It seems that no matter who you talk to, or what industry segment they are from, you can't escape the whole online video monetization debate. While it's a topic that is important to talk about, I think many forgot that today, for the vast majority of content owners, online video is a line item cost, not a revenue generator.

While everyone is working to change the economic dynamics of online video from cost to profit, we have to be realistic and truthful about what content owners are going through, especially in today's tough economic climate. I hear a lot of industry vendors talk about how they are looking to "add value" with their offering or how their platform allows for "monetization" of content. In many cases, the value is not clearly spelled out by the vendor or it does not exist. Many times what one vendor or customer sees as adding value, another customer wouldn't. Content owners don't want a bunch of fancy marketing terms used to describe what they are buying. They want simple, straight-forward details on how the product or service is going to help them generate money, lower their costs, or at least allow them to break even with their online video offering.

The other day, one major content owner told me that they have nearly 50,000 hours of video archives they have yet to encode and place online as doing so would simply cost them money each month. And while they already have a large volume of traffic to their site, the simple cost to encode, store, manage and deliver all of that content won't generate them any revenue this year. This highlights the major problem that content owners are facing, even a top-tier major content owner such as this one.

Aside from a handful of online video offerings from companies like Apple, MLB and others, how many other companies can we point to who are making money today? When asked, even the major broadcasters won't give out any real details on whether they are even covering their costs for their online video offerings. As an industry, if we can't point to dozens of successful case studies published online that show content owners making money, then we have to be even smarter on the projections and expectations we set with content owners and with one another in the industry.

Many are working and working hard to solve this problem. Online video advertising is only just beginning, new consumer devices are starting to come to market and the quality of video is getting better each year. Three to four years from now this will look like an entirely different industry, but it's going to take a lot of work to get there. Some content owners won't make it and many are going to struggle for some time to come. While we are seeing progress with many different facets of online video, we need to keep the industry grounded and realistic and remember that for nearly all content owners, online video is still a cost center.

UPDATED: I've now heard back from Move Networks and can confirm that CEO John Edwards is still the CEO of the company. In addition, John has now been named executive chairman of the board of directors. Move says 30% of the company has been laid off and they "are making the necessary adjustments and planning appropriately to get to profitability more quickly."

It's always unfortunate for any company to have to do layoffs and for employees to lose their jobs, but if the layoffs help Move get to profitability faster, it needs to be done. I've also been told, but not by Move, that these layoffs were planned back in November and that folks were told their last day would be this week. If that is the case, it was a nice way for Move to do it, giving people three months notice.

While Move won't say how much revenue they did last year, I have heard from people who would know that Move billed roughly $40M in total 2008 revenue. I don't know how much cash they are burning through but with the increased business Move has been signing up and the financial savings they will see from the layoffs, I think Move could get to profitability in the next 18 months if not sooner.

Move Networks made some major layoffs in the past day or two and rumors are circulating that CEO John Edwards has also been let go. While I can't confirm or deny if Move has changed their CEO, I'm hoping it's not true, I can confirm that layoffs have happened. I reached various Move employees in the past few hours who told me they could not comment on what is taking place as they no longer work for the company.

Some Move Networks employees e-mails are now bouncing and when you call Move's HQ and use their automated phone system, John Edwards and other employees names are no longer found. Move did say they will contact me shortly to give me the details, and I will update this post when I know more.

Added 4:21pm – When reached by phone Steamboat Ventures declined to comment on any of the changes today at Move Networks and passed me off to an outside PR agency.

Added 4:29pm – I've now heard from multiple former Move employees who have been let go and it appears the layoffs have come from locations all over North America and not just from Move's headquarters as some were speculating.

StreamingMedia.com has a series of three upcoming webinars that I will be moderating over the next few weeks. Kicking off tomorrow at 2pm ET is Limelight Networks and Gomez presenting on how content owners can "Maximize Your CDN investment". Learn why real-world testing is the best measure of a CDN's performance, tips for improving the performance of your infrastructure, metrics for measuring effectiveness from the user's perspective and how a CDN partner can lower your infrastructure costs. The webinar is free and those who attend are entered to win a free TOMTOM GPS unit.

Next week, CDNetworks and Adobe are presenting on "How to Optimize Your Video Streaming Projects with Flash Media Interactive Server 3.5"

And in two weeks, on February 26th, Rhozet will be presenting on "Transcoding 101". Learn about video and audio formats, why and when format conversion (transcoding) is critical, the vocabulary of transcoding, industry-leading transcoding technologies, and how to generate supplemental revenue streams via IPTV, VOD, DVD, web and mobile media.

Folks have been speculating today that Global Crossing might soon enter the CDN space by reselling one of the current CDNs in the market. I can confirm that Global Crossing has already been working with Limelight Networks and started reselling their CDN offering over the past few weeks and plans to focus primarily on the European market. Folks inside the industry have been talking about this for awhile now, but the companies involved have been pretty quiet and not commented on the story.

Unique to the deal is that Global Crossing is also providing first level support for customers and is hooked into Limelight's network so that Global Crossing can do self-provisioning and real-time monitoring of the network. For Global Crossing, they get more than just a reseller type agreement and can take full control and responsibility for the customer. For Limelight, it allows them to try and penetrate the enterprise market which is Global Crossing's strength and a vertical that Limelight has been targeting in the hopes of diversifying their revenue across more than just media and entertainment customers.

In addition to Limelight, Global Crossing is also already selling EdgeCast's CDN services as well but I don't know the specifics around the support and provisioning on the EdgeCast network. Although based on what I know of EdgeCast's software, which is fully designed for resllers to completely manage customers on their own, I expect the deal to be similar to Limelight's, although the company would not comment.

While I expect we'll hear more details about this from Global Crossing at some time, what I'd really like to know is what metrics they plan to use to decide when to sell one CDN over another? Why would they tell one company to use EdgeCast over Limelight or vice versa? Is it simply based on price? Location of servers? I'd also like to know if Global Crossing has any sort of internal system setup where they can pass traffic from one CDN to the other without the customer knowing and basically load balance between the two.

David Vorhaus from Yankee Group Research put out a report this morning on the EdgeCast and Global Crossing deal but the report is not public for me to link to.

The advance program for the Streaming Media East show in May in NYC is now online. We've got roughly 35 sessions this year and about 110 speaking spots. I am starting to place speakers today. I have over 800 speaking submissions to go through but have already placed a bunch of great folks from Disney, Babelgum, boxee, ABC Television, MetLife, BusinessWeek.com, Tuner, Syracuse University and a few others. The process of placing speakers has just started, so if you see a session you think you need to be a part of, better contact me fast.

Here is a quick outline of the session titles, full descriptions can be found online.

• Bridging TV And Broadband And Cutting The Cable
• Streaming Production: Improving Your Video Quality
• Online Video And Set-Top Boxes
• Demo: Compelling Video Advertising Campaigns
• Using Metadata to Better Engage Your Audience
• Live Broadcasting with Mobile Phones, Consumer Cameras and Laptops
• How Old Media Is Embracing Online Video and New Media
• Content Production for the Web
• The CDN Ecosystem: Moving Beyond Bit Delivery
• Successful Content Syndication and Aggregation Strategies
• Monetizing Long-Form Video
• Can Broadband Network Operators Successfully Harness P2P?
• Media Framework: Video Publishing Platforms
• CDN Research Data: Market Sizing and Pricing Trends
• Implementing Flash Video DVR Functionality For Live Broadcasts
• Tools And Best Practices For Enterprise Streaming Media
• Best Practices: Marketing Video for Multiplatform Delivery
• Making Effective Online Video for Education
• Microsoft Smooth Streaming: Delivering HD-Quality Video Over HTTP
• Reinventing The Ad Model Through Discovery And Targeting
• The Impact Of Broadband-Enabled TVs, Gaming Consoles And Devices
• Automation And Workflow Solutions For Transcoding Your Video Content
• New Advertising Platforms and Networks
• Live Broadcasts And HD Video: Can Web Video Ever Scale To TV-Sized Audiences?
• Cost Savings from Enterprise Streaming
• Video for Distance Learning & Classroom Training

In addition to the Streaming Media East program, shortly we will publish the special one-day Content Delivery Summit agenda. Stay tuned

While Level 3 recently laid off part of their workforce in December, their CDN group is still hiring and has half a dozen open positions they are looking to fill today. The list they just sent me includes the following:

• CDN Product Manager – Broomfield, CO or Thousand Oaks, CA
• CDN Field Expert, Director Product Management – Washington, DC area
• CDN Operations Engineers – Broomfield, CO
• CDN Service Delivery Technicians – Broomfield, CO & Tulsa, OK
• CDN Account Directors – DC, LA, San Francisco

If you're interested, contact Mary Spuler at Level 3.

If your online video related company has any job openings, let me know. In many cases I will highlight them here on the blog – free of charge.

As an avid Mets fan, I check their website every day and within the past 24 hours, MLB put up a notice on all team pages that they have opened up MLB.TV for 2009 with cheaper rates than last year. MLB is once again going with two different options, a basic subscription service at $79.95 for the year and a premium service at $109.95 for the year. As the website points out, both of these packages are $10 cheaper than they were last year if you pay upfront. But for those who want to pay monthly, there is no discount being offered with the monthly costs being $19.95 for premium and $14.95 for the regular package.

In December, Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM) President and CEO Bob Bowman told PaidContent.org that in 2009, "…we have to lower our prices". Clearly MLBAM is looking to drive more subscriptions with a reduced rate and only offering the discount to those who pay upfront for the entire year is pretty straight forward. In addition to the lower price, the premium service comes with some new technology features enabled by MLB's switch to Flash in the beginning of the year. The most relevant of which is the ability to have DVR like functionality during a live game, a new feature of Flash Media Server 3.5 that Adobe introduced in November of last year.

MLB's premium service also allows for a new picture in picture feature and they also say HD quality is new for 2009. With the high-bitrate encoding MLB was doing last year, their video quality was already very good, taking it up to HD only makes the deal even sweater. I'm interested to hear the tech specs on how MLB is doing the encoding for HD video and what they will be providing.

As far as I am concerned, MLB is doing everything right with their online video offering in 2009 by giving us better quality, at a lower cost. Now if only they could figure out a way to get rid of all the blackout restrictions.