Eight months ago I wrote a post entitled “Ten Years Later, Blockbuster Still Lacks A Digital Media Strategy” where I outlined some of the ways that Blockbuster has faltered with their strategy for the digital distribution of movies. After the post, I heard from some angry shareholders who wanted to argue with me about how the company would turn it around and I received a call from Blockbuster directly who wanted to brief me on their digital media strategy.

While it was great to hear directly from the company on what digital initiatives they were working on and their pitch to me on why things would get better for the company, I’m afraid that eight months later, things have only gotten worse. While I don’t doubt that some of the folks working on the digital media strategy at Blockbuster get it, if you just look at some of the things Blockbuster’s CEO said last week on their earnings call, you can clearly see that the company simply doesn’t have the right culture to be successful with digital.

When asked different questions about Blockbuster’s digital strategy, CEO Jim Keyes responded by saying things like, “these times demand a conservative approach,” and that the company “will proceed cautiously as to how aggressive the company should be.” For a company that has almost no digital offering today, those are some pretty scary statements. The last thing Blockbuster can afford to do is stay at the same slow pace for a digital offering roll-out that they are at now. For all the talk of what Blockbuster is actively working on, I still don’t think they have a single successful deal involving digital they can talk about today. Of course, some will say that they have already signed deals to get their platform on to TVs and mobile phones, but so far, those deals are meaningless.

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While many content delivery vendors continue to add new services tied into the video ecosystem, CDN vendors as a whole have been very slow to diversify their product portfolio outside of delivering video, software and small objects. For a long time, Akamai has been the only game in town for services tied to commerce and application acceleration and has dominated the market with very robust offerings. 

Today, Akamai still has the vast share of the market for services outside of CDN that Akamai classifies as "value added services," of which application acceleration is one of those offerings. But over time, Akamai is going to start to see some competition for these services because the other CDNs know that services like application acceleration have very high margins, aren't being sold purely on price and will enable CDNs to diversify their revenue away from video.

Last year, Limelight launched some new services aimed at the enterprise, government and commerce sectors, for which they now have more than 200 customers, and a new startup called Cotendo launched in the market specifically focusing on application acceleration. And next week, CDNetworks plans to launch a new application acceleration offering, which over time, will also start to compete with Akamai for some of their business. While I am not suggesting that these offerings by Cotendo, Limelight and CDNetworks will grab Akamai's market share overnight, clearly we are starting to see a trend by CDNs who want to do more than just deliver large objects and video streaming.

There is no question that today, Akamai's services still have a lot of functionality that the others don't yet have, like being PCI compliant. But over time, services by Akamai's competitors will come up to speed and Akamai will have a couple companies competing with them for a portion of their value add services based business. While it is too early to predict what percentage of Akamai's market share these companies can compete for and how quickly they can ramp up their platforms to be on par with Akamai, it's something to keep a close eye on over the next twelve months.

Make no mistake that multiple CDNs now have their sights set on Akamai's high margin value ad services business and plan to make it more of a challenge for Akamai to dominate the market like they have for so many years. While I've always been mainly focused on video, over the next few months I'll be diving a lot deeper into the application acceleration topic on my blog and reviewing some of the features and functionality that these platforms have to offer. The last time I visited Akamai's HQ in 2008 I wrote up two detailed posts on their application delivery service which you can read more about at "A Detailed Look At Akamai's Application Delivery Product – Part 1" and "Overview Of Akamai's Application Delivery Customers – Part 2."

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.