I'm pleased to announce that executives from FLO TV, Epix and TV.com are confirmed as keynote speakers for the upcoming Streaming Media West show taking place November 17-19 in San Jose. I'll be posting more details soon and in the mean time, the call for speakers closes in the next few days. Get your submission in now if you want to be considered.

While dates for the 2010 Streaming Media West show have not yet been announced, all signs point to the show being moved to LA for next year. We'll make the official announcement as soon as we have the dates and location confirmed.

For the past few months, Level 3 has been working on building a brand new video based website dedicated to showcasing their content delivery offering in the market. Yesterday, the site Level3Delivers.com went live with nearly 75 video clips that do a really great job of telling the Level 3 CDN story.

The mini video portal has interviews with Level 3 executives, customers and features a whole bunch of case studies and shows logos from such customers as Netflix, Microsoft, Comcast and Yahoo! amongst others. The videos provide a great insight into Level 3's entire CDN ecosystem including Vyvx and their broadcast operations services and it's great to see Level 3 really focus an entire website to their CDN offering. The new site is well thought out, provides answers to a lot of technical questions about their ecosystem and will be a valuable sales tool for Level 3 when pitching content owners.

A few weeks back, I got to spend a good deal of time with Level 3 executives at the Content Delivery Summit and Streaming Media East shows. I also recently had a call with Peter Neill, the new SVP of content markets for Level 3 to hear more about their CDN strategy. While some of our conversation was off the record, what I can say from the calls and meetings is that while some turmoil came out of the changes made within the CDN group last month, Level 3 is clearly still committed to their CDN offering.

At the Streaming Media East show, the biggest thing I heard Level 3 competitors talking about was just how many Level 3 sales reps were at the show looking for new jobs, implying that Level 3 was really losing people. Yet when I asked Level 3 competitors if any of them were going to hire these reps, they all commented that most of them weren't qualified. So while Level 3 has been losing and cutting some account managers, it does not sound like it's due to anything negative at Level 3. Level 3 still continues to sign up large content owners and I still think they are on track to do nearly $100M this year in total CDN revenue, defined as streaming, software downloads and small object delivery.

I've been a long time customer of Verizon's FiOS service, starting off years ago with 10Mbps, then 20Mbps and as of last week, now 50Mbps. For those who can't get FiOS I feel for you as it's hands down the best offering available in the market and puts cable to shame. Even with Cablevision's recent announcement saying they will offer a supposed 101Mbps offering, it's not fiber to my house. If it's not fiber to the home, then it's not FiOS and can't be compared to FiOS.

I called Cablevision last week only to be told their 101Mbps service won't be available "for some time", the price is not "guaranteed" to be $99 when it launches and the service won't come with any guaranteed throughput. When I asked Cablevision how they can compete with a service like FiOS that pulls fiber to your house I was told "the service is just as good as FiOS as Cablevision's modem has lots of power." Too funny. When will Cablevision get a clue.

Cablevision's poor marketing ploys aside, I'm looking to test as much high bitrate video as possible across multiple entertainment devices. I have a Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, Roku, TiVo Series 3,VUDU, Slingbox PRO-HD, Apple TV and broadband enabled Blu-ray player setup in my living room. So if you know of some really high-bitrate video offerings, streaming or otherwise, please let me know and I'll test them out. In addition, if you'd like me to test anything on any of the above mentioned devices, drop a note in the comments section.

Related Posts:

– Numbers Show Consumers Are Not Cutting Cable In Favor Of Online Video

– Verizon Cuts Peering Costs To CDNs: The Real Story Is More Than Price

– If Everyone Had Verizon FiOS For Broadband, Capping Would Not Be An Issue

– Verizon's FiOS Service Will Change The Game For Video Delivery

– Verizon's FiOS Service Pays Off: Adoption Growing, Service Capable Of 50MB Today

Last week at E3, Microsoft announced that later in the fall, 1080p streaming will come to the Xbox 360 using Zune video technology. While full details of the technology and how it works are not ready to be released by Microsoft, they did share some additional details on the service which I can make public.

Zune video on Xbox LIVE was built from the ground-up for Xbox 360 to
take full advantage of the Xbox platform and is built on top of Smooth Streaming. It features what Microsoft is calling a
"state-of-the-art encoder" for the highest level of fidelity and a high
performance decoder capable of full-framerate 1080p playback, which
enables Smooth Streaming playback, smooth fast-forward and smooth
rewind functionality. Microsoft says their 1080p instant on technology will offer a level of quality and
performance only previously seen with downloadable or physical media.

For the full instant on 1080p streaming and 5.1 surround sound
experience, Microsoft recommends at least an 8 Mbps broadband connection. The
beauty of the technology however, is that movies and TV shows on Zune
video will automatically scale to the best possible resolution based on
the speed of the users connection. So if a consumer has a 6 Mbps
connection, they will still get 1080p and a great audio experience, but
may not get 5.1. And as a back-up, Microsoft says anyone can have a 1080p/5.1
experience, but they may be required to download the content instead of
streaming it if they don’t have an 8 – 10 Mbps broadband connection.

While no specific date has yet been given, Zune video on Xbox LIVE will launch sometime this fall with only a small inventory of video available at 1080p. While no exact numbers have been given on the volume of inventory available at launch, Microsoft said they will bring some of the best content from some of the top studios including Warner Bros., Universal, Paramount,
CBC [Canada] and the MLB Network, Whether or not content from Netflix will take advantage of the new 1080p streaming technology is not yet known but I would not be surprised if there weren't at least a few title from Netflix available at launch.

While there has already been some speculation in the industry as to which CDN(s) will get this delivery business, that's still to be seen at this time. I've heard various answers including the idea that Microsoft may keep some of this delivery on their internal CDN.

No matter who gets to deliver this content, clearly it's not going to be a lot of traffic. The number of Xbox 360 users who have their console hooked up to a TV set capable of doing 1080p and having at least an 8Mbps connection can't be huge. Not to mention, most of the content available in 1080p is probably going to have to be purchased. Clearly the Internet is not capable of handing the streaming of 1080p content to any large scale and while this offering is all about the future, the Internet still won't be able to handle this level of streaming years from now.

For Microsoft, I believe this offering is their way of getting ahead of the rest of the market and saying they can do 1080p streaming before anyone else and prove the concept. Nothing wrong with that and as a Verizon FiOS user, I can't wait to see what it looks like. But for the average Xbox 360 user, I don't think they will be able to take advantage of 1080p streaming for a long time to come.

In an interesting announcement this morning, CDN provider EdgeCast has licensed Web.com's patent portfolio and will be providing CDN services including web page acceleration and origin and edge storage for the Web.com property.

The patent license agreement grants EdgeCast a license for more than thirty issued and pending patents covering a broad range of methods and techniques including: display and delivery of rich media; unique storage systems; automated hosting and server management; load balancing technology; and dynamic DNS technologies. Some of the patent applications date back as far as 1994.

I've just started doing a little research on Web.com's patent portfolio and you can find a list of most of their patents here on their website. Most of Web.com's patents don't directly involve video and are more focused on things pertaining to DNS, managing servers and load balancing amongst other network related activities.

Frost & Sullivan’s research on the Digital Media market spanning the past decade and the entire value chain from content acquisition down to content delivery shows the market accounting for billions of dollars in 2008. Just the storage and media asset management components together achieved $6.5 billion in global revenues for 2008. The storage and content management markets are expected to grow at a combined CAGR of 13% through 2014 despite a significant dip in 2009 due to longer sales cycles caused by the economic slowdown.

Adding in the professional services and SI components, this market balloons to over $10 billion in 2008 and is expected to more that double its size by 2014 at a CAGR of 11%. The result has been a field day for system integrators (SIs) and vendors who have jumped on the opportunity to provide a solution for the missing glue that would bind such disparate and siloed workflow components seamlessly into a comprehensive, efficient and profitable tool.

Sponsored by HP, Frost & Sullivan has published a free white paper on this topic that details some of the market opportunities for vendors in the digital media workflow. You can download the free white paper here.

During his keynote at the Content Delivery Summit last month, Jeff Cohen, GM of Microsoft's Edge Computing Network gave out a lot of interesting data as it pertains to Microsoft's CDN business. While the theme of his presentation covered a lot of great topics, one of the points that really stood out was how quickly Microsoft is moving away from relying on third party CDNs for delivery and instead, using their own internal CDN. While this trend by Microsoft is something that has been widely known about to anyone who closely follows the CDN space, this is the first time I have seen Microsoft break out numbers that shows the split in traffic. (Note: Jeff's slides can be downloaded here, video of his presentation can be seen here)

Over the past two years, Microsoft has quickly started bringing a lot of their traffic for video, software downloads and small object delivery in-house. In 2007, third party CDNs delivered 95% of Microsoft's traffic. Based on Jeff's estimate, third party CDNs will only account for 40% of Microsoft's delivery business by next year.

While Jeff said that Microsoft would always have the need for CDNs to compliment their own delivery, clearly that's a lot of lost business for the CDNs in a three-year period. During that time, Akamai and Limelight have gotten the vast majority of Microsoft's business and Level 3 has received a good portion as well, but primarily just over the past 14 months. While Microsoft is not pulling the business away from CDNs overnight, it is a lot of lost traffic for them to have to make up, not to mention, revenue growth they can't rely on. Of the three CDNs that have most of the business, it probably impacts Akamai more than anyone else since Akamai always had the largest share of Microsoft's business. And with Microsoft having licensed Limelight's technology, Limelight should be making up some of that lost traffic over time with their licensing contract.

Jeff's slide also shows some interesting numbers when it comes to the type of traffic being passed over their network. In 2007, video delivery account for 10% of the traffic and in 2010, is expected to account for 55% of all traffic delivered on Microsoft's CDN. At the same conference, Level 3 also stated that video now takes up 70% of all traffic on their network. These data points are more evidence on just how quickly video traffic is growing and the challenge third party CDNs have in trying to make money. When the largest percentage of traffic on your network comes from video, yet video only account for lets say 25% of your revenue, those are some skewed numbers.

While Jeff made it clear that Microsoft will always need to rely on third party CDNs for scale and for delivery in regions of the world where Microsoft does not have a footprint, he also said that, "we want to make sure that what's strategic to our business, stays within our business". Jeff also said that the decision to move traffic to a CDN or from a CDN is done on a "property to property basis" inside Microsoft.

While I don't know what percentage of revenue Microsoft accounts for at any of the CDNs, a question I am often asked, with Jeff estimating that Microsoft's traffic is growing "between 30-100% year over year", that's a lot of additional bits the CDNs won't get to deliver in the future.