better level of video quality with the subscription. That may be their plan, offer HD quality and use that as an incentive for people to pay for a better experience. But if Hulu doesn't offer content in at least 720p, users aren't going to pay to get the same poor Hulu video quality that exists today. Hulu's encoding only supports up to 480p and full-screen does not look great. I always get lots of stuttering, pixelation in scenes with fast movement and quite a bit of buffering. As we've see with other successful subscription offerings like MLB.com or the NFL.com, content needs to encoded at 2+Mbps, be available in at least 720p HD quality, and provide a very good quality of service.

Unless Hulu plans to add at least 720p support for their subscription service and make the user experience much better, they have no shot at charging anything for access to their content.

The past weeks' events surrounding the new language in Apple's iPhone Developer Program License Agreement — which prohibits developers from using such software as Adobe's CS5 suite for converting Flash content for the iPhone — have exposed the San Jose software giant's shortcomings in the mobile space. Interestingly enough, these problems for Adobe didn't pop up overnight or come about simply due to Apple changing their licensing language. Yet, because of Apple, it's caused a lot of people to realize just how late to the mobile space Adobe has been.

Over the past few months, I've spent a lot of time talking to current and former Adobe executives off-the-record who have revealed to me details regarding plenty of red flags in Adobe's mobile strategy which were brought to the company's attention years earlier. Those I spoke with agreed that Adobe's recent shift in management style and insistence on staying the course rather than adapting resulted in their shortcomings in the mobile market.

For many years, Adobe's rise to the top of the software industry was the result of having a vision for its products, not just sales goals. Former Adobe engineers I spoke with attest to the "good old days" when co-founders John Warnock and Charles Geschke roamed the office halls, tested products first-hand, and chatted with team members who were developing the company's industry standard software. This type of vested interest and on-the-ground awareness instilled a sense of camaraderie and motivated engineering teams to ship products that were the best, not just "good enough." Adobe made software with a clear goal of fulfilling critical needs for their users, and the entire company — from the top-level execs to the engineers in the design labs — were in sync with this common objective.

But within the past few years, Adobe's focus shifted from being at the top of its class solely to growing its bottom line. Cost-cutting became the company's priority as each year brought no less than 10% in staff cuts. Naturally, the engineering teams became demoralized as they knew every Q4, after they shipped the product they were working on and after putting in long hours, their jobs could be shipped out as well. The executive team's quality-killing concentration on profits started adversely affecting not only the products that made Adobe what it is today, but also its design strategy and adaptability to the changing industry.

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We're excited to announce that on Tuesday, May 11th at the Streaming Media East show, Amazon, Adobe and Sorenson Media will be providing FREE training on Encoding, Managing, Publishing and Delivering online video. These two hour classes kick off at 10:30am and 2:45pm and are limited to 75 people on a first-come, first-serve basis. They are completely free and all you need to do is register for a free exhibits pass for the Streaming Media East show and you're in.

Simply go here to register and then show up early to the Hilton hotel in NYC to make sure you grab one of the 75 seats in the room. A huge thanks to Amazon, Adobe and Sorenson Media for making this training free for anyone to attend.

The day before the Streaming Media East show takes place, I’ve organized a one day summit for Monday May 10th on the Content Delivery industry (www.CDNsummit.com). The summit brings together nearly all of the content delivery vendors, as well as telcos, ISPs and content owners to discuss what’s taking place with the infrastructure of online video. In addition to our keynote by Jim Crowe, CEO of Level 3 I’m also pleased to announce that Doug Pasko who is the Director of Online Media Technology for Verizon will be our second keynote of the day. While Verizon has been pretty quiet talking about their CDN activities, they have a lot going on internally and last week, announced an expanded CDN partner program to draw content onto the Verizon network via direct connections with content owners’ servers at content delivery access points located around the country.

In addition to Level 3 and Verizon, other confirmed speakers include Amazon, AT&T, Ankeena, Yahoo CDN, 3Crowd Technologies, MTV Networks, Conviva, Limelight Networks, CDNetworks, EdgeCast, EPIX, Encoding.com, Adobe, Tata Communications, Highwinds, Ustream and many others still being added. You can see the full agenda here.

It’s not too late to register and readers of my blog can use my personal discount code of DRF1 and attend the summit for only $395.

For as long as I can remember, there has been this long standing debate inside the content delivery industry regarding which network architecture is better, one that is distributed or non-distributed. While many have opinions on the subject, to me, it's the content owner that decides which is best and not the vendor. Over the years I've spoken to hundreds of customers about the topic and frankly, I think it's time for the industry to re-define what it means to have a "distributed" network and the real metrics should be used when comparing one network to another.

Fifteen years after some of the first CDNs started delivering video, many of the CDNs still want to use their network architecture as a key selling point. While that's natural of any CDN to do, the problem is the way some go about doing it. Today, customers don't ask how many servers a content delivery network has and I can't remember the last time any content owner asked me how many servers any CDN has. While Akamai has spent the last ten years trying to convince everyone that a distributed network is the only way to properly delivery content, the market has shown us that there are now many different ways to delivery video with the a very good level of QoS.

In prior year's, Akamai's distributed network mantra was accurate. When CDNs first started to crop up in the market, they would start off with a few POPs and call themselves a CDN, even though they had very little coverage or capacity. But today, times have changed. The real questions customers ask are about capacity, coverage locations, quality of service and peering, not the number of servers. Those are the details content owners want to know and as long as a CDN can deliver a good user experience, it doesn't matter to the customer if the network is distributed or non-distributed. How a CDN sets up their network is up to the CDN and most content owners don't care how they do it, only that the service they buy works with their expected level of quality.

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Today at 2pm ET is another StreamingMedia.com webinar on the topic of HD quality video. Sponsored by Internap, the webinar will discuss how network impairments and delays reduce the quality of the viewing experience. There will also be an extensive Q&A session after their presentation so bring your questions and we'll get to as many of them as possible. You can register to attend this free webinar here.

Here’s a quick rundown of all the press releases I have seen so far from NAB on Wednesday. Here are links to Tuesday’s and Monday’s releases.

• IVT Takes Webcasting Software Platform to the Cloud
• Kaltura Launches “Kaltura Exchange”, the first Virtual Marketplace for Video Applications
• Irdeto to Deliver Secure Content Worldwide Using Adobe Flash Access 2.0
• RipCode Enables Clientless Adobe Flash Video on Apple iPad
• blinkx Extends Partnership with Brazilian Digital Media Pioneer, ELO Company, to Launch Internet TV Platform
• ViewCast Streaming Media Management Software Now Supports Apple iPhone Mobile Devices
• Verizon Leverages Powerful Network to Deliver Massive Volumes of Traffic for Content Owners, Aggregators
• AAPT And EdgeCast Networks’ Partnership Brings Global Content Delivery To Australian Market