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.

Over the past few months, I've been hearing more talk about Brightcove teaming up with Limelight to enable Limelight to move up the stack and offer more solutions in the video ecosystem. While neither company would comment on the rumor, (Updated: Brightcove says the agreement as I have described it does not exist) I've since learned that this deal is in fact taking place and that for the past few months, the companies have been working together to put it in place. While details of what the offering will look like are not being discussed, it would make most sense for Brightcove to license a customized white label version of their platform to Limelight, thereby enabling Limelight's customers to have direct access to the functionality that Brightcove provides.

While some might suggest this does not provide a lot of value as anyone can just go directly to Brigthcove if they need this type of solution, a customized version of the Brightcove system running on Limelight's network would be beneficial to many customers. It would also give Limelight immediate new offerings at scale like transcoding, professional services support for things like custom player builds and I'd like to think that working together, the data that Brightcove and Limelight already collect could be used to provide customers will a very robust reporting and analytics package. We'll have to wait to see exactly what the deal looks like when it is announced, but there is a lot of synergy between the two companies and this is a natural progression of where CDNs are headed.

Over the past year, Limelight, like nearly every other CDN, is trying to do more than just deliver bits. With video delivery pricing declining each year and more content owners asking for solution based offerings, not just bandwidth, CDNs are trying to make the move up the stack and offer more value add services. For vendors like Limelight, this is a 180 degree reversal from 18 months ago when they said they didn't want to move up the stack and just wanted to focus on the delivery part of the business, thereby letting partners solve the other video ecosystem pieces. But like any industry, it evolves quickly and all of the CDNs have tried to evolve with it. Level 3 is working hard to finish their ecosystem offering, Limelight recently acquired Kiptronic, and Akamai is focusing a lot of their efforts on value add services in other segments of the market.

Companies who solve some of the ecosystem problems are going to get acquired by some of the larger CDNs or will do deals to private label their services, enabling CDNs to bring the solution in-house, on their network. While this all makes sense, the one problem I see with it is that no one is willing to talk about what type of impact these deals can have on CDNs revenue. Akamai was years ahead of their competitors when it acquired NineSystems to get the Stream OS content management system, but to date we don't know how many customers use it or what kind of revenue it adds to Akamai's bottom line. So while a Brightcove and Limelight deal makes a lot of sense, it might be a good 24 months or more before these solutions account for even 10-15% of CDNs revenue.

While it's too early to know what kind of impact a Brightcove and
Limelight deal could have, we should expect more of these types of
announcement from the CDNs over the next few quarters.

Internap has confirmed that VP or Engineering Steve Kiene will be leaving the company in August to pursue another career opportunity. Steve joined Internap about six months ago and one of his tasks was working on Internap's CDN platform. The company said it is currently looking for a replacement and that Steve will be with the company until the end of August to help with the transition.

This week, Cisco released their second annual visual networking index which predicts that by 2013, all forms of video will account for almost 90% of the total consumer traffic on the Internet. While that sounds like a big percentage, I'd like to know how Cisco came up with these numbers. Cisco's website shows a lot of charts and numbers, but then says the source for the data is themselves. Where is Cisco getting these numbers? How did they come up with them? What are they based off of? What is their methodology? Come on Cisco, show us the data behind this. More importantly, if Cisco's predictions are right, that's not necessarily a good thing for the industry.

We keep hearing about traffic growth due to video, but what we don't keep hearing from are content owners making money from all this traffic growth. If Cisco's numbers turn out to be accurate, that's a lot of additional video traffic that someone needs to monetize unless they want to be though of as someone like YouTube. A company that pushes a lot of traffic, but can't break even. Don't be fooled into thinking that just because video traffic is growing, so too is the revenue of the companies in the space. Video now easily accounts for more than 50% of all the traffic on the CDNs, but it accounts for far less than 50% of their overall revenue. That's a problem.

For all the traffic growth we keep hearing about, we also see companies like BT and others capping users or telling content owners they are going to have to help foot the bill for network upgrades. We've now got content owners doing 3MB streams and folks like Microsoft announcing they will do 8-10Mbps 1080p streams on the Xbox 360 later in the fall. All of this is great, but there needs to be some kind of business model behind this surge in traffic. If it's not figured by the ISPs and content owners, many are going to have a false sense of security thinking that because video traffic grows by a large percentage, the revenue of companies in this space will grow by the same volume. That won't happen. While the CDNs won't tell us how many total streams or GBs they deliver each quarter or each year, if they did, we'd see that they are delivering five or ten times more volume, yet their revenues are not going up by the same rate.

I'm all for video growth, but lets be realistic when companies like Cisco put out numbers like these and won't show us how they came up with them. Traffic growth without revenue growth really does not matter.

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.