The Streaming Media West show is only six weeks away and the program is just about complete. All final speakers are going on the website this week and due to a few last minute changes or cancellations, I have just three spots left. Below are the sessions and details. No other speaking spots remain. I appreciate the interest many of you have but this is all I have left and even the waiting list is longer than I could ever use. See the details below and send me an e-mail ASAP if you are interested. Many of these spots will close in the next 24 hours.

Speaking Details: I have one spot on each of the below round-table panels. I am not accepting any vendors at
this time, only content owners and customers. However, vendors are welcome to submit their customers for these spots.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Online HD Video: What’s Taking So Long?
High-definition online video content online has long been promised, yet the outlets for this vibrant media are few and far between. What is holding up adoption? What is stopping HD from reaching our desktops? We’ll explore this discussion from all fronts—technology, entertainment, and aggregation—to get a feel for what the holdups are and when we can expect to see more HD in the cloud.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Tools And Best Practices For The Enterprise Streaming Media Department
This session will bring together four frontline streaming media professionals to discuss their favorite toolsets and techniques for producing enterprise communications and training content. The emphasis will be on in-house production with "off-the-shelf" tools and apps, rather than turnkey or outsourced solutions. What works and what should be avoided? What is the best way to maximize your budget? How can you leverage existing infrastructure already inside your organization? This and more will be covered in this enterprise-focused session.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Evaluating and Choosing The Right Methods Of Video Delivery
With all the various means of distribution and protocols available for video today-CDN, P2P, streaming, progressive download-there is still no single solution that will meet all customers’ needs perfectly across all platforms and devices. Learn the various methodologies for content distribution, as well as the pros and cons of each type. Speakers will also discuss which methodologies apply best to which platforms and geographic locations based on type of content, length and format of video, and target audiences. Panelists will also provide you with guidelines and formulas for determining the best single and/or hybrid solution for your online video distribution needs.

While Limelight Networks has been getting a lot of media coverage over their NBCOlympics.com business, many have been wonder and asking what exactly is Akamai’s role for the games? On last weeks quarterly call, Akamai executives made references to their Olympics business but without any details, until now.

In an e-mail to me this weekend, which I am allowed to share, Akamai detailed what they are doing for the Olympics, the type of content they are delivering and the websites they are working with. While it is true that Limelight is delivering all of the video, live and on-demand for the NBCOlympics.com website, (with Level 3 as the backup should anything go wrong) Akamai’s network is being used to cache and deliver all of the static content for NBCOlympics.com. NBC is using Akamai for dynamic site acceleration, event planning and support and syndication services.

In addition to the NBCOlympics.com website, outside of the U.S. many other websites have rights to broadcast the games. Akamai is working with the European Broadcast Union to deliver Olympic video to the sites they support including Eurosport, TF1, Canal +, Y.L.E (Finland) and France Television amongst others.

In addition to the European Broadcast Union, Chinese portal Sohu, MySpace China, Tudou.com, PPLive and others are also providing Olympic content, but I don’t know who is providing the delivery of that content, exclusively in China. While ChinaCache would not go into many details, they did say that they are helping IOC rights holders like CCTV, QQ and others with over 100Gbps of Flash live and on-demand streaming. Updated: ChinaCache put out a release saying they are providing delivery for Sohu, People.com, Xinhua,
CCTV, QQ, Sina and China Online.

Naturally, some on Wall Street are going to ask me what type of traffic does Akamai expect from the Olympics and what type of impact will this have on their revenue? Since no one knows exactly how much traffic any of these websites will get, there is no way to know and Akamai did not provide me with any traffic estimates.

No doubt, the Olympics are going to be a big online event for all of the content delivery networks involved, who will see lots of traffic. But with only so many hours in the day, and thousands of hours of live and on-demand content available, how much can one really watch in a 10 day period? And the big question, which so far, no one has been able to officially answer for me is, how long will the Olympics video be archived on NBCOlympics.com? For the CDNs involved, the longer, the better.

Note: I asked additional CDNs in Europe and Asia if they were providing any content delivery services for the Olympics so they could be included in the post. Some didn’t respond to the request or stated they were not involved.

Liz Gannes, Editor of NewTeeVee.com is moderating a panel at the Streaming Media West show on Tuesday, September 23rd entitled "Online Video vs. ISPs: How Much is too Much?" What’s good for online video content publishers isn’t always good for ISPs, and more and more ISPs are considering throttling bandwidth or charging for fees as video streams and downloads increase exponentially. Can consumer desire for video and service provider limitations co-exist? Are content owners and the industry at risk of not being able to develop new business models from online video?

We’re looking for a few great panelists who can speak in detail on this topic and are from companies that have a vested interest on the content side or the ISP side. While I am accepting all submissions, we are looking for speakers from companies that are really tied into this subject and can speak from experience. We’ll be picking speakers in the next few days so if interested, e-mail me right away.

Make sure to send me the speakers name, title, company, bio and a very clear description of how this topic is relevant to the speaker and their company. If you know of someone who you think would be great for this panel, happy to have an introduction. If we choose them, I’ll give you a free all access conference pass to the show.

Note: I am wrapping up the final program for Streaming Media West and will be posting a few open speaking spots on the blog over the next few days.

I listen to all of the CDNs quarterly calls and have to admit that last night, Akamai delivered a very confusing message. On one hand they said traffic was still growing, but not as fast as before and that pricing for CDN remained stable. But on the other hand, blamed the economy and lack of broadband speeds for the reason content owners are not spending more money to deliver more content, which created less growth. That does not make sense.

Less than three months ago at our Streaming Media East show, we had content creators like NBC, Yahoo!, Time Warner Cable, Metacafe, CSTV, Turner, MTV, NHL, Comcast, ABC, CondeNet, CNN, AP and Reuters amongst others, who all spoke about their online video presence. Not a single one said that they were putting less content online due to the economy and none of them that I remember said anything about less traffic growth for video. If anything, they talked about how traffic is still growing, more content is going online, at higher bitrates and being syndicated to more sites or devices. For me, this is hard evidence that the economy is not affecting the online video industry, the CDNs, or content creators when it comes to online video consumption.

While I still think Akamai has one of the strongest suite of products around, especially for the video ecosystem, when it comes to the media and entertainment vertical, they now have some real competition. Limelight has been winning a lot more video specific business as of late and Level 3 has had some big wins as well, but has yet to talk about them. CDNetworks is still gearing up in the U.S. but will provide some competition to Akamai for M&E business over time. And outside of those three CDNs, smaller delivery networks have the ability to challenge Akamai on mostly small deals. Adding all of that up and it does eat into Akamai’s business. Now it may not take away a lot of Akamai’s current market share for video CDN business, but it may take away a larger percentage of new business going forward.

Remember, with Akamai not breaking out their revenue based on product line, we don’t truly know what product saw the most decline in the quarter. And with the CDN product accounting for about 50% of Akamai’s revenue, there are a lot of other dollars out there coming from Akamai services other than content delivery. To me, this is simply an indication of Akamai having a tougher time in a very specific market, M&E, for one very specific product, CDN. Akamai is not in danger of losing it’s larger CDN market share anytime soon and no other CDN is going to come even remotely close to Akamai’s total CDN revenue. While I would not expect Akamai to come out and say that competitors gave them more of a challenge last quarter, that’s what is was. It was not the economy and it certainly was not due to the strange excuse they gave of broadband speeds not being fast enough in the U.S.

On one hand they said they need consumers to be able to get HD quality video to help really grow the business, but on the other hand, when they launched their HD product eight months a year ago, they did the right thing and set expectations correctly by telling the industry that HD won’t have a real impact on the market for a few years. So the fact that HD was not big on the web last quarter, or moving forward, is not a surprise to them or anyone else.

To me, the bottom line is that Akamai had a more challenging business last quarter, in the M&E vertical, specific to CDN, then they have had in the past. That’s all it was. The thing I don’t like is the notion this can create in the market and industry when the number one CDN says the economy hurt their business. So far, the economy is not having an impact on the content delivery business.

Note: I have never bought, sold or traded any shares of Akamai or any public company ever. I have no vested interest in the price of any stock and both Akamai and Limelight are or have been sponsors of my blog.

Updated 12:12pm: Unlike the Olympics where Limelight is the exclusive provider for video, the NFL games will be streamed by both Limelight AND Akamai.

Starting September 4th, the NFL in conjunction with NBC will stream 17 Sunday Night Football games on nfl.com and nbcsports.com. While Limelight had no comment when asked about the recent announcement, I have learned that Limelight and Akamai will be the backend streaming providers working with NBC and the NFL. By my count, this makes at least five major wins or expanded contracts for Limelight in the past few months. Disney, Microsoft, Netflix, Amazon and now the NFL/NBC. While I don’t know the terms of the deal and whether the NFL or NBC will be the paying customer, Limelight is already closely working with NBC for the Olympics. The NFL content is new business for Limelight but for Akamai, falls under an existing contract they already have with NBC.

Many of the newer CDNs on the market have been talking for some time now about how they are only focusing on live delivery and how their "next generation" networks are so much better for live streaming than an Akamai or Limelight. But to date, I have yet to see any recently launched CDN win any of the big contracts for all of the live events that have happened or will soon take place. The Olympics, NCAA March Madness, Presidential Debates, Operation MySpace, Oprah’s Online Classes, Democratic National Convention, US Open for golf and tennis and the NFL Sunday Night Games amongst others. Akamai, Limelight and Level 3 combined are responsible for doing the delivery for all of these events.

This reinforces the fact that building out a global CDN to truly scale for large live events and have the required capacity and support pieces in place to handle such events is not as easy as some think it is. Live events are unique in that you get one chance and one chance only to get it right. You can’t add capacity after the fact like you can with on-demand delivery. The CDN has to be able to route traffic in real time, monitor and report back on the network to the customer in real time and deal with things like content ingestion, splitting streams across the network and working very closely with those who are capturing and encoding all the signals. Successfully delivering large scale live events it still not easy and it takes a very focused and disciplined approach to that specific segment of the market to be successful. The idea that any CDN can come along and simply add capacity and be able to handle large scale live events is just not accurate. 

While news sites have been reporting for weeks about NBCOlympics.com video offering, most have stated that NBC is forcing users to download the Silverlight player in order to see live and on-demand video. This is not the case. While Microsoft is pushing users to download the Silverlight player in order to take advantage of the enhanced video options and control room that gives you access to switch between multiple live streams, those who don’t have the Silverlight player or choose not to use it will still be able to get stand alone video streams if they have the Windows Media player. When the Olympics start, users will be given an option to choose the Windows Media Player if they don’t use Silverlight. Updated: Read this post oh how to use Windows Media instead of Silverlight.

This is good news for users at work who don’t have admin rights to their desktop and can’t upgrade to the latest Silverlight player. With much of the Olympics content taking place during working hours, those inside an enterprise corporation will still be able to get the streams and tune in to the action. While NBC has not yet decided on the bitrates the video will be encoded in, I have confirmed that multi bitrate encoding will take place and should provide viewers with some really good quality.

Many have been asking me today, how Limelight and Akamai could both be streaming the Olympics. They aren’t. Limelight is delivering all of the live and on-demand video and Akamai will be caching and delivering a lot of the static content.

Comparing the data for content delivery pricing specific to video delivery in Q2 from the prior quarter shows pricing remained very stable in Q2 but with some new trends emerging. While pricing for Q2 is almost identical to Q1, there was a drop in the price per GB delivered for those customers who on average are doing over 1PB (petabyte) a month. While this is a small percentage of the total number of CDN customers overall, I did see new contract pricing as low as three cents ($0.03) per GB delivered on new 12 month contracts. In Q1, the lowest I saw was around two and a half cents but that was not the norm. (Note: you can easily find my latest pricing data at www.cdnpricing.com)

I think it is also important for me to point out that while many on
Wall Street are implying that the CDNs are seeing slowing traffic or less CDN growth in terms of the numbers of bits pushed, that is not the case. I don't see any market indications from customers or CDNs to lower traffic last quarter or any signs that customers are delivering less content. To the contrary, all I see is more bits pushed, more often, at higher bitrates and to more devices. With Akamai, Internap and Limelight all reporting numbers in the next two weeks, investors should be asking them details on the products that make up the numbers Wall Street cares so much about. Analyze the products the numbers come from.

One of the biggest trends I am seeing in new contracts is no monthly commits required. In its place, customers are committing to traffic over the course of the entire 12 months. While this is not brand new and has been going on for some time, it is now almost the norm for new customers who have a lot of delivery. Anyone doing more than about 500TB a month and in some cases even lower, is committing to a yearly amount of traffic instead of monthly. While this does not have much of an impact on CDNs in terms of revenue, it is good for customers as it gives them more of an incentive to push as much traffic as they can with the CDN. And since you don't pay overages on a per GB delivered model, customers are getting more content online and available for viewing. (related: Content Delivery Pricing: Understanding CDN Overages)

While some customers I talk to as well as analysts in the industry seem to think that before too long CDN services will be almost free, that could not be further from the truth. While pricing has dropped year over year, pricing has remained very stable for the last three quarters and should remain so. There is a direct fixed costs to running and maintaining a content delivery network and the services of a CDN will never be free or close to free. And while some of the smaller, newer CDNs are willing to give away the business to grab market share and are losing money on those deals, well established CDNs will not give it away and lose money. While every CDN I speak to always says they aren't losing money on any deal, I know that is not the case. I see some of the pricing on these contracts that some of the newer CDNs are charging and I know they are losing money on various deals. When they are pricing things at one or two cents per GB delivered, and they don't have the size or scale of a larger CDN to take advantage of buying transit in bulk, money can't be made at those levels. For those that worry this may erode the pricing of more well established CDN players, it won't. Customers are not buying on price alone and many customers I speak to are willing to pay more to be with a well established player who has been proving for years what their network is capable of.

At this time, I don't see pricing on these large deals going much lower when the lowest is at three cents per GB delivered. Many of the CDNs have told me that at that level, they are just breaking even and aren't making anything on those deals, which is ok since so few of their customers are getting that level of pricing. As CDNs continue to scale their networks and learn how to better optimize their servers, which gives them the ability to push more bits with less infrastructure, we could then see a small pricing decline. But I expect that will be 12-18 months off as most of the established CDN vendors don't expect to be able to really advantage of their next major network upgrade, on the software side, until that time.

At the Streaming Media West show in September, I will be making two presentations on the CDN market. The first will be reviewing all of the latest pricing data and breaking down the numbers in greater details. This presentation is entitled "CDN Pricing: The Going Rate For Video Delivery".

My second presentation entitled "CDN Research Data: World Content Delivery Networks Market" will be my first report with Frost & Sullivan that will break down the CDN market specific to video. The data presented will also analyze the trends in different regional markets: Americas, EMEA, and Asia Pacific, as well as provide revenue and demand forecasts for CDN solution providers and peer-to-peer based solutions. Register for the show before Aug. 20th for the discount rate.