CDNetworks has confirmed that Steve Liddell resigned today and has been replaced by long time CDNetworks board member John Milburn. Steve held the title of President of CDNetworks International and was opointed to that position after the company he was CEO at, Panther Express, was acquired by CDNetworks in February of this year.

John is a member of the CDNetworks Board of Directors, representing Oak Investment Partners, and was instrumental in organizing the syndicate of investors that provided $96.5 million in funding to CDNetworks in December 2007.

CDNetworks says John has served as an advisor or board member for many ISPs and Telcos in Asia and several Silicon Valley based companies, including Juniper Networks, AboveNet and Aleton Websystems. John recently served as the chief negotiator for the sale of GMarket to eBay for $US 1.2 billion dollars. 

This move comes at an interesting time as I was just saying to someone the other day that it seems like CDNetworks has been really quiet in the U.S. lately and has not made much noise since the Panther acquisition. Of the contracts I have seen in the market for CDN services it seems like CDNetworks name isn't showing up as often. Not sure what to attribute this to, but I'll be speaking with John before too long to hear his strategy on how CDNetworks plans to try and really crack the U.S. market.

Updated 2:14pm – When reached by phone, Steve Liddell said his main goal after the Panther acquisition was for him to stay on board and make sure the integration between the two companies went smoothly. He says with the integration now done and completed about 90 days later, it was time for him to move on to a yet undetermined new opportunity.

While going through some of my old files, I came across a bunch of my pricing data from 2005. This was around the time I started collecting CDN pricing a couple of times a year and the charts below show pricing from the market in 2005 based on per MB sustained, per GB delivered and includes pricing on storage as well.

While no one who follows the space will be shocked to see just how far pricing has dropped over the past five years, it's also funny to look at the buckets of volume that were being priced back then and what was considered to be a large volume customer, compared to today.

But if you think these prices are crazy, just look at what the going rate was in the industry in 1999 for a live webcast. Below is what InterVU's list price was at the time for a webcast at 56Kbps. To put these numbers in perspective, the $95K cost to do a 4 hour webcast to 25,000 simultaneous users today would cost on average about $1,500.

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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