This morning Syabas, best known for their Popcorn Hour media player, announced that come spring they will launch a new $129 box similar to Roku called the Popbox. I got a detailed briefing on the new device last week and had the chance to speak with Syabas COO Alex Limberis on what their business model will be.

While the Popbox is very similar to the Roku with its small form-factor and fanless design, the Popbox has a couple of key features that sets it apart from the Roku. For starters, the Popbox plays just about every video format out there including MPEG1/2/4, Open MPEG-4 HD, Xvid-HD, WMV9-HD, VC-1 and H.264. On the audio side, it also supports MP1/2/3, WMA, WMA Pro, Ogg Vorbis, AAC, AC3, DTS, PCM, WAV and FLAC. It also supports a lot of image formats, Windows Media DRM and a bunch of subtitle and metadata formats as well.

Syabas says that one of the main strengths of the box is that it has a
very powerful video processor and essentially uses the same processing
platform as the Popcorn Hour. The box supports 1080p and can do up to
100Mb/sec video decoding, which about is two times what Blu-ray does. The company says that as a result, the Popbox can deliver better video quality than the Roku. This could be accurate, but since I have not been hands-on with the Popbox, I'm not going to state it as a fact. It would be easy to test as you could simply playback a local file on both units and compare the quality, but until Roku enables the USB port on the XD-HR unit, there is no way to do the comparison.

While the Popbox has no hard drive, it does ship with a 2GB SD card, two USB ports and one HDMI port. The ports allow you to plug in other devices like Flip cameras and external hard drives enabling users to ingest their networked media content. While some might expect the included SD card to be used for storing content, that's not supported. The Popbox SD card enables the box to store what Syabas calls "popapps" for their  Popbox store (screenshot) and the main purpose of the SD card is to store those apps and the metadata. The company has announced more than twenty content partners for the Popbox store including Netflix, Twitter, Facebook, Photobucket, Next New Networks, Revision3, blip.tv, IMDB and Funspot Games have all developed Popapps for the platform. While I have only seen screenshots of the Popbox store, the UI is beautiful and clearly beats Roku's interface hands-down.

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I don't know about you, but I am so sick and tired of hearing about 3D TVs and all the hype that surrounds them. For a product that barely exists in the market, I'm seeing way too many articles, quotes and marketing fluff surveys talking about how the 3D industry is going to be this huge business. Sure, 3D TVs might be a big business 5+ years from now, but it won't have any series impact on the market in the meantime. In fact, most analysts who track the market predict that only between 30-40M 3D capable sets will be sold by 2014. That's a very small number and nothing to get excited about.

Of course, that's not stopping companies like Sony who make the sets to predict that by next year, there will be a 3D TV set "in every home", referencing a specific region in Europe, not the U.S. But even still, how can Sony possibly think this? Consumers aren't even buying $150 Blu-ray players in large volumes yet, but Sony and others think people will drop a few grand for a 3D set sometime in the next few years? Most 3DTV sets won't even be out until late 2010 and you're going to have to wear glasses at all times to see anything in 3D. And the sets that don't require glasses, Panasonic says it will be, "at least 10 years before the technology is advanced enough to provide a similarly robust 3D experience without glasses". Ten years? Remind me why I am suppose to be excited about 3D TVs today?

Even with all those facts and numbers, I continue to see more and more surveys, like this one, that say consumers want 3DTV content. Duh. Of course we want better viewing experiences, but none of these surveys ever seem to say what consumers are willing to pay to get it. Depending on which analyst report you look at, the penetration rate of HDTVs in the U.S. isn't even at 50%, but we're suppose to be excited over 3DTVs and what might happen five or more years from now? The SMPTE isn't even suppose to deliver a 3DTV standard until sometime in 2011, although other organizations like CEA are working on their own standards as well.

3D TVs look great at CES and in product demos, but they do not represent what the average consumer is going to purchase anytime soon. How many consumers who spent $1,500 to upgrade to an HDTV this year are then going to be willing to spend another $2,000 three years from now to get a 3D experience? That's not realistic. 3D TVs may be the "future" but that future is not anytime soon. Weren't Internet connected TVs suppose to be the future as well? No question they have a better shot at adoption, but even their sales projections are low, under 5M sold in the next three years.

I'm tired of the TV manufactures and content owners trying to convince us what the next kind of technology is that we want, what we should be excited about as consumers or what we should be buying. We are the consumer, we decide with our wallets what we want. If content owners and TV manufactures continue to make big bets on 3D TVs being adopted in the next few years, they are going to be really disappointed when they lose.

This morning, Limelight Networks announced an agreement to acquire privately held EyeWonder in a cash and stock deal valued at $110M. The deal is expected to close sometime in the first half of next year. After DoubleClick and maybe Pointroll, EyeWonder is one of the largest rich-media ad platforms in the space, billing about $35-$40M in revenue for this year. With Limelight’s 2009 projected revenue of $140-$150M this deal should easily make the combined companies into a $200M+ organization in 2010.

For Limelight, this is a smart move and the immediate affect is two fold. It increases their revenue by a third and more importantly, they are acquiring a company that has 70%+ margins on their business. EyeWonder’s overhead is low since they are not in the infrastructure business and this will allow Limelight to diversify their revenue with a product line that’s not competing solely on price, like we have seen in the CDN space for so long.

Already I am hearing some say that the combined EyeWonder and Limelight ad solution will compete with Akamai’s advertising solution, which is not the case. Akamai acquired acerno to get into the behavioral targeting business. EyeWonder is a platform that allows for rich-media ads on the web and within video games. Two very different ad solutions, solving two very different problems for content publishers.

Of the $110M in purchase price for this deal, Limelight is paying for $62M of it in cash. This leaves Limelight with about $100M left in the bank and I would not be surprised if we saw them make a few more smaller acquisitions in the near term.

The drawing is now closed. Thanks to Microsoft I have two copies of Expression Studio 3 to give away. All you have to do is leave one comment on this post telling Microsoft what you'd like to see in the next version of the product. If you are a newbie to the product, no worries, just leave your contact details. Make sure you use your real name and a valid e-mail
address and I'll pick two lucky users at random at the end of the month. Winners: Lon Van W. from Boise, ID and Logan D. from Seattle, WA.

A big
thanks to Microsoft for giving me two copies to give away.

Thanks to many generous vendors, I have a bunch of products I’m giving away this month to readers of my blog. Since I have so many items, I’m leaving the drawing open for all of them until the end of the month. Good luck!

The winner will get one Xbox 360 Pro console, a 12-month Xbox LIVE membership, 1600 points and an Xbox 360 Messenger Kit. Enter here.

To celebrate the launch of Brightcove’s new Express offering, Brightcove has nicely offered to give away 25 Flip Mino cameras to the first 25 readers of my blog who sign up for a Brightcove Express account. Details here.

One lucky reader of my blog will get a copy of Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5. This is an incredible
giveaway as the software retails for $4,500 from Adobe’s website. Enter here.

Last month Roku announced the launch of their new Channel Store and in celebration of the launch, I’m giving away one Roku HD-XR unit. Details here.

Thanks to the Silverlight team, I have two copies of Expression Studio 3 to give away. Each of these retails for $599 from Microsoft’s website and will go to two different winners. Enter here.

This morning, Amazon announced that their CloudFront content delivery service now supports Flash streaming as long as the videos are stored on Amazon's S3 service. Amazon has deployed version 3.5.2 of Adobe's Flash Media Servers in 14 edge locations globally and now supports RTMP, RTMPT (HTTP tunneled), RTMPE (encrypted), and RTMPTE (tunneled and encrypted) flavors of RTMP. In addition, Amazon says they will support live Flash streaming sometime in 2010.

While Amazon's CloudFront service for on-demand video never really disrupted any of the larger CDNs in the market, this latest announcement drastically changes things. While Amazon is not going to take any large customers away from the CDNs, think MLB or Hulu, Amazon does have the potential to take many of the mid-sized customers who spend between $3-5k a month on video. That's Amazon's sweet spot and there are a lot of those customers in the market with the major CDNs. In addition, while Amazon still needs to flush out the other ecosystem pieces for video, their offering already ties in with transcoding solutions from Encoding.com and Bits on the Run. Additional third party developers are already working on other apps that will help enhance Amazon's offering including reporting.

While some might say that the downside to CloudFront is that it does not have an SLA, Amazon does have two levels of premium support that costs between $100-$400 a month for customers who want 27×7 phone support. Right now, I don't see the lack of an SLA for CloudFront as a negative for the customers they are targeting. The trend I am seeing in the market is that content owners want more control over their content, want to be able to do self provisioning and don't want to have to call their CDN every time they need something done. Amazon requires no commitment, no contract, no overages and has up-front pricing with no additional cost for Flash streaming. You can setup a CloudFront account right now and be streaming in about five minutes. What's not to like? If some still want to argue that delivering video on the Internet is not a commodity, Amazon's announcement should make them think again.

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The drawing is now closed. Thanks to Adobe, I have one copy of Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5 to give away to one lucky reader of my blog. This is an incredible giveaway as the software retails for $4,500 from Adobe's website. Winner: Sean D. from New York, NY.

Because I don't want someone winning this and simply re-selling it on eBay, this drawing is only open to companies. To enter the drawing, you must leave one comment on this post with your real first and last name, a valid email address AND the URL of your company. I'll pick a winner at random at the end of the month and mail it out to the user at no charge. Keep an eye on the blog as later in the month, I'll have another Adobe Flash product to giveaway.

A HUGE thanks to Adobe for allowing me to give this away on my blog.