In the past 36 hours, I've seen 37 stories in my Google reader about the the MJ webcast and unless I missed it, not a single article talked about anything pertaining to the business side of live broadcasting. Every time a large webcast takes place on the Internet, the industry wants to speculate about the Internet breaking or failing in some way and everyone seems to want to cover the story only from an infrastructure angle.

While some seem to think it makes for great headlines by asking if the Internet will crash under the strain and want to imply some sort of doom and gloom from too much traffic, in reality, the titles of many of these articles should be seen for what they really are – a headline.

Does it really matter to any industry how much traffic is delivered if there is no business model behind it to sustain it? Sure, lots of traffic is great for the CDNs, good exposure for the companies that make the video platforms and some of the other vendors involved, but what about the content owner who is paying to make this happen? Over the years, I've done enough large-scale live events for many of the major portals including Yahoo!, MSN, MTV and VH-1 to know what live events truly cost to produce and they are not cheap. At a time when content owners are trying to create a sustainable online business, the industry only seems to be writing about traffic numbers for webcasts or how many Facebook updates took place.

What we should be talking and writing about is the costs associated with putting these events live on the web and the potential ways content owners can turn this into a business over time. How much money does any major newscaster lose during a one-off large scale live event? Are they trying to sell sponsorships during the event? Do they have any type of ad model specific to live events? Are they seeing any success at all when it comes to covering their costs? These are all questions we should be asking and more importantly having discussions about so we can try to figure out the business models to sustain these events. At some point, all of this technology boils down to a tool content owners need to use to sustain themselves in some way. Why is no one talking about that?

Instead, those who cover the industry are so caught up in the traffic numbers and the many ways they can turn those numbers into nothing more than a headline. Think to yourself how many articles you read on the MJ webcast and ask yourself if you learned anything different from all of those stories you read. I know I didn't. Nearly all of them simply said the Internet didn't break and reported the traffic numbers. Nothing wrong with reporting the traffic from an event, but there is a bigger story here that we should be discussing as an industry. There is a business somewhere behind the technology of online video, even for large scale live events.

This is what disappoints me about the industry sometimes. 2009 marks the fourteenth year since streaming was first used on the Internet. Fourteen years. There is more to this than infrastructure and when all you ever see people writing about after a large broadcast is stuff involving bandwidth, it makes it look like we have not progressed much as an industry. This industry needs to grow, we need content owners to be profitable and we need to be discussing how that is going to take place and what we can do to get there faster.

Related Posts:

– We Need To Remember, Online Video Is A Cost Center, Not A Profit Center

– Webcasting Large Entertainment Events Still Unprofitable

Larry Kless and Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen, co-chairs of this year's inaugural Online Video Platform Summit, are posting updates about the event as well as news about the online video platform space on Twitter. Check it out — Twitter name is @ovpsummit, and the event hash tag is #ovps09.

Late last night, Neal Page, Co-Founder and CEO of Inlet Technologies passed away after a year-long battle with Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML). A few months back, Neal and I were chatting about the industry and he mentioned that he was stepping down from the day to day side of things to take care of some medical issues, but I didn't realize how severe it really was.

Neal co-founder Inlet Technologies in 2003 and before that, founded Osprey Technologies in 1994 which is now a division of ViewCast Corporation. For anyone who did webcasting back in the days, Osprey was the "de facto" capture card for enabling live video over the Internet. The Osprey product line was a big factor in the success of live webcasting in the early days of the streaming media industry.

While I wouldn't consider myself to have truly known Neal outisde of business, he was always professional, polite and someone I never heard a single negative comment about; something that carriers a lot of weight in this world when it seems many people in business forget that your reputation and professionalism is all that really matters.

Inlet has a short announcement of Neal's passing on their website and co-founder John Bishop is doing a 100-mile LIVESTRONG bike ride looking to raise $7,500 in support of Neal. He's already at 75% of his goal so lets try and help him reach it.

In a deal that had been in the works for some time, it was announced today that effective last week, Thomson Reuters has acquired Canada based Streamlogics. Terms of the deal were not disclosed and I don't have any details on the valuation but will update the post if I find out.

This is a nice deal for Streamlogics who has been providing webcasting based services for the past ten years to many major enterprise, government and pharmaceutical organizations in North America and Canada. While headquartered in Toronto, Streamlogics had sales offices in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Nashville Tennessee.

For Thomson, Streamlogics is now at least the seventh webcasting company they have acquired over the past ten years. While I'm sure I am forgetting a few of them, the ones that come to mind are CCBN, NetVision, Earnings.com, Broadcast1 and RAW Communications amongst others.

Over the holiday weekend I started going through all of the speaking submissions for the Streaming Media West show and after looking at a few hundred submissions, it's clear that many companies in this space can't describe in one sentence what they do. I've always been one to believe that it's crucial that every person in your organization be able to deliver the exact same pitch on who you are and what you do as a company.

All organizations should be able to describe in one sentence, or within ten seconds if speaking, what their value proposition is. They should not have to fumble for words, have long drawn out answers or take up a lot of time. While many sales executives can do this, it's something everyone in the company needs to be able to do, whether they are a sales person or not.

On our speaking submission forms, one of the required fields is a brief description of who your company is and what they offer in the market. After going through a few hundred of these submissions and e-mails, it's clear that companies are either very good at this, or very poor. While I don't need to call out any companies by name, here are some of the pitches on what was submitted to us:

• is a leading provider of world-class solutions for online video technologies.
• the world's leading provider of online video solutions in the consumer space.
• is a fully integrated, digital media technology company.
• our solutions allow you to realize the potential of online video with consumers.
• is a one-stop, turnkey provider of online video services and entertainment.
• is a leading video services company powering the distribution of live online video for the web.
• our company is committed to delivering content to consumers, along with more effective ways for companies and advertisers to promote their goods and services to this growing audience.

While many of these descriptions all use a lot of buzz words from the industry, none of them describe what exactly any of these companies do. What kind of provider? Hardware? Software? Video platform? Are you focused on marketing? Technology? Content creation? All these descriptions leave me with more questions that answers.

However, not all of the company descriptions are bad. Many are quite good and it seems none were in-between. Half were really on point, half were pretty poor. As an example, here is just a small sample of company descriptions that were very good:

• Visible Measures is the independent third-party measurement firm for Internet video publishers, advertisers, and social marketers.
• Similar to online photo sharing sites, Motionbox makes it extremely easy for consumers to share high quality personal videos with friends and family.
• Accordent Technologies provides enterprise-wide rich media communications solutions that enable world-class organizations to inform, train and engage their audiences online.
• Sigma Designs is a leading fabless provider of highly integrated SoC solutions that are used to deliver multimedia entertainment throughout the home.

The point of sharing this is not to look down on any company but to make vendors realize that they need to refine their pitch. If you can't describe what your company does and what they offer in the market without someone having to go visit your website to figure it out, then the messaging needs to be corrected. This principle is no different for any other industry sector and certainly applies to any business in any market. Take a look at your company description, deliver that message to others inside your organization and ask for feedback. Is it clear? Does it use too many marketing terms? Are you using buzz words just for the hell of it? How does it compare to your competitors?

Once you think you have it refined, share it with others in the industry, run it by your customers and see what the feedback is. Always keep refining the message and make sure that everyone in your organization can always deliver the same clear, concise message no matter who they are talking to. Back when I worked at Globix, everyone in the company had to stand up in front of others and was tested on giving the company pitch, even if you didn't work in the sales organization. It's great practice for all employees and in today's economy, everyone in the organization is in sales one way or another.

Today, Akamai "officially" announced support for variable bit rate streaming of live and on-demand video content for the iPhone and iPod touch and has launched a new showcase site at iphone.akamai.com. The site which has been live for about a month, showcases content from about a dozen content providers including FOX News, MTV and USA Today amongst others.

Akamai's new iPhone streaming service is based on the standard HTTP delivery protocol which for Akamai, means they can utilize more of their HTTP network infrastructure as opposed to proprietary based streaming protocols. Earlier in the week I came across the showcase site and tested the quality and while it looks pretty good, there were times when the video appeared choppy. Hard to know what exactly caused that as the videos as they play now, don't give you any performance or quality indicators in the player to know if your connection is having problems. That's one feature I'd like to see in the player and one that most PC based video players already have built in.

I have some videos of what the quality looks like on an iPhone and will post those shortly. Here's a short clip:

While there's been a lot of hype about peer-assisted technology (P2P) over the past few years, in reality, the technology has gotten very little adoption when it comes to being used to distribute video, let alone streaming. Today, most of the content being delivered via P2P is for software and gaming downloads and so far we haven't seen any of the major CDNs offer a real peer-assisted solution on their network. Later this year, that is going to change.

Within the next two quarters, both Akamai and Limelight are going to bring to the market peer-assisted delivery services on their network. And unlike previous deals where some of the CDNs were simply reselling a third party P2P platform, these solutions are going to be their own, deeply deployed and integrated directly into their networks.

(Correction: In the case of Limelight, they will work with other existing P2P companies who want
to use the Limelight Network for peer-assisted delivery.)

While some might think the reason Akamai and Limelight need peer-assisted solutions is to reduce their costs, or offer a cheaper level of delivery in the market, they would be wrong. This is not going to be about reducing a customer's bandwidth bill as many P2P providers pitch in the market today, but rather the ability for Akamai and Limelight to guarantee a certain level of quality. For all the talk in the market about HD video and the word "quality", the fact of the matter is that the CDNs don't control the last mile and have no way to ensure truly HD quality video.

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