Tomorrow at 2pm ET I’ll be moderating another StreamingMedia.com webinar, where Microsoft and Level 3 will be presenting details on how to deliver HD video over HTTP.  Attendees will learn about Smooth Streaming technology and how, when combined with a CDN, it can deliver high-quality video, making true HD 1080p media experiences a reality. You’ll also learn:

• What Smooth Streaming is and why it is the future of online video delivery
• How Smooth Streaming delivers HDTV-quality experiences over HTTP
• How it has been successfully implemented for major live events and on-demand content
• The end-to-end steps for delivering your content with Smooth Streaming

There will also be an extensive Q&A session after the presentation so bring your questions and we’ll get to as many of them as possible. You can register to attend this free webinar here.

While many large ad small CDNs continue to try burn through a lot of cash, trying to turn a profit from delivering content on the web, content delivery network EdgeCast has been EBITA positive since Q2 and become profitable last quarter. The company, which has raised just $6M in one VC round, and a little over $10M in total, has grown their business very nicely in the past two years, with only a fraction of the money other CDNs have raised.

While EdgeCast won't talk about or disclose their revenue, I know they are slated to do between $15-$20M in total revenue for 2009. This is a far cry from the CDN revenue that Akamai, Limelight, Level 3 or CDNetworks is doing, but it does show that CDNs can in fact be profitable. While it is easier to turn a profit as a smaller provider, since you need less money, to date, even most smaller CDNs haven't even been able to survive. Panther Express raised over $20M during the course of their existance, wasn't profitable and ended up being sold for around $2.5M. (Originally I reported the number was $5M, but have since learned it was even less than that) CDN Vusion burned through $11M in VC money in 24 months and went under earlier in the year. EdgeCast has spent half the money Panther did, and has almost the same revenue to show for it, as a profitable company.

Over the next few months, EdgeCast is going to have to decide how big they want to grow to and what they want to become. While they can still grow their revenue, if they want to take their business to the next level  and say double their revenue, they'd have to go out and raise more money. Doing so would put them under a lot more pressure to grow faster and try and maintain profitability at the same time. But if they want to remain profitable, stay small and nimble and work towards being acquired by one of the telcos, they can just keep doing what they are doing now, with no additional funding.

For their part, I hope they stay small, stay focused and don't raise a lot more capital. Multiple telcos have said how much they like working with EdgeCast and a few of them have even publicly predicted that before long, one of the telcos will have to acquire someone like EdgeCast when the telcos are forced to stop re-selling CDN services and bring them in-house.

Yesterday, TiVo and Blockbuster announced that consumers who have a Series 2 or Series 3 TiVo unit can now rent movies from Blockbuster. The service, which was originally announced in March, went live yesterday with movies costing between $2.99 and $3.99 a piece. While the release says that "subscribers can now rent hot new release movies", I couldn't find any movies to rent that I would call "hot new releases". The "new releases" section contained movies like "Shrink", "The Last Resort", "Dance Flick" and "Battle For Terra". As of this morning, there were 658 movies available to browse and Blockbuster said that "in the coming weeks," it will expand the number of movies available and provide a "select" number of HD titles.

Frankly, I don't understand Blockbuster's strategy with TiVo. While it makes perfect sense to bring their content to the device, why launch with a service that's only half baked? One of the biggest arguments made by Blockbuster on why they have an advantage over Netflix is that they have rights to first-run movies, something Netflix does not have. But then they launch the service with no first-run movies and don't even offer anything in HD quality.

While it's good to see Blockbuster working to get content on more devices, TiVo alone won't do much for the company since according to TiVo, as of last quarter, the company had 1.6 million standalone TiVo subscribers. While TiVo doesn’t break out how many Series 1, 2 or 3 units have been sold individually, if we assume that one million of these subscribers have a Series 2 or 3 unit, Blockbuster is realistically reaching a million or less consumers. And based on adoption numbers we have seen with Netflix's streaming on the Xbox 360, about 10% of Xbox 360 owners use the Netflix service. Keep in mind, Netflix streaming is free so the adoption numbers will be higher than those who have to pay to stream a movie with Blockbuster. That puts the number of consumers who are realistically going to use the Blockbuster service on TiVo probably at around 50,000 or less. That's not a big number.

Anything Blockbuster can do to bring content to more devices will help the company and this is the first step of many. But without having "hot new releases", HD quality and a large enough consumer base, Blockbuster is still going to have trouble getting their digital media strategy to pay off.

Baron's says Akamai "shares are trading higher in a down market this morning amid rumors that the company might be a takeover target for Google." Baron's is only reporting what they hear, but seriously, who starts these rumors? Why would Google buy Akamai? They don't need a CDN, they have their own. And even if they needed more capacity or reach, they would not spend billions to acquire it. They could build it for a fraction of that cost.

Not to mention, what would Google do with all of Akamai's customers? And why would Google pay to buy a bunch of servers and infrastructure that is dedicated to deliver content using Microsoft's technology? And for some who say that Google would want Akamai's revenue, they would not deliver content for Microsoft, so how much revenue is that alone they would lose?

I can't think of one single reason that makes sense on why Google would buy Akamai, unless Google wanted to get into the business of delivering content for third party content owners, which would not help their core business in any way.

Eighteen months ago, the online video platform space was largely dominated by only a handful of providers in the industry. But today, with over two dozen companies now providing services to the market, the online video platform space is hotter than ever. We've seen Brightcove become profitable, Ooyala able to raise money in a bad economy, KIT digital making acquisitions and offerings like those from Kaltura based on open-source technology, coming to the market. The online video platform space is changing, services are evolving and more importantly, the business is maturing.

This was the main reason why StreamingMedia.com decided earlier in the year to dedicate two whole days to the subject and launch the Online Video Platform Summit at the Streaming Media West show in November. The entire event has been organized to show content owners how to use video management platforms, the value they provide and demonstrate successful real-world use cases. The event also brings together nearly every vendor in the online video platform space and gives attendees the ability to see many of these platforms in action. You can see the agenda here.

We are very pleased to announce, and would like to thank, the following companies who are involved in the show as sponsors, speakers or presenters: Adap.tv, Adobe, Akamai, Artivision, Brightcove, Datpresenter, Delve, Digitalsmiths, Endavo, EveryZing, Fliqz, Kaltura, KickApps, KIT digital, Kyte, LongTail Video, Multicast, Ooyala, Origin Digital, Reality Digital, Sorenson Media, Truveo, TubeMogul, Twistage, Veeple, Visible Measures, VMIX, voped and YuMe.

The summit has been designed to help organizations of all types, not just those for whom video is their core business. Come join video publishers of all types and sizes as well as the industry and see first-hand how these platforms work, what they cost and the impact they can have on your business.

As a thank you to my blog readers, I'm offering everyone the ability to register before October 30th for only $495, using my personal discount code of DRF1, which is $200 off the price to attend.

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?