All of the sessions and keynotes from the 2009 Streaming Media West and Online Video Platform shows have now been archived and are available online for free at www.streamingmedia.com/videos

If you have never been to that page before, you will be simply be asked to put in your name and email and will only have to do it one time. Anyone is welcome to re-purpose the videos on their own website or blog or syndicate in any manner they like. The only session that is not archived is the Xbox keynote which due to lightning conditions, may or may not be added.

Our thanks to Quality Tech who encoded all of the videos and to Brightcove for hosting them.

While many are already talking about CDN video pricing stabilizing in the New Year, so far, I don't see that stabilization taking place. Based on all of the data I saw last quarter, I expect pricing to continue to decline rapidly for the first half of this year. By the summer, pricing should become more stable and by the end of 2010, I expect that pricing on average will only decline about 25% for the year, compared to the 40% decline I saw on average in 2009. (note: you can always find my latest pricing post at www.cdnpricing.com – Previous Quarters: Q1 09, Q4 08, Q3 08, Q2 08, Q1 08.)

At the same time, while many content owners surveyed said they say traffic growth of about 35-40% in 2009, I expect that 2010 will mark the first time in two years that we will see the rate of traffic growth accelerate, but not by much. While we are only a month into the New Year, most of the major content owners I am speaking to think they can grow traffic by about 50% this year.  While that's only a 10% rate of growth over last year, it's still growth over the prior year, which is something we didn't see at all in 2009.

As you take a look at the Q4 pricing numbers I've published for video delivery, there are some key points that one needs to keep in mind. For starters, CDNs tend to be a lot more aggressive with pricing in Q4 as the year comes to a close and they are trying to get as much business in the door as possible. In addition, the average high numbers look a lot lower than usual partly due to the fact that Akamai is now aggressively cutting pricing across a wide swath of their CDN customers. I expect that by the third quarter of this year they will have re-price around 75% of their CDN contracts, which you can read more about here.

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For those near the Stamford CT area, Sib Law has started an online video Meetup group which will get together for the first time starting next month on February 11th at 7pm. Join Eric Mortensen, Director of Content Development (Blip.tv), Dana Tower, COO (Pond5), and Jamison Tilsner, Founder and COO (Tubefilter.tv) for presentations about their organizations and a panel discussion about trends in the industry and opportunities to grow revenue. While I live close to Stamford, I won't be able to make it to the event next month but hope others will be able to attend and help Sib kick off the new group. You can find all the details on the event here.

For as long as I can remember, consumers have been saying that with digital content, they want to purchase it one time and then have the ability to watch it on any device they choose. While that desire has yet to come to fruition in the market, the fact that Apple is forcing people to have to buy the same apps over and over again, just because they come out with a new device, really shows the monopoly Apple has with their iTunes platform.

I love MLB.TV, even more than Netflix streaming as I am more interested in baseball than movies. But if wanted to get MLB on the iPad, I will have to pay MLB a third time, for the same piece of content. I bought MLB.TV for the PC, MLB's AtBat app for the iPhone and then would need to buy MLB's app for the iPad. How many times do consumers have to pay for the same piece of content?

While MLB might be just fine with the current model, what If MLB wanted to include the iPhone or iPad apps as part of the MLB.TV package so that the users don't feel like they are being nickeled and dimed. It would be a better user experience and would also give MLB an incentive to up-sell their higher priced MLB.TV package. But with Apple's iTunes ecosystem, currently there is no way to grant subscribers free access to a paid app. Right now, there isn't the ability to give codes to MLB.TV subscribers during the purchase process that would make a paid app part of their subscription.

To me, this lack of flexibility in the iTunes ecosystem makes no sense and is a bad decision on Apple's part. I know someone is going to be quick to say in the comments section that it makes sense because Apple makes a lot of money from it. Or course they do, but that only makes sense to Apple's bottom line, not to consumers. And since iTunes would not exist without content partners, Apple should be working harder to make their content partners look better and provide a better user-experience.

Imagine how much flack MLB will take when some consumers realize they are paying 3x for the same content. They will complain to MLB and MLB will take all the heat when it's not even MLB's fault. Now I don't know that MLB would even consider giving MLB.TV subscribers the other apps for free, but if they did want to, they couldn't because Apple won't allow iTunes to do that. Apple has such a monopoly over content owners with iTunes that neither the consumer nor the content owner has much say in how content is purchased, consumed or played back.

Aside from the fact that Apple's new iPad won't support Flash video, how on earth could Apple design a device that forces you to keep it flat at all times? Does Apple really think people want to hold a 10" screen in front of their face, at eye level, for two hours while watching a movie? The fact you have to keep this flat, on your lap, really keeps it from being used for video applications. Not designing a built-in stand up so that you can stand up the iPad on a table is a huge design flaw on Apple's part.

While the Apple website already shows one of the cases that you will be able to buy for the iPad that also double as a stand, that functionality should be built in. With the iPhone or iPod Touch, I can understand the lack of a built in stand as the device is small and most are not using it for extended periods of time. But the whole point of the iPad is to use it for interactive applications like video and with a 10" screen, share it with others. I should not have to buy a third-party case just to be able to use the device the way it was intended, with the functionality that's needed for video.

For a company that is so smart, I'm still amazed as how Apple makes such glaring mistakes like this.

Another flaw I just noticed with the iPad is that the aspect ratio of the screen does not support 4:3 or 16:9 video. (Updated: It appears the iPad is 4:3, but still the viewing experience will suffer. See this article with images of what movies will look like on the iPad and how much black there will be) Does that mean Apple has to re-encode all of their iTunes library just for the iPad? For folks who are really serious about their video, what kind of impact is that going to have on them? While I don’t think this alone will keep anyone from buying one, it’s just another example of how Apple is hyping this device for video, yet then not thinking about video in the design process.

In a conversation with Bloomberg, Roku's CEO Anthony Wood stated that the company plans to raise $30M in private funding this quarter and wants to take the company public sometime next year. Anthony said he expects the company's revenue to double to $75M in 2010 and that the company will top the 1M units sold to date mark this year. Roku also plans to continue to cut the pricing of their Roku units, which has dropped by 30% since 2008. 

In the interview, Anthony sees the hardware as becoming less important, eventually being given away for free, with the focus really being on "subscription content". Roku has been hard at work looking to bring more content to the device and expects to have over 100 channels available by the end of this year. While Roku's goal is to earn money from subscription fees and advertising, that will only work if there are enough devices out in the market. So while the hardware does become less important over time, unless Roku plans to license their platform to non-Roku devices, the company can't expect to make much money from content and advertising any time soon.

Even with 1M devices on the market, what percentage of those customers are going to use it to get content outside of Netflix? Many will, but my guess is that a lot won't use it for any other purpose aside from Netflix streaming. So even if Roku gets a 50% adoption rate of consumers willing to view some of the other content channels, half a million eyeballs is not enough to make money from when it comes to advertising and you have to split that revenue with partners.

One other interesting note from the Bloomberg article is that Netflix has confirmed that it sold their stake in Roku to Menlo Ventures, one of the original investors in the company. Netflix says they might discuss this in more detail during today's Q4 earnings call and I'd be curious to hear their reasoning. I don't know what prompted them to sell their stake, but I wonder if the fact that new devices like PopBox are coming to the market to compete with Roku makes Netflix have to look more neutral.