While there continues to be a lot of talk in the industry about HD quality web video, to date, I still have yet to figure out what classifies web video as HD quality? As an industry we are using the word HD to clarify video as being a certain level of quality, but these days it seems many are calling their video HD or their video delivery offering as supporting HD, but then the video is not truly HD by TV standards.

Depending on who you ask, the HD standard for the web video seems to be all over the map. While we know that for broadcast TV HD quality is usually defined by a resolution of 1080i, 1080p or 720p, the codec used for web video seems to play more of a role in the definition of HD web video than in the traditional broadcast industry. Some also say that you have to take into account the bitrate the file is encoded at in order to classify it as HD or not.

We’ve seen delivery networks say they can deliver HD video over regular 6 megabit connections and others who say they can do it over connections at half that. Many delivery networks all say they support "HD quality" but then don’t define what they classify HD quality to be and what their offering supports. The recent Operation MySpace webcast was touted as HD quality but then I saw many in the industry commenting on how it really wasn’t HD quality due to the codec that was used.

So what is HD quality on the web? What are the classifications we need as an industry? While HD web video has very little traction today, with the term being used so often, we better create some sort of standard agreed upon. If we don’t, over time, the word HD may not be associated with such good quality video as we want it to be.

With the Streaming Media West show taking place earlier than usual this year, September 23-25th in San Jose, TODAY is the day to contact me if you want to organize and moderate a session at the show. The ideal candidate is someone who specializes in some facet of the online video business be it advertising, search, content creation, etc… or focuses on some aspect of the many different technologies in the industry.

If you are an expert in a particular topic and want to design the focus of a session, pick your own speakers and pick the format be it presentations, demos, case studies, round table panel etc….. I need to hear from you, today. Seriously, the program is now 75% planned and if you want in, a week from now will be too late.

I am open to all ideas and suggestions and am looking for those who are comfortable working with me on their session and have the experience in organizing a discussion around a topic. If you are interested, send me an e-mail today or better yet, call me immediately at 917-523-4562.

I turn in the advance program tomorrow for layout, design and printing so I really am down to the wire. I have only a few open spots left and need to hear from you if you want a shot at filling them.

Today, Onstream Media announced that it had agreed to acquire IPTV based platform provider Narrowstep in an all stock transaction. Shareholders of Narrowstep will receive 11.1 million shares of Onstream Media common stock plus have the opportunity to earn additional shares based on reaching future sales targets.

For 2007, Narrowstep had about $6 million in sales and total operating expenses were over $16 million, much of which was spent on the buildout of their own content delivery network. At the end of November of 2007, Narrowstep had about $6.5 million in cash and had started to shop the company. At their current burn rate, Narrowstep was close to having to raise another round this quarter in order to stay open.

Onstream Media, which is on a run rate to do between $15-20 million for 2008, and has a current market cap of around $40 million, gets more than 75% of its revenue from webcasting related services. On paper, this acquisition is an odd combination since Onstream Media is really in the services business and Narrowstep is in the software and platform business. Both companies have two very different business models and very different customers, in different regions of the world.

Thanks to ScribeMedia, we now have some of the Streaming Media East sessions edited and archived online. Thirteen sessions are now available for viewing with more being added each day at www.streamingmedia.com/videos

We welcome anyone to use the videos on their site or in their blog in anyway they like as long as it is non-commercial in nature.

Today, at The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital conference, Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos made reference to a new streaming video service Amazon will be launching in the next few weeks. While details were not discussed and very little info was given out, it’s not surprising to see Amazon launch a streaming service based offering to go along side Amazon’s Unbox service.

While I think it is great that companies like Amazon are experimenting with streaming media based offerings, there is no demand in the market for such a service today. I love Amazon and I love my TiVo, but to date, Amazon’s Unbox service has had no real success in the market and consumers are not asking for more video based services to stream what is expected to be movies to their PC. The whole movies to the PC business has been tried for years, in all forms, and with every kind of business model. Lets face it. Consumers decide what gets adopted, not technology and content owners and my fear is that with the name Amazon has in the industry, expectations will be set way too high by many of what they think Amazon’s streaming media based offering should turn into.

I hope Amazon launches it quietly and uses it as a test for how content is consumed, how the technology works and to basically get their feet wet with streaming. If the service is hyped and expectations run wild, it will hurt the entire industry when the service does not get as much adoption as some may think.

But for me, the bigger thing to watch from this service is how the content will be delivered? Is Amazon planning to stream the video from their network? To date, I don’t know of Amazon having any kind of content delivery footprint using Flash Media Servers to be able to stream video. Could be they won’t use Flash or that while Jeff called it "streaming" it might actually be progressive download. But the infrastructure side of this offering is really what we need to watch. As Amazon slowly turns into a CDN for video, it will be interesting if this new service now as acts the catalyst for Amazon to build out their network to support streaming or if they plan to use a third party CDN.

With the Streaming Media East show ending yesterday, I was hoping to spend today trying to catch up on all my e-mails but I’m already getting lots of calls this morning about Goldman’s downgrade on Akamai. While I am not a financial analyst and don’t look at the numbers like those on the street do, I can say that I disagree with the reasons why Goldman downgraded Akamai this morning. The reasons given were large network operators entering the space, acquisition by smaller vendors by network operators and the potential entry of P2P offerings.

That all sounds scary on paper, but that’s where it ends. Right now, there are only two network operators in the CDN space. Level 3, who I have been saying all along is a real threat to Akamai and AT&T. Based on my briefing with AT&T and the details I gave out about the scale of their build-out, if they end this year with the 400Gbps they are aiming for, across all of their CDN service, video, software downloads, app delivery etc… that would give them a fraction of what Akamai has. Not to mention no transcoding service, content management, DRM and all the other functionality that Akamai’s Stream OS product has. Level 3, yes, they will challenge Akamai but we have know that for months now, so that’s not new news.

The second reason Goldman gave was that some network operators may acquire some of the smaller CDNs and then compete with Akamai on that level. Again, sounds good on paper, but who are they going to acquire? After Limelight, no other CDN has even half of the revenue Limelight does. Most will do anywhere between $10-$40 million this year. At $40 million, that is about 10% of Akamai’s CDN revenue. Not a big threat. And even if they acquired two or three CDNs and bundled them all together, none of them sell into the government market, offer application delivery or have the tools and APIs Akamai has.

And as for P2P, right now, P2P is not getting traction. It will get some traction down the road, but P2P is NOT a replacement for CDN, it is a compliment. Just like Amazon’s web services are not a replacement for CDN, they are used in conjunction with a CDN. Kontiki who is one of the longest running P2P solutions on the market did $6 million last year when they were owned by VeriSign. Is that a revenue number that’s got Akamai worried?

If Akamai was getting downgraded due to issues with ARPU, CAPEX or other issues like that that I don’t track very closely, then I’d have no comments. But to downgrade Akamai for the reasons mentioned today, when the data does not back it up, I have to disagree.   

Note: I have never bought, sold or traded any stock in Akamai or any other public company ever.

(Note: My latest pricing data can always be foiund at www.cdnpricing.com) At the Streaming Media East show on Tuesday, I published my CDN pricing for Q1 in a session entitled "CDN Pricing: The Going Rate For Video Delivery". You can download the slides from the presentation here.

The first thing that some of you may notice when comparing 2008 Q1 pricing with Q4 of lat year is that it looks like pricing went up. However, for Q1, I changed some of the metrics on how I am reporting pricing as well as who those numbers are from. In the past, I started pricing at 1TB of data transfer per month. As you can see from all the comments on my blog in Q3, pricing is all over the map at low levels and my pricing at 1TB was inaccurate for a lot of customers. Today, anything under 50TB is considered small and CDNs don't think of a customer being large until they are doing about 500TB per month. So moving forward, I am going to give out pricing starting at 50TB a month of transfer. Anything under 50TB a month is now really impossible to give out an "average" number for.

Also, pricing for Q1 is now only from CDN players who are focused on going after large companies. In the past, I included data from those who go after large companies as well as those we go after small and medium sized customers. Those who go after small and medium sized customers are what I call regional service providers. There are probably over a 100 of those companies and they all do pricing differently, including packaged pricing where you get certain levels of storage and transfer all for one price. They tend to price very differently than those CDN going after large business.

The only place I saw pricing go down in Q1 is with a very small percentage of the largest customers who continue to push a lot more traffic each month. Those doing over a petabyte. The lowest price I heard for 2PB a month was two and a half cents per GB delivered.

That being said, here are the numbers for Q1. I will post the video archive of my session as soon as it is available.