This morning, the Streaming Media West show kicked off with a keynote by Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, who highlighted some of the data around the usage of Amazon Web Services. Jordan Hoffner, Director of Content Partnerships for YouTube then presented on some of the challenges associated with making money from online video. I’ll get the slides from Werner’s presentation online as soon as I get them and you can download Jordan’s slides from his presentation here.

A lot of news has crossed the wire this morning, with more to come:

• Adap.tv Closes $13 Million in Series B Round of Funding

• IVT Debuts PrimeTime, the Enterprise Video Portal with Search and Social Networking Capabilities

• Octoshape and Highwinds Unleash P2P Solution for Live Streaming

• Qumu Breaks Down Video Barriers with Launch of Capture Studio

• RipCode Announces Latest Version of its Flagship Offering

• Akamai Accelerates Metacafe Leading to Significant Impact on Page Views and Video Consumption

• Kontiki Announces Delivery Management System, Version 5.4

• Gomez Adds Streaming Media Monitoring Service to the ExperienceFirst Platform

• Mirror Image Internet Launches an Easy To Use Media Management Platform for Monetizing Video Content

• DigiMeld Launches Online Video Portal for Independent Content Providers Using Its Grid-Streaming Platform

• DigiMeld Launches New Grid Streaming Technology for High-Quality Internet Video

• Abacast Inc. Announces the Acquisition of Tukati, Inc., Becoming the First Content Distribution Network to Offer Hybrid Peer-Assisted Distribution for Both Live and On Demand Streaming Media

• Ipera Leverages Revolutionary Video Enhancement Technology for Enterprise Video Server Market

• AP Taps ThePlatform For Broadband Video

• Visible Measures’ Viral Reach Database Surpasses 100 Million Unique Videos from More Than 150 Video Sharing Sites

I’ll get more news up as I get it. Don’t forget, if you are in the area, there are various parties and networking events taking place this week.

This morning, Gomez launched a new streaming media monitoring service dubbed Active Streaming XF. For the past few months I have been beta testing the new service and adding my own streaming media URLs into the system from many of the major CDNs. While the service gives you results on all of the usual items you would expect like startup time, packet loss, etc…. it also allows you drill down in great detail on each individual test stream down to the individual IP address.

This is a great feature as it enables a customer to quickly and easily find out if the content delivery network they are using is truly serving content from a specific region of the world. While some CDNs say they serve the content from a local POP, this new Gomez service can tell you if it’s really local delivery or not. Gomez has put a great deal of thought into the service, not only in terms of the technical details it provides but the ease of use you have in managing the data. All of the data that is presented has the ability to be managed simply by dragging a graph, data point or item in the tool bar. You don’t have to ask the system to re-sort the data, you simply drag any aspect of the data to drill down or change the way the data is presented. It is extremely intuitive and is the best interface I have seen so far for any monitoring service.

Right now, many CDNs use Keynote’s competiting monitoring service to validate their SLAs and it will be interesting to see if any of the CDNs being to use Gomez as well. From the testing I was able to do, this new Gomez service has really been thought out well and for some customers, is as cheap as a few hundred dollars a month.

I don’t want to sound ungrateful and I do appreciate vendors thinking of me, but I’d prefer to see vendors save their money and not send me logo encrusted frisbees, beach balls, mugs, calendars, polo shirts and the like. This swag costs vendors a lot of money to get made and in most cases, it’s also arriving to me via FedEx which is costing you another twenty or thirty dollars for delivery.

What I always recommend to any vendor who wants to get in front of the media and leave them with something that keeps their brand in mind is to use flash drives. They are cheap to buy and you can drop them in an envelope and mail them out for less than a dollar. And even better, pre-load it with all of your marketing materials, product sheets, press releases and any other company related content and it’s even more valuable. I’ll actually use it and will look at the contents on the drive.

I’d feel bad if I were to throw out all the shirts I get, being some of them are very nice and some even come custom with my name already on them. But at 185 pounds, anything sized XL looks like a dress on me. So the shirts end up going in one of those clothing donation bins.

Again, I appreciate the thought, but I think the money could be spent more wisely.

This morning, via an e-mail to Web Services customers, Amazon announced a new content delivery offering under development that they expect to make widely available before the end of the year. While the initial content delivery offering won’t compete with the major CDNs like Akamai and Limelight when it is released, it has the potential to down the road if Amazon adds some specific product functionality.

Over the past few months, I have been speaking to Amazon about the content delivery market as a whole and about their new offering. As a result, I am under NDA and am not at liberty to disclose many of the details of the new offering, which Amazon will release when the service is available in a public beta shortly. That being said, there are some details I can talk about now including some of the functionality of the product.

When released, the yet to be named product offering will offer HTTP only delivery for objects, both video and non-video related. The offering won’t support streaming, live broadcasting, or provide many of the other products and services that video content owners need. While those are potential features that Amazon may offer down the road, they real story here is that Amazon is going to offer a high performance method of distributing content with low latency and high data transfer rates. The service will be cheap, rock-solid and targeted to the masses, just like the other AWS products are. While I can’t release any details on pricing, the new service will be like S3 and EC2 in that it will require no contracts, no commitments and customers will only pay for what they use. My opinion, customers won’t be complaining about the price.

Objects must be stored on S3 and initially, the service will not be able to pull content from origin storage on another network. For some, this will be a deal breaker. But for the average customer Amazon is targeting with this, the S3 offering is cheap and reliable. The network will deliver content in North America, Europe and Asia and additional details on the number of POPs and locations will be released by Amazon at a later time. Amazon is "currently working with a small group of private beta customers" for the new service and will provide more details on the offering very shortly.

While the new Amazon offering won’t take any business away from any of the major CDNs for the time being, it will make a real dent in the smaller regional service providers, many of whom focus on HTTP delivery, smaller sized customers and don’t support streaming either. For the major CDNs who are helping to not only deliver video, but also supporting functionality like live broadcasting, Flash, Silverlight, transcoding, authentication and reporting and analytics specific to video, the Amazon service won’t compete with them, yet. But if you are in the CDN business, you better take note of what Amazon is doing and keep a close eye on their CDN offering as it evolves. If Amazon adds additional video specific functionally down the road and provides the kind of support that large content owners need, specific to video, this could get very interesting.

Even with Amazon not going after the really large business that the major CDNs have today, Amazon clearly will be able to dominate the video specific business that requires no complex needs, only requires downloads and needs quality delivery at a cheap price. There are two kinds of CDN customers for video delivery today. The major ones all need a lot of additional services and support and don’t buy on price alone. But the other kind of CDN customers are those who have very commoditized requirements and typically buy solely on price, which is exactly the kind of business Amazon can win.

While there are already over 50 CDNs in the market today (www.cdnlist.com), Amazon is the most recent entrant who really has the ability to shake up the market and make content delivery a very straight-forward and easy to use service, for a large segment of customers. I’m excited to see what Amazon does with the new offering and if they can act as the catalyst to really push content delivery to the next growth level, which would be good for all vendors. I know some will worry that Amazon will simply take business from other CDNs, but think of the bigger picture here. That’s the story, the long term impact Amazon could have on the market.

Below is the e-mail sent to AWS customers.

Dear AWS Customer:

This new
service will provide you a high performance method of distributing
content to end users, giving your customers low latency and high data
transfer rates when they access your objects. The initial release will
help developers and businesses who need to deliver popular, publicly
readable content over HTTP connections. Our goal is to create a content
delivery service that:

• Lets developers and businesses get
  started easily – there are no contracts, and no commitments. You will
  only pay for what you actually use.
• Is simple and easy to use – a single, simple API call is all that is needed to get started delivering your content.
• Works seamlessly with Amazon S3 – this gives you durable storage for
  the original, definitive versions of your files while making the
  content delivery service easier to use.
• Has a global presence –
  we use a global network of edge locations on three continents to
  deliver your content from the most appropriate location.

You’ll
start by storing the original version of your objects in Amazon S3,
making sure they are publicly readable. Then, you’ll make a simple API
call to register your bucket with the new content delivery service.
This API call will return a new domain name for you to include in your
web pages or application. When clients request an object using this
domain name, they will be automatically routed to the nearest edge
location for high performance delivery of your content. It’s that
simple.

Sincerely,
The Amazon Web Services Team

By now, many sites have all reported that BitTorrent has raised another round of funding, this time totaling $17 million and putting their total raised to date close to $50 million. You really have to wonder what these VCs are thinking, putting more money into a company that has no clear business model or product offering. For all the talk of how many players BitTorrent has installed or the "platform" they have, peple still don’t seem to realize it’s not about how many players you have in the market and they are incorrect to think of BitTorrent as a "platform".

BitTorent is simply a protocol and is a method for downloading content. You don’t make money with BitTorrent just like you don’t make money with HTTP or FTP. It’s simply a protocol. BitTorrent is a means of distributing software, games or video and it’s that content that is being sold as the way to make money. You are making money from the content, not from BitTorrent. Or you’re using it for promotion purposes to get trailers and demos in the hands of consumers.

I get the sense that people are missing the point that you can’t make money with a client. If you have an entire platform that allows you to create, ingest, manage, store, deliver and track your content, that’s different. But that’s not what BitTorrent has. Simply having an open source client is not a means of generating revenue.

And for all the talk of how many players BitTorrent or any other company has installed, the number of installed players is not the metric to measure success or market opportunity by. RealNetworks has a lot more players installed than BitTorrent, but what has that gotten them in the video world? The size of your player installs is not as important as many in the industry make it out to be. Most users will download a new client if they want the content bad enough, so the idea that you have to have a lot of players already out in the market before you can deliver your content in that format is just not accurate. Look how many major broadcast studios started distributing their content using Move Networks when Move was just starting out and had very few players installed.

The bottom line is that BitTorrent does not know what it wants to be, does not have a clear product offering and right now, is not delivering any message to content owners on what they can offer. I speak to many large content owners all the time, see tons of RFPs and I have yet to see BitTorrent included in any of those RFPs. Content owners who want to deliver video specifically are not considering BitTorrent.

If BitTorrent made their offering into more of an Amazon type service, explained what it offers, how it works and published pricing for the service right on their website, they could generate some interest. Maybe not enough interest to translate into sizable revenue, but it would be a very clear offering in the market, and would give them a starting point.

Next week, all of the keynotes at the Streaming Media West show by Amazon, Roku, YouTube, Disney/ABC and EQAL are open and free to everyone. And if you needed even more reason to attend, StreamingMedia.com will be giving away FIVE Roku Netflix Set Top Boxes on Wed. Sept. 24th, after Anthony Wood, the Founder and CEO of Roku is done with his keynote presentation.

Simply register online for a free exhibit pass and be at Anthony’s keynote presentation for your chance to win one of the five Roku boxes which will be given away in-person.

StreamingMedia.com has two upcoming webinars I will be participating in, including answering questions from attendees during the event. The first, sponsored by Limelight Networks, is this Thursday, Sept. 18th at 2pm EDT and is entitled “Successful Live Event Streaming“. You can get more details and register for the free webinar here.

And on Thursday, Oct. 2nd, Internap is sponsoring a webinar entitled “The CDN Ecosystem: Going Beyond Content Delivery“. You can get more details and register for the free webinar here.

If you have any questions on either of these topics, you can e-mail them to me in advance or put them in the comments section below.