This morning, SaaS based transcoding provider mPOINT announced a re-launch and re-branding of the company which is now called Panvidea. Originally founded in late 2007, the company has been pretty quiet in the space and hasn't done much talking about their solution or given out many details on the company. With today's re-launch, the company now plans to start marketing their services and has also announced some new clients including A&E Television Networks, Fox Broadcasting Company, and Getty Images.

In a conversation with the company yesterday, they said they have about 15 customers and continue to sign up new ones each month. While their website does not list their pricing like most of the other SaaS based transcoding services do, the company says their pricing is much more affordable as they only charge customers for the content that's encoded and don't charge anything for the ingestion and upload of content to their system. By contrast, most other providers charge content owners based on the size of the file that is upload and the size of the file that results from the encoding.

To date, the company has raised "several million dollars" via seed funding and a Series A round and is expected to announce shortly a new round of funding that will give them enough money to operate and grow the business over the next twelve months. The company has about 25 employees, mostly in the U.S. but also with a development team based in Argentina. Panvidea has teamed up with other vendors in the video ecosystem who resell or white label their service including EdgeCast, IBM, Aspera, Brightcove, Akamai, Highwinds and others who to date, have provided most of the revenue for the company. Moving forward the company expects that direct sales will account for 50% of their revenue with the rest still coming from their channel.

The market for SaaS based transcoding services continues to heat up and while there area bunch of vendors in the industry including Panvidea, HD Cloud, Ankoder, Hey!Watch and uEncode amongst others, except for Encoding.com, most of them are still in beta, just launching or have not reached any real scale as of yet. But the market is still early and we'll have to keep an eye on how these companies grow over the next 12-18 months.

Updated March 18th: Panvidea has announced their series A funding in the amount of $2M.

Back in October, Adobe announced that sometime in 2010 they would provide support for HTTP streaming enabling CDNs to leverage their existing HTTP infrastructure and cache technologies for video delivery. The platform, called “project Zeri”, will provide support for all Flash Codecs, support adaptive bit‐rate switching, support live and on-demand delivery, enable the protection of content and will include full support within the Open Source Media Framework, to help provide a standard player. Kevin Towes from Adobe detailed all of this in a post on the Adobe blog six months ago.

In that time, Adobe has been working with some of the CDNs who have already deployed the technology and they have been working with beta customers to test the platform. Sometime next month, Adobe is expected to officially announce that the technology is now available with CDNs and will also announce content owners who are using the new service.

While this is good news for the industry and for content owners, the real question is how much cheaper is it for a CDN to deliver video via HTTP as opposed to RTMP? If HTTP based Flash streaming really does reduce the internal cost to a CDN, will CDNs pass that savings onto the customer in the form of  lower pricing? While it is possible, I have yet to see any CDN offer lower pricing for video content being delivered via HTTP using Microsoft’s HTTP technology called SmoothStreaming. But the cost to CDNs to deliver content using Microsoft’s technology was never that expensive because unlike Adobe, Microsoft does not charge a license fee for the streaming software or take any kind of revenue share payment.

Right off the bat, I don’t expect any of the CDNs to lower their price, but over time, it is something to keep a close eye on due to the fact that video delivered via HTTP is cheaper for them to manage and distribute And if the CDNs can reduce their internal cost with delivering video, even if they don’t lower the price to customers, the positive impact could be that it helps the CDNs become profitable, something that almost all of them are still struggling with. While Adobe has discussed the pricing model with CDNs for HTTP streaming, from the folks I have spoken with I get the sense that the exact pricing still has not been worked out. So it does sound like from Adobe’s side, the exact numbers are still up in the air.

Adobe has really been behind Microsoft when it comes to the functionality, capability, scalability and pricing model of their streaming server and has been slow to adopt and support HTTP based streaming. This has led some CDNs like Akamai to not wait for Adobe to support HTTP and forced them to develop and deploy their own HTTP based Flash streaming technology, which they announced in September of last year. And while I’ve heard that this has made Adobe quite un-happy, CDNs can’t always rely on third party companies for services they need today.

There are some other interesting details regarding this subject which I will give more details on when Adobe makes the official announcement.

I think it's a safe bet that one of the most popular panels at the Streaming Media East show in May will be on the topic of HTML5 and the the debate on whether it will impact on the video market any time soon. I'm looking for some really good speakers for this panel who want to talk about the pros and cons of HTML5 as it pertains to video and have the technical expertise to talk about the subject from all angles. I'm also looking for a REALLY hardcore moderator who knows the technology inside out.

I've read some really good blog posts about the topic lately and if you've come across a post by a blogger you think would be a good moderator or speaker, please put it in the comments section below. So if you are interested, or think you know of someone who would be great on the panel, please send me an email asap. Here are the details on the session:

HTML5 And Web Video Standards – Tuesday May 11, 2010 – 4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
As video becomes increasingly important on the web, content providers, browser developers, and end users can no longer afford to have the primary video delivery mechanisms locked up in standards that cannot be adapted to new environments. This is especially true for emerging trends such as mobile video and cross-device video technologies. HTML5 Video might be the answer, and we'll discuss what it is, the challenges it's facing, and how it affects other formats such as Flash and Silverlight, as well as how leading platforms and web giants such as Google, Mozilla, and Apple are supporting it.

While Netflix has always had a dual-vendor approach for their streaming delivery by using CDNs Limelight and Level 3, in the beginning of the year Netflix continues to move away from Level 3 and will be taking just over half of their traffic to Akamai. While this is clearly good news for Akamai, the price point at which Akamai is charging is the lowest price I have ever seen the company offer.

We've all known that for the past two quarters, Akamai has been getting aggressive on pricing with their M&E business and lowering pricing to win or retain customers. But this latest round of Akamai pricing shows just how much they are now willing to compete with Limelight and Level 3 and in many cases, are looking to price business at levels they know the other CDNs can't or won't match. While they are finally acting like they now want to own the CDN market outright and keep their competitors from growing, the flip side is they are now the single biggest company driving down CDN pricing in the market. What use to be Limelight and Level 3 driving pricing down, has now been replaced by Akamai offering pricing that is well below what the others offer, on many large deals.

Lately, Akamai has been giving some large companies like Netflix a very discounted rate if the customer agrees to give Akamai at least 51% of their traffic. In exchange, Akamai offers the content owner a highly discounted rate for three of four months as an incentive. In this case, Netflix is paying Akamai about one and half cents per GB delivered for a couple of months before Netflix's pricing goes back to about six cents per GB delivered. At a penny and half, that's about 3x cheaper than what Limelight charges Netflix and is at a price that Limelight simply can't match. While I'm hearing that Netflix just renewed their contract in the new year with Limelight, one has to wonder what Limelight would do in 2011 if Akamai keeps their pricing at this level.

One way to look at this is that Limelight has a little less of Netflix's traffic, but at a higher price which should mean they can make more money from it. Akamai on the other hand has more traffic, but at a greatly reduced price point which means they can only make money from getting a lot more traffic, or by having a lower internal cost than Limelight, something we don't know when it comes purely to their CDN business. Akamai's thinking has to be get the M&E business it in the door at all costs so they can drive volume on the network and have a chance at upselling customers to higher margin products. Essentially, CDN can be a loss leader for Akamai if it had to be in order to act as the catalyst to grow their value ad services business. The real winner in this case is Netflix, which continues to drive down their cost of streaming movies.

Akamai is clearly making some really aggressive moves in the market right now and is looking like a company that really wants to once again dominate the CDN space. While many have been talking for the past 18 months about all kinds of other companies that are going to enter the CDN space, or compete with the leaders in the CDN space, it's very clear that the race is still between Akamai, Limelight and Level 3 for the largest portion of the CDN market.

Lisa Larson-Kelly and Jan Ozer will be hosting two half-day workshops on Streaming Production and Flash Delivery on March 23, 2010, at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. The workshop courses detail the complete streaming production and delivery workflow, from set design to Flash Media Server setup, from H.264 encoding to Flash Player creation. A full day course is really affordable and only costs $300.

Lisa and Jan have been the instructors at our Streaming Media East and West shows for many years and they really know their stuff. If you're in the NYC area and want to get some hands-on training, you can't go wrong with these workshops. You can get all the details on the workshops here.

Over the past two weeks, the Xbox LIVE dashboard has been featuring a bunch of MSNBC.com video highlights from the Olympics as well as news headlines. I decided to check some of them out last night and I was really disappointed to see that MSNBC.com is simply taking the low-bitrate stream for the web and using it on the Xbox platform. As a result, the video window is small, gets centered in your TV and most of your screen is filled up with a big border all around the video, as you can see in the photo above.

As we all know, the Xbox 360 is capable of displaying really good quality video, even 1080p. But in this case, MSNBC.com is not taking advantage of the Xbox 360 platform and instead, is using what looks to be around a 500Kbps stream, which is being encoded specifically for the web, not for a device connected to your TV. While I don't think Olympic highlights has to be in 1080p, we are talking about sports content with a lot of motion that looks really bad at 500Kbps. Why wouldn't a news organization as big as MSNBC.com have the content encoded specifically for the device it is being played back on? Is it purely an effort on their part to save money on video distribution costs?

A person I spoke to involved with Xbox agreed that it was not a good example of the Xbox 360's video capabilities and that the Xbox team was aware of it. A spokesperson for MSNBC.com said, “we’re in the process of providing video in full HD and will let consumers know when it’s available.” When I pressed them for a date, I was told, "later this year". While that's nice to know, I can't understand why they wouldn't have the proper video quality to begin with from day one.

With Walmart buying VUDU, some are speculating that the value to Walmart is the deals that VUDU has in place with seven leading TV manufactures to carry VUDU's platform on their sets. While this might look good on paper since it enables Walmart to sell as many TVs from their stores as possible with a platform they own embedded into the hardware, the problem is that even Walmart can't sell enough TVs over the next few years for it to matter.

While we keep hearing a lot about broadband enabled TVs, widgets and TV apps, no one seems to be asking how many Internet enabled TV sets need to be sold to actually make a difference in the market. If you look at the number of sales analysts are predicting for 2010, the numbers are all over the map. iSuppli predicts just over 13 million, Parks Associates predicts 7 million, TDG predicts 4 million and DisplaySearch predicts 12.9 million. That averages out to 8 million sets this year, which is a really small number.

Out of that, many analysts who cover the TV market also estimate that only about 25% of those sets will actually be connected to the Internet. So that leaves us with about 2 million sets for 2010. How are those numbers to get excited about?

Microsoft has more than 20 million consoles connected to the Internet today. Yet that one device by itself has not changed the market in terms of content owners making money or impacting the revenue of any vendor in the Xbox video ecosystem. So how are a few million Internet connected TVs going to change this market so broadly like people keep saying? Even if we look at projections for the number of Internet connected TVs in the U.S. by 2013, iSuppli predicts almost 23 million and TDG predicts 43 million by 2014, it's still not a big number. If I take an average of their numbers and say there will be around 25 million sets in 2013, even if 75% of those are connected to the net, you're talking 18.7 million TV's, which doesn't change anything.

I think it is fair to say that if we combined the multiple Internet connected devices like TVs, gaming consoles and Blu-ray players they could create a real positive impact five years from now on the market. But TVs by themselves won't make that much of an impact in the next five years. Even some of the TV manufactures I speak to directly don't have any of their own estimates on how many models they will sell with broadband functionality built in as they don't see the numbers being that big. I think Internet enabled TVs are cool, make sense for some consumers and many, many years from now will matter to the industry. But for any content owner who thinks the Internet TV platform is going to change their syndication or monetization strategy anytime soon, they are going to be in for a big letdown.