In a conversation late yesterday with Jeremy Allaire, CEO of Brightcove, Jeremy went on-record to tell me that the company is now officially profitable and cash flow positive. While this is a big deal for Brigthcove, it's an even bigger deal for the industry and is validation that companies in this market can in fact create scalable, profitable businesses.

Nearly twelve months ago to the day, I interviewed Jeremy for a story where he commented that he expected Brightcove to be profitable within a year. While some wanted to argue that Brightcove burns too much money and could never grow their revenue fast enough, the sheer number of customers for Brightcove's premium service says otherwise. Brightcove now has over 700 premium customers, almost double what they had at this time last year, and while Jeremy would not give out any revenue details, he did say that the company will see 50% revenue growth in 09'. From my estimates, I expect Brightcove is probably on track to do about $80M this year.

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Based on numerous sources I have spoken to, I can now confirm that Akamai has been selected to stream the 2010 Winter Olympics for the NBC Olympics website. While Akamai and Microsoft did not provide any comments for this story, Akamai is already in the planning stages to handle the broadcast. (Updated: Akamai says they can now confirm that "they are involved in streaming the event next year.")

While it may seem surprising to some that Akamai was selected considering Limelight Networks successfully streamed the Olympics last year, there are some key factors that helped Akamai get this business. The Olympics will be using Silverlight and Microsoft's new Smooth Streaming technology, a technology that Microsoft worked with Akamai on and that Akamai paid to have the exclusive license to for a couple of months, before other CDNs were given access to it. Smooth Streaming is going to play such a big role in the Olympics and will dictate the quality that the user will get that it's really no surprise that Akamai would be selected, since they have the most experience working with the technology.

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One of the most common questions I get asked from those who track public CDNs in the industry is what the barriers to entry are for new CDNs who enter the space. With so many new content delivery networks popping up in the last 24 months and the technology having evolved quite a bit over the past ten years, it's a fair question.

Today, the online video platforms and the necessary hardware that is required to run a CDN are completely commoditized and delivering video on the web is not as hard as many CDNs make it out to be. That said, it's pretty easy to enter the CDN market with an investment of tens of millions of dollars and offer a solution in the market that gets some decent customers. But that alone is not enough to seriously compete with any of the major CDNs in terms of scale or revenue. While many of the newer CDNs coming to the market always want to say they are going to "challenge Akamai", the fact of the matter is they won't challenge Akamai's revenue, scale or market share, ever. Sure, if you are Level 3 and you put hundreds of millions of dollars into building out a CDN offering, you have a chance over many years to compete with Akamai. But most CDNs aren't raising and spending that kind of money.

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While the Streaming Media East show only ended last month, we're already in the planning stages for the Streaming Media West show and Video Platform Summit taking place in November in San Jose. Organizing a conference where you have 150+ speakers over three days takes place far in advance and believe it or not, the advance program will be finalized in the next week.

So if you wanted to moderate a session at the show, organize a discussion around a topic of interest to you or get involved in helping to create the programming of a session, now is the time to contact me. We already have a few hundred speaking submissions in the system and we'll start placing speakers shortly. For me, the hardest part is always finding moderators that are neutral and understand the importance moderators play in helping us produce quality programming.

If you have experience moderating and are looking to help out and get involved, you need to contact me ASAP. I'm also looking to pay some moderators who are willing to help out with more than one session.

With all the back and forth on the blogs this week from those trying
to predict exactly how much money YouTube is losing, personally, I
think many are still missing the bigger picture when it comes to
YouTube and how we value companies in this space. Maybe some of us
simply want to see different things for the industry or judge the
success of the industry on different metrics. For me, I want to see
companies in the space last for ten years with a sustainable business
model that actually generates revenue. To me, that is the only real way
any company should be judged in any industry, Internet related or not.

But
these days, especially with YouTube, many simply want to only focus on
their "market share" or the number of videos being consumed as somehow
equaling success for the company. That seems to be the same metric that
was used in early 2000 when the vast majority of content portals said
that all they needed was a lot of eyeballs to be successful and that
the number of eyeballs was all that mattered. How well did that work
out?

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While it's unknown how much traction Google is getting with their Video Adsense platform, multiple publishers have reached out to me over the past few months to talk about how Google is trying to force publishers into presentation requirements that they say conflicts with content versus advertising principles, not to mention, violates the IAB guidelines.

Today, many publishers and internet broadcasters are trying to capture revenue in this economic climate with ad network supplementing inside sales. With video, we see numerous implementations of ads including overlays, prerolls, mid, post, post slate, etc. What's interesting, and disturbing to some publishers, is Google's Video Adsense platform and the encounters these publishers have had with Google who they say is being very hypocritical in that they claim to want to serve the advertiser while taking a stance to "protect the user experience."  One instance these publishers describe is this.

In the Google AFV (Adsense for Video) implementation guide, the overlays state that they cannot cover user controls, which makes sense. However, many publishers, including for example Hulu, have bottom video controls that appear on MouseOver state.  So the scrubber, mute, etc., appear when the user hovers over the Flash screen therefore displaying the player controls. Google's AFV states that the overlays will take over the bottom 20 percent of the player. Now as far as I can tell, that is in compliance with IAB guidelines and so is the non-covering of controls even if the user has an option to disable the Ad overlay.

However, in the same document, Google states that text overlays will appear for 1 minute of video starting at 00:00 and rich media overlays will display for 20 seconds of the first minute. Neither pops back into play after the first minute. This is in violation of the IAB guidelines as it states overlays can display for 25 percent of every minute of video or: 15 seconds as a maximum. It also minimizes the ad impressions publishers can expect as oppose to other ad networks. One of the publishers who reached out to me recently spoke to an AFV Product Manager in regards to this issue as they are trying to determine if it is financially worth their investment (development time and resource) to rebuild their players based on expected impressions just for AFVS. He's what he was told by the AFV product manager:

"Unfortunately, we are not able to relax our polices in order to test out the overlays. We feel very strongly about making the user experience the best it can be and we need to do our best to prevent invalid clicks for the advertisers."

Publishers say that's what troublesome about this is that Google is masking most likely a promise to advertisers for decent display with their hypocritical socially concerned consumer experience efforts. It is also disturbing that Google is trying to force publishers into presentation requirements that may conflict with content versus advertising principles. And as Google signs up advertisers, some premium, because they are the 8000lb gorilla, some are saying they will force small publishers such as video bloggers, and other small video content operations, to comply with layout standards that publishers may not have the resources to comply with and therefore cannot sustain operations. Most simply rely on IAB standards for their builds and even with decent resources, redesigning the player means redesigning the layout and site which is not a small task for many.

To some publishers, it seems that the Google AFV product team looked at YouTube as the gold standard and decided that all video advertising would have to be compliant with the display of that environment.  They feel that Google cannot play both roles. Ad Network vendor and social user experience governance cannot co-exist like that as it's a conflict of church and state. This has existed since publishers have relied on display advertising as well as subscription models for revenue. Publishers also stated that most of the other ad networks they have worked with do not force display policies such as this as the publishers would never display client advertisements in a poor setting as the advertiser would never come back. The market works just fine this way.

While I am not a publisher of video and don't use any ad network/platform, I think publishers have a real case here. Especially the smaller publishers who could be pushed out of the market if Google's Adsense becomes the dominant platform and content publishers are forced to have to use the system.

Are you a content publisher? I'd love to hear what you think about this in the comments section below.

Ooyala contacted me to let me know they currently has six open positions they are looking to fill. The open jobs include East Coast Sales Director, West Coast Sales Director, Application Engineer, Inside Sales Representative, Infrastructure and Operations Engineer and Account Coordinator (Mountain View or NY based). If interested, you can email Nicole at Ooyala.

If you are looking for a new position, have taken a new job or are a company that has a job opening, let me know. In many cases I will highlight it here on the blog – free of charge.