I'm happy to announce that I've now confirmed 80% of the speakers for this years Streaming Media East conference and exhibition, taking place May 12-13th in NYC. I still have some open speaking spots left and have a few positions for those who may want to moderate. Keep an eye on my blog over the next few days as I will be announcing what I am still looking to fill.

Here is a partial list of confirmed companies speaking at the show. Speaker details will go online next week.

I'm still working on the CDN Summit agenda and hope to have that online next week. I'll be posting open speaking spots for that as well as the few remaining spots for East over the next few days.

There's been a lot of changes in the CDN industry in the past few quarters with many carriers and telcos entering the market, mostly via partnerships with other CDNs. Here's an updated list of CDNs in the market, broken down between pure-play CDNs versus non pure-play vendors like carriers and telcos. (To make the list easier to find on my blog, all you have to do is go to www.cdnlist.com for the latest update)

Non Pure-Play CDNs

• AT&T
• Broadmedia
• BT (will launch by year's end)
• Deutsche Telekom (partnered with EdgeCast)
• Global Crossing (reselling Limelight and EdgeCast)
• Internap (acquired VitalStream)
• Level 3 (acquired CDN assets of SAVVIS, acquired Servecast)
• NaviSite (reselling EdgeCast)
• NTT Communications
• Pacnet (partnered with Internap)
  
• PCCW
• Reliance Globalcom (partnered with Internap)
• Tata Communications (partnered and invested in BitGravity)
• TeliaSonera (will launch in April)

Pure-Play CDNs

• Accelia
• Abacast
• Advection.net
• Akamai
• Amazon Web Services
• BitGravity
• BitTorrent
• CacheFly
• ChinaCache
• CDNetworks
• Cotendo
  
• Conviva
• Digital Fountain (acquired by Qualcomm 2/09)
• EdgeCast
• EdgeStream
• Grid Networks (merged with GMS 4/09)
• Highwinds
• Itiva
• Limelight Networks
• Mirror Image
• Move Networks
• Pando Networks
• Panther Express (acquired by CDNetworks 2/09)
• PEER1
• Real Broadcast Network
  
• Technicolor
• Velocix
• Voxel.net
• Vusion

Before anyone starts saying it's not fair to put all these folks on a list, please read my disclaimer in my last CDN post which explains many of the differences between the CDN vendors in the market.

With all the carriers and telcos entering the CDN space of late, it's no surprise that European carrier TeliaSonera plans to enter the CDN market and will probably make the announcement at the MIPTV show in Cannes next month.

TeliaSonera is the number one carrier of IP traffic in Europe and their website says they provide direct connections to their network for more than 80% of all European broadband service providers. They basically own the vast majority of eyeballs in Europe. Currently, many of the CDNs who have delivery services in Europe buy from TeliaSonera and it appears as if they now want to cut out the CDNs and take that business on themselves.

I'm also hearing that they plan to offer a video content management service across their network and plan to make an acquisition in the market to add this functionality to their offering, although I don't know who they plan to acquire or how close a deal may be.

TeliaSonera will need to do a lot more than just be able to deliver bits if they want to truly enter the CDN market and if they do plan to add some applications to the network to help manage video assets, it's a similar approach that Level 3 is taking in the States. The CDN market is going to look very different 24 months from now and while it will take many years for the shift to take place, we're already starting to see a lot of the carriers and telcos lay the ground work for what it to come.

I didn't get a chance to see the premiere episode of Late Night With Jimmy Fallon on TV Monday night so last night, I checked out the archive online. Over the course of the entire show, NBC delivered the exact same 30 second Windex commercial five times. While I have been complaining about the lack of targeted online video advertising for some time, this isn't even about targeting.

Why is NBC delivering me the same ad five times in a row? I find that hard to believe that NBC has no other ad sponsors for the premiere episode of Late Night With Jimmy Fallon. I know it says Windex is the sponsor, but if I play back other clips from the same show, I get an ad for FedEx. And even if Windex is the only sponsor, what impact do they think their ad is going to have when played five times in a row? Now it just annoys me and makes me want to not buy any Windex products. What's the problem here? Is there a shortage of online video advertising inventory? Do advertisers just not get it? Clearly, this isn't working.

Related Posts:

– Lack Of Ad Targeting Keeping Publishers From Making Money With Online Video

– Yahoo! Video Shows Us The Problems With Online Video Advertising Today

On Monday, BitGravity announced their new live HD streaming offering dubbed "BG Live HD" which will be available in April. The technology supports 720p or 1080p at 30 frames per second with 1080i support in future development plans. While the demo I saw of the service looked excellent and had very good quality, I think traction could be hard to come by even with BitGravity's low pricing in the market. While I agree that the total cost of ownership for BitGravity's live system could be cheaper than some of their rivals, customers are not buying on price alone.

Over the past year we've seen many CDNs and live video offerings come to the market saying they can take share from guys like Akamai, Limelight and Move Networks. But to date, the big vendors still have nearly all of the live event business and content owners have yet to flock to any of the smaller players simply based on a cheaper price.

BitGravity's new live offering is not going after customers who outsource the need for a broadcast video platform to someone like Move Networks, but rather is targeting the content owner who wants to do their own encoding in-house and is not just looking at how much it costs to deliver some bits. That could be BitGravity's advantage, targeting a smaller segment of the market others aren't focusing on as hard, but it's too early to know if they can get any traction. BitGravity has been out in the market for over a year now and we have yet to hear if any major broadcasters are using their service.

In that time, BitGravity has already been offering very low prices in the market, usually half of what Limelight or Level 3 charge and many times, with no commits. I have not yet seen that aggressive pricing strategy pay off in the way of large customers and anyone who follows the CDN market knows that trying to grab market share with low pricing never works out in the long run. That said, BitGravity does not license or run their network using Adobe's Flash Media Servers, so it is possible that their costs are lower than others, but no one truly knows.

BitGravity's live HD service looks really nice, but so do a lot of others and each day it is getting more and more difficult to see the quality difference from one HD video over another. BitGravity is selling their live HD service with the value that it has very low latency, around six seconds. That's good to hear, but it still does not beat Adobe's Flash Media Live Encoder with FMS that has a default of only two seconds for a non multi-bitrate encoding. BitGravity may truly have a cheaper offering in the market but for me, the proof is seeing if BitGravity can sign up customers to use the service. If BitGravity can show that major broadcast customers are using their live HD platform, they might be able to get some traction. But until we can see if that happen, it's all speculation.

Since BitGravity is a private company, it's hard to really gauge how much money they are burning through. They raised $11.5 million from Tata Communications about six months ago and raised a smaller round of $2.5 million a few months before that. In that time, BitGravity has been doing a lot of development work and has expanded their headcount so clearly they are spending a good amount of the money they have raised.

For me, like many of the new CDNs in the market, the verdict is still out on BitGravity's potential success as we don't really know enough about their business to judge if they might have the staying power to survive in the market. Adoption is the key. If they can get customers signed up and scale their business, they have a chance. But if they can't grow revenue quick enough, they will be like a lot of the other CDNs in the market who have enough cash today, but come 12-18 months from now, will be hoping to sell their company if they can't raise more capital. Right now, it's too early to know where BitGravity may end up until we hear more concrete details about their business.

This morning, Roku officially announced that the Roku digital video player can now stream movies and TV shows from Amazon's Video On Demand offering. I've been playing around with the beta for the past few weeks and while the interface is very nice, HD quality videos from Amazon aren't offered. That said, if Roku can continue to add more content partners for the device and improve the video quality, I think they have a very good chance at having a total of half a million boxes sold by the end of this year.

Setting up the Roku box with your Amazon account is easy and requires you to add a five digit PIN. Once done, you're up and running and searching through movies and TV shows is pretty simple. The Amazon offering on Roku allows you to browse Amazon's Video on
Demand menu right form the TV, which is something currently not
available for Netflix content. The only real problem I found was that there is no way to skip through a long list of movie titles. You have to scroll through them one by one and if your list is really long, it can take awhile.

Unlike the Netflix service on Roku, users who want to get content from Amazon need to pay $3.99 for a 24 hour movie rental or $1.99 to purchase TV shows. Initially that may surprise some Roku owners who have always thought of the box as providing free content via Netflix, but Amazon's Video On Demand offering is not an all-you-can-eat service.

While the video quality was good for most of the videos I watched, it could definitely be improved. I have seen some Roku users speculating on discussion boards that the Roku is not powerful enough to stream HD quality movies, but we know that's not the case. Three months ago, Roku announced that HD quality videos were now available for the Netflix streaming service, so the lack of HD content from Amzon is a content problem, not a technical one. In addition, while the Roku supports stereo audio, there is no support yet for surround sound.

While still priced at only $99, the Roku is a really nice affordable box, but is still quite limited with regards to the content one can get on it. As with any offering, the content available for viewing will dictate Roku's success in the long term. While I expect Roku will announce more content partnerships this year, the key is for Roku to get some major content owners on board. They need to get some major broadcasters or someone like Hulu to agree to make their content available to the Roku. While Roku has talked about going after the major broadcasters, it's a sure bet that they won't license their content for free. That means that any content offering on the Roku from a major broadcaster will enable some form of advertising tied into the service, which might be ok if done correctly.

While I don't have an exact number of units sold, I do know that to date, close to 300,000 Roku's have been sold since it first launched in the market last year. I think that's a pretty successful start, but when compared to the Xbox 360 which to date has sold 13.3 million consoles in the U.S. alone, the Roku still has a long way to go before it is thought of as the primary device one uses for playing back movies and TV shows. While I have a TiVo, Xbox 360, Apple TV, Vudu, Roku and broadband enabled Blu-ray player, the Xbox 360 is still the device that is my first choice, based on video quality and the catalog of content available.

Over time, I think the Roku box will compete less with the Xbox 360 as both devices primary roles and price points are very different. But for now, the Roku is competing with the Xbox 360 in my household.

While many want to proclaim that yesterday's announcement of CDNetworks acquiring Panther Express is the start of major consolidation in the CDN sector, it's not. More than a year ago people were saying the exact same thing and in that time, we've only seen this one deal take place. Not to mention, the CDNetworks acquisition was for a company that was not profitable, had many non-commit contracts and from what I keep hearing, CDNetworks got a very good deal, valuing Panther Express at a little over $5M. But even if Panther was valued for more money, it still would not signal the start of any major consolidation.

The problem with thinking that major consolidation will take place is that the vast majority of CDNs don't own any real technology, don't have applications, have no patents, no intellectual property, have a small number of customers and very little revenue. Lets say that you are a telco that wants to enter the CDN market. What do you get by acquiring a current CDN that has very little in the way of technology or revenue? While we've seen many telcos and carriers enter the CDN market with offerings, none of them have made any acquisitions yet and most are simply reselling another third party CDN.

Some CDN vendors do have some value add technologies, but most don't yet have a lot of revenue. There is some value placed on hybrid networks and those CDNs who have more application layers on top of their CDN that would be considered more valuable. Certainly Akamai and Limelight are always possible acquisition targets simply based on their revenue, but they are the exceptions. Looking past them, the rest of the pure-play CDN vendors all did less than $20M in revenue
last year and for the vast majority of them, they won't even do half that much this year.

That said, in a few years, the revenue share from pure-play CDNs, (defined as those who get the vast majority of their revenue from CDN services versus other companies who get revenue from things like colocation and transit) is going to drastically change. In 2008 the market size for video delivery services was $398M (www.cdnmarket.com). Of that, pure-play CDN vendors accounted for 86.1% of the total revenue. At some point, a larger percentage of CDN revenue is going to come from the telcos, carriers and those who provide other services outside of just content delivery. But until that time comes, the pure-play CDNs still control the vast portion of the market.

One of the main reasons we have not yet seen any telco or carrier do an acquisition is simply due to the fact that the video delivery market is still very small. This isn't a knock on the CDN industry, or the vendors, it's just reality. As much as we all want the market to be bigger, the market for video CDN services is still very small revenue wise when compared to the other services carriers and telcos offer. As IP based video delivery continues to grow, these companies will start to take more of an interest in the pure-play CDNs. But that's why for now, aside from Level 3, who bought some CDN assets and technology, all of the other carriers and telcos have decided to license or resell a CDN instead of buying one.

They want to get their feet wet with CDN services, get a handle on customer requirements, see how current CDNs handle things like provisioning and scaling their networks and then decide if they want to be in the business. This is exactly what folks like Global Crossing told me this week when they discussed how they want to slowly enter the market, without having to deal with capex spending. Once they evaluate the market, if they decide they want to be a major player, then they will look at doing an acquisition 12-18 months down the line. This thinking is nearly identical amongst all of the telcos and carriers I have spoken to who have chosen to resell another CDN, for now.

Even if Panther Express was valued for more money, this still would not signal the start of any kind of major consolidation in the market. While I do know of two other CDNs who have offers on the table now and could potentially be acquired shortly, like Panther, they are very small and it won't impact the market dramatically.

For more details on the CDN market, including lots of revenue and market share and sizing numbers, see my Frost & Sullivan CDN report, which you can still get at a discounted price.