It's been a long busy week with the Content Delivery Summit and Streaming Media East shows happening over the past few days. I got to meet a ton of content owners, many from Wall Street and got to spend time with a lot of different vendors in the industry for one on one meetings. We had a record number of 3,733 registered attendees for the East show this year, our highest ever, which is a testament to the growth the online video industry is still experiencing, even with the poor economy. Thanks to everyone who helped make both shows such a success.

I have a lot of posts to work on for next week on things I heard, saw and trends I am seeing take place in the market. There is a ton of content delivery related news and analysis for me to get online as well as my CDN pricing from Q1 which I presented at the show. We'll also have all of the on-demand videos up shortly and most of the presentations are already available for download.

Dozens of articles about the show have already come out and until I get a post up with all the links, Larry Kless has put together a long list of the coverage on his blog here and here. He also has a post with all of the news and releases that came out during the show and archived video of the NY Video meetup that took place with nearly 500 attendees.

I'll be doing a lot of writing over the weekend so look for multiple posts each day next week with my recaps from the shows. I actually have too much to cover and won't get to everything so if there is something you really want me to talk about, drop me a line and let me know.

Our thanks to the 200+ attendees at today's Content Delivery Summit for making the show a great success. We had a really nice mix of content delivery customers, vendors and Wall Street analysts in the crowd with lots of networking and very focused discussions taking place. There is so much to cover from the summit and I'll try to get some posts up as soon as I can. We'll also have the video archives up shortly. In the mean time, you can already find some of the presentations here.

My thanks also to the fourteen vendors who sponsored the event and helped make it a success. If you attended the summit and have any comments on what you saw, heard or would like to see next year, please let me know in the comments section.

Tonight we're teaming up with the NY Video Meetup group to once again host their monthly event at the Hilton Hotel in midtown, the night before the Streaming Media East show opens. About 500 attendees are coming out to see, discuss and vote on four exciting web video startups. This will be a packed event so please visit the NY Video Meetup website for all the details and make sure to RSVP as there are only a few seats left.

Agenda:
6:30-7:00PM Networking
7:00-8:00PM New Product Demos & Q&A
8:00-9:00PM Job Exchange & Networking (cash bar downstairs)

May Startup Presenters:
1. Volomedia – Jeff Karnes, VP Marketing & Products
2. Clearspring – Alex Calic, VP Network Development
3. Aniboom – Uri Shinar, Founder & CEO
4. SesameVault – Cameron Brain, Founder & CEO
5. Magma (Stealth) – Andrew Baron, Founder & CEO of Rocketboom will unveil his new startup

All attendees will also have the opportunity to win some free all-access conference passes to the Streaming Media East show.

New York based Veotag, which allows you to display clickable text within an audio or video file has been acquired by Atlanta based streaming media provider Multicast Media. Terms of the deal have not yet been announced but I expect the official announcement will probably come out next week.

Next week’s Streaming Media East show will be mark the 20th show that I have chaired over the past seven years. Whenever you have over 250 speakers a year, across three shows, changes and cancellations are always bound to happen. That’s simply part of the conference planning business. But each year that goes by, more and more companies are becoming really bad with their speaking commitments. Too many companies are confirming the spots and then the day of the event, don’t even show up. We get no call, no notice and the company does not even send a replacement speaker. This is simply unprofessional and makes your company look bad. I have a list of companies that will no longer be invited back as a result.

While most folks would probably agree with me that’s just bad manners for no shows, what about all the speakers who decide the day before, or less than three business days before the show to cancel and don’t send a replacement speaker? I’ve probably had twenty speakers cancel this week alone and have been fortunate to replace most of them, many times with the help of the session moderators but it has not been easy. Trying to organize, plan, market and promote a show of this size is difficult when 15% of your speakers change three days before the event. So I am putting companies on notice right now that it’s simply unprofessional and it makes you look bad when your company name is in the program and someone in the audience wanted to hear from you, but you didn’t show up. Yes, it does not help me plan a show, but I am not the one presenting on stage, you are. So when you don’t show up, it hurts you a lot more than it hurts me. You send a bad message to the market and it’s just bad for your business.

Things happens, sometimes speakers have no choice but to cancel. People get sick, go into labor early, flights gets canceled and things happen out of anyone’s control. But too many companies think they can simply call up and say the “economy” is keeping them from coming or that “budgets” have now been cut. If you are on the West coast and are planning to speak at the show two days from now, that means you would have already booked your flight, hotel and other costs that are not exactly easy or many times possible to refund. So telling me two days before the show that all of a sudden there is no budget probably means you really had no intention of sticking to your speaking commitment to begin with. Way too many people are using the lack of budget as an excuse as if all of a sudden the economy got bad in the last three days. If you don’t think you can make it and budgets may be an issue, then why do you commit to the speaking spot? Speakers hound me really wanting some spots, but then all of a sudden act as if they had no chance of showing up anyway, even though they double or triple confirmed the commitment.

Companies need to be a lot better with follow up and understand what you are committing to when you say you are going to show up somewhere and speak, for any show or event. Some are really good but it seems that as each year goes by, more and more companies are handling their speaking engagements very poorly. Case in point is when it takes a company three months to decide if they want a speaking spot that has been offered to them. If it takes you three months to even decide if you want the speaking spot to begin with, before you even decide who the speaker will be, then you really don’t value the opportunity and it’s not a fit. Moving forward, I am going to be a lot more strict with speaking spots at future shows. Companies that take weeks or months to even acknowledge they have been requested to speak will simply be skipped.

For those that do adhere to their speaking commitments, I thank you. Not everyone is unprofessional and some speakers who had to cancel, (MTV, Sling Media, Adobe, Level 3 and others) were all able to find a replacement speaker in the company to send in their place, so I thank them for that help. If you attend next week and find that someone who you were planning to chat with or wanted to meet is no longer speaking, let me know and I will do my best to connect you with them. While having 160 speakers over three days would mean most folks expect some changes to take place, my job is to make sure you met up with and get introduced to whomever you came to hear speak. If I can make that happen for you, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

In the nearly two years since Level 3 first got into the CDN business, they have managed to accomplish a lot with their CDN offering in a very short period of time. From both a revenue perspective and from a product feature set, Level 3 has done in two years what took Limelight four years to do when Limelight first started offering their CDN services in the market. It took Limelight from 03' to 06' to break the $50M revenue mark, something Level 3 achieved after its second year. And if we estimate that Level 3 does at least $75M in CDN revenue this year, they will already have done more than half of what I expect Limelight's revenue to be this year, around $150M.

Much of Level 3's success with their CDN offering has been a result of the CDN group being treated like a startup. For all of the internal politics and red tape that all large companies have, from day one the CDN group has moved quickly, executing their product road map and operating outside much of the confines of the rest of Level 3. For any telco wanting to get into the space by way of building out their own service, this is the only way to grow a CDN offering in the market. The CDN market is very competitive, you have to be able to turn on a dime, get proposals out the door fast and roll out product upgrades every quarter. The business is lost or won based on speed and how responsive you are to customers. Most telcos don't have the mentality for this, they can't do anything quickly and as a result, they can't nurture a new product like content delivery to the market.

Level 3 has done the opposite, but only because the CDN group has been able to operate like a startup inside the larger company. With Level 3 announcing their restructuring plans last week, they are basically saying it's time to move the CDN product out of startup mode and into the rest of the company. While that makes sense if they really want to grow the business and ramp the revenue, it's also a surefire way to kill the business if not handled correctly. If the integration of the CDN offering is not done right and the product road map, marketing, sales and delivery side of the business gets bogged down internally and no longer operates with the speed needed to win in this market, Level 3's CDN offering could lose all momentum.

While I am not saying that will happen, we have seen it take place in the market before and it should be a concern to Level 3. With the company restructuring internally, it also means they are now losing at least three of the key executives who have helped bring the service to the market and were responsible for helping to integrate other Level 3 services like Vyvx into the CDN offering. While losing some key people does not mean Level 3 can't move forward and doesn't still have a lot of smart people working in the CDN group, it's to be seen what the strategy and vision is going forward. Level 3 has appointed Peter Neill as the new SVP of the Content Markets group for the company, which the CDN product falls under. And while I don't know Peter at all and have not had the chance to speak with him since his new role, his background is not in the broadcast or contents market, something that all three of the former executives were very strong in.

In trading emails with Jim Crowe yesterday, he made it very clear that their "views on the strategic importance of CDN have not changed" and that they "are not backing away from our determination to be a leader in CDN." That's very good to hear, but I think the point needs to be driven home stronger in the market. As I mentioned earlier in the week, I got a lot of calls on Monday from Level 3 customers when Level 3 made these restructuring changes. Many wanted my opinion on what was happening, how that would affect them and what this means to Level 3's commitment to the CDN product line. While I don't doubt Level 3's continued commitment to their CDN offering, they also need to realize that they created a lot of this turmoil in the market. Nearly five month ago Level 3 started talking about the changes, but really only executed on them last week. That means that in that time, they let their competitors use the prospect of change against them and it opened up doubt with some of Level 3's customers. In my opinion, the changes took too long to make and should not have been discussed so far in advance. Customers should not be wondering for months what is going to take place.

Level 3 has been a hot topic this week and I've traded e-mails with a lot of industry folks who think this is now the end for Level 3's CDN offering. I don't think that is the case and I still continue to hear from Level 3 customers who are very happy with the service and the support they receive. Level 3 is not charging the lowest price in the market just to give this stuff away and they still have the momentum. But Level 3 needs to manage the integration of the CDN product into the rest of the company very closely and in my opinion, needs to share with the market and customers their CDN strategy moving forward. When you lose three key execs who to date have been responsible for sharing that vision with everyone, you can't go months before you decide who your CDN evangelist is going to be. You need to get them out there immediately, talking to everyone, explaining the vision, laying out the product road map and showing everyone that while change sometimes brings uncertainty, it won't impact the success of Level 3's CDN offering.

I'm getting a lot of questions asking if any of the sessions from the Streaming Media East show and Content Delivery Summit will be available online. The short answer is yes. We have always recorded all of the sessions from all of our shows and made them available on-demand about a week after the show is over. You can always find all of these archives at our video portal located at www.streamingmedia.com/videos

We'll also be streaming live some of the tracks for both shows next week with the help from Ustream, so look for those links on my blog next week.

In addition to our video portal, we also have archives of every Streaming Media East, West and Europe show dating back to 1999, nearly 2,000 hours worth of content. While we don't have many of the older shows online, as we don't have the original masters and many of them are encoded at 56k, if you are ever looking for a specific session let me know and I can track it down for you.