Last week, multiple sources familiar with Hulu's video plans told me that Hulu already has an iPhone app ready to go, but won't launch it until Hulu rolls out a subscription based service. While Hulu has hinted at such a service in the future, the company is still downplaying it as though it won't come anytime soon. That said, Hulu did say from day one that they will look at a combination of free and paid content offerings for their business, so the idea of a subscription service is not a new one. It's only a matter of when, not if.

While the iPhone does not support Flash video today, one of the sources I spoke with said Hulu has already converted some of their content over to H.264 for playback on the iPhone. However, they didn't know how much of Hulu's content had been converted and for all we know, the content that was converted could have been just for testing purposes. While Hulu is usually quick to downplay anything they might be working on, they do have an entire team working on new projects and offerings and have a section on their website called Hulu Labs.

Even if these sources are accurate, there's still a lot of hurdles Hulu has to get through to make an iPhone app a reality. For starters, it has to be approved by Apple which could see Hulu as a threat to iTunes. While I don't think they would and could probably use Hulu's iPhone app to push sales of download to own content, with Apple, you never know. The other big hurdle is whether or not AT&T would allow Hulu streaming to the iPhone over 3G. Considering they won't allow services like Sling over 3G, it's possible that Hulu also only gets streaming over WiFi. But if Hulu was able to do some sort of revenue sharing deal with AT&T, one could argue they may allow it.

No one knows for sure when a subscription based service or iPhone app by Hulu will come to the market, but clearly Hulu is pretty far along with their plans for both. How much would you pay a month for a subscription to Hulu if the offering was better quality video to the PC, ideally HD, and the ability to get videos to the iPhone?

I've just added a new session at the Streaming Media West show on the subject of TV Everywhere and over-the-top video, to be moderated by Colin Dixon at TDG. Ideally, we're looking for speakers from any of the cable providers or content owners who are currently providing content for TV Everywhere trials or are offering over-the-top video. This is a last minute addition to the program, which gets closed out in the next few days, so please email me ASAP if you want us to consider you for one of the speaking spots.

This morning, Bell announced an exclusive partnership with Limelight Networks on a new CDN offering, targeting content owners in Canada. While this is not the first telco Limelight has worked with, the Bell partnership is unique since Bell won't simply be re-selling Limelight's service or licensing their technology. Instead, Bell is placing Limelight servers in their co-lo facilities, tying them into their IP network and using Limelight to operate and maintain the CDN.

This is a multi-million dollar deal for Limelight and the two companies have already lined up family.ca, themovienetwork.ca and superecran.com as the first clients who will use the new CDN. While the market for CDN services in Canada is still small when compared to the U.S., projections I have seen from Cisco say the total CDN market in Canada, for video and non-video content, was $106M last year, growing to $174M by the end of 2010.

Bell marks the latest of a long list of telcos and carriers that have entered the CDN market in the past twelve months and there will be more to come. You can see the entire list of telcos and carriers offering CDN services at www.cdnlist.com

This morning, Compuware announced an agreement to acquire Gomez in an all cash transaction valued at $295M and expects the deal to close next month. I last wrote about Gomez a year ago when they launched their new streaming media monitoring service called Active Streaming XF. While I don't know much about Compuware or the application performance software industry, I wonder if the sale of Gomez will have any impact on the CDNs who use Gomez today.

Currently, many of the CDNs use Gomez to monitor the performance of their network and while I have said many times the methodology used to measure the performance of one CDN to another are invalid, Gomez still seems to be what nearly all the CDNs are using when a customer asks them for third party performance data.

The reason each CDN shows a different result in their Gomez chart is due to the fact that the CDNs are all using different metrics to test. Most are showing the chart as if it represents video, yet might just be testing small objects and not video objects. Also, many times, some CDNs that use Gomez tweak the testing methods to be in their favor even if it is not a fair apple-to-apples comparison to other vendors.

With Gomez now being sold, I wonder what, if any, impact this might have on CDNs currently using their service. I also find it hard to believe that for an industry that uses the word "performance" more than any other word to describe their service, I have yet to see any CDN publish any public document that outlines the performance of their network or even the methodology that customers should be using to judge "performance". None of the CDNs have even defined in a public document what the word "performance" means when it comes to video.

Today, FLO TV unveiled their highly anticipated "FLO TV Personal Television". A portable 3.5" touch-screen device with built-in stereo speakers that will let consumers take their TV with them on the go. The device will be available this holiday season with a suggested retail price of $249 plus at least $8.99 a month in FLO TV subscription fees. It measures 4.4 inches by 3 inches, is only half an inch thick and weighs just over 5 ounces. The company says it has a battery life of more than 5 hours of TV viewing or 300 hours on standby.

Bill Stone, President of FLO TV will be our keynote speaker on November 17th at the Streaming Media West show in San Jose and will have the Personal Television with him for viewing. All keynotes are free to attend, so register now for a free exhibit pass and come get hands-on with the device.

Back in April, I reported that two colocation companies had contacted me to say that Cisco was acquiring colocation space in various third party data centers in the U.S. for what Cisco was calling a new content delivery network. While I don't know Cisco's plans when it comes to the rumors of a commercial public cloud offering, I can confirm that Cisco does not plan to offer any CDN service specifically for video delivery.

After multiple conversations last week with various groups inside Cisco, it's clear that offering video delivery services via a Cisco operated CDN does not fit into the overall plans of the company. Numerous folks at Cisco said they would not compete with the same companies they already sell gear to and that Cisco's main goal is to help third party telcos, carriers and corporations deploy their own CDN's, which sometimes requires Cisco to take space within third party colocation facilities.

I don't know whether or not this approach by Cisco also keeps them out of the cloud-based storage and application services business, but I would think the same principle of not wanting to compete with their customers would apply and for now, keeps such an offering from coming to the market.

Yesterday, Limelight Networks made two related announcements; a new global content delivery platform, called the XD platform, and two new services based on that platform, called LimelightCONTROL XD and LimelightDELIVER XD. I’ve been getting a lot of questions from folks about these announcements, especially since one of the releases contained a quote from Overstock.com, a customer that as far as I had known, had only been using Akamai.

Many are asking me if this new platform is going to allow Limelight to really push into the value add services market that Akamai has dominated for so long. I’ll be posting a deeper look at Limelight's technology hopefully later in the week, but in the meantime, here’s an overview of the news, as well as an answer to the question I’ve heard the most: is this a threat to Akamai's high margin business?

Limelight's new XD platform features the same basic architecture as Limelight’s previous network, still utilizing their 15,000+ servers deployed around the globe, connected to 900+ last-mile networks. In addition, Limelight now has 8 million externally-deployed user
agents, deployed around the Internet, feeding data back to Limelight
about conditions on last-mile networks and Internet backbones (this is
one of the areas that I hope to learn more details about during a
scheduled briefing with Limelight later this week).

The new XD platform uses new edge server software that includes something Limelight calls “Adaptive Intelligence” that adjusts protocols in real-time for each connection or user request, which Limelight says significantly improves delivery performance. All existing services run on the new platform, so there is no migration for current customers as they are already running on the new XD platform. (Limelight’s delivery this past weekend of “The Wizard of Oz” for Netflix was all done on the new XD platform).

Limelight's XD platform also supports new services, the first of which Limelight also announced yesterday, called LimelightDELIVER XD and LimelightCONTROL XD. LimelightDELIVER XD uses the new Adaptive Intelligence feature of the XD platform to provide faster and more consistent object deliveries to users and LimelightCONTROL XD provides enhanced reporting and management features, including self-provisioning.

It is important to keep in mind that “CDN services” is not one single market, but a collection of sub-markets: streaming, large object delivery, small object delivery, whole site and dynamic content delivery, and overlay routing.  As I have written in the past, CDNs are starting to do a lot more than just deliver video on their networks. CDNs offer services in some or all of these areas, and also mix and match these, or parts of these, into services aimed at particular customer business problems. What Limelight announced yesterday is focused on object delivery, not whole site and not transactions. So just by themselves, today’s announcements probably don’t fundamentally rewrite the rules of the CDN industry.

But it seems pretty clear to me that today’s announcements are just the beginning and that there’s more to come. Limelight's XD platform announcement, in particular, seems like a “foundation” announcement on which Limelight will likely build other services. Globally deployed user agents that collect data on Internet and last-mile conditions – all the way to end user devices – and feed that data back to the CDN is potentially pretty important stuff.

And the Adaptive Intelligence approach seems pretty interesting too, as it extends the CDN “toolkit” beyond just resolving hostnames to edge servers that will handle the next few minutes’ worth of content requests. It’s an approach that extends down to the individual connection and out to the very end of the last mile. If it really does make Internet connections significantly faster (by using them more efficiently) on a case-by-case basis, and if Limelight applies this approach to other kinds of CDN services, like whole site delivery and transactions, then this could disrupt Akamai's value add services.

But Limelight hasn’t announced those kinds of services just yet. So today, I’d say this is a pretty important announcement for companies doing object delivery – small or large – and that it may just be the beginning of something fundamentally very significant – but we’ll have to wait and see for sure if it has any impact on Akamai's value add services.

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– CDNs Need To Evolve To Offer Tiered Performance And Pricing Plans

– Featured Article: The Future Of The CDN Market