I am looking for an experienced TypePad designer who can handle some changes that need to be made on the layout of the blog and is familiar with TypePad’s hosting platform. I don’t need graphic work done but rather code work and layout and formatting. Must be familiar with advanced templates, RSS feeds, SEO for blogs etc… At most, it is a few hours worth of work and needs to be done right away but could lead to some additional work. If you are interested, or any of you fellow bloggers can recommend someone to me, please contact me.

The call for speakers for the Streaming Media West conference and exhibition taking place September 23-25 in San Jose is now open. Since the West show is earlier this year than last year, the call for speakers will only be open for the next 5 weeks. For the East show, we got over 800 submissions, which is 8x the number we have room for. I cannot stress enough how important it is that you get a submission in during the deadline if you wanted to be considered as a speaker. All the details of how to submit are here.

Also, I am actively looking for moderators and session organizers for the West show. I had some really great help from folks for the upcoming East show and are looking for the same help again. If interested please send me a session outline that includes the name of the session, a detailed 5-6 sentence description of what the session will cover and a list of potential company names that you think can speak to the topic. I am particularly interested in session topics that show real-world video in action with non-vendor demos.

Normally I would have a bunch of spots I am looking to fill this far in advance of the Streaming Media East show in May, but this year I got so many speaking submissions and many moderators stepped in to help that I have only a few spots left. Once these are filled, the program is closed. If you are interested in any of the spots below, please contact me. Full descriptions of each panel can be see here.

Tuesday May 20, 2008 – 1:45 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Session Title: Entertainment Devices: How TiVo, Xbox, and iPhone’s Are Changing Content Consumption
One panelist spots remains.

Tuesday May 20, 2008 – 1:45 p.m. – 2:30 p.m.
Session Title: P2Ps Role In Delivering Online Video
Need a really good moderator, preferably a blogger/journalist who covers P2P and the telcos. Confirmed speakers on this panel include Verizon, Comcast, Wachovia and one large M&E content owner.

Tuesday May 20, 2008 – 4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Session Title: User-Generated Video in Education
One panelist spots remains. Must be from an educational institution.

Wednesday, May 21, 2008 – 11:45 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Session Title: Online Video: Should Content Creators Get a Cut?
One panelist spots remains. Ideal speaker would be from a new entertainment company that has just gotten backing from a major VC.

That’s all I have open at this time, but as always, you can contact me with any other questions regarding the content of the show.

Last night, The Wall Street Journal was the first to report that Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen said on a conference call with investors that Adobe is working on a Flash player for the iPhone and hopes to have it ready around June. Shantanu said that Adobe has been working on the new media player since the release of the iPhone SDK by Apple last month. While this is good to hear from Adobe, I think there still are a lot of unanswered questions about how Flash video may work on the iPhone and what if anything Apple may do to prevent this if they have their own agenda.

This morning, Adobe announced that Microsoft had licensed Adobe’s Flash Lite software so that Flash based content will be able to be viewed within Internet Explorer on future versions of Microsoft Windows mobile phones. While Flash Lite itself does not play back video, rather the device plays the video and Flash Lite acts as the container, this is still a step forward in the right direction. With Adobe saying that half a billion mobile devices shipped with Flash Lite and Microsoft willing to license Flash Lite from Adobe to make the content experience better, the bottom line is that the consumer is the winner in this deal.

Now if only Apple and Adobe would come to some kind of arrangement and made Flash video work on the iPhone consumers would really win. My hope, Microsoft and Apple come to a deal to allow Silverlight to work on the iPhone. But after Steve Ballmer’s comments earlier in the month from the MIX 08 conference, it does not appear this will be happening anytime soon.

A little over a week ago, Microsoft released Expression Encoder 2 beta and the new version has quite a few of the features that webcasters in particular have been asking for. One of the biggest changes is that Expression Encoder 2 is now a product in its own right rather than a feature of Expression Media. It’s part of Expression Studio 2 and also available standalone. You can read all details on the Microsoft blog. Highlights of the new version include:

Better Encoding: VC-1 advanced authoring SDK integration, New profiles, and CODECS, Improved MPEG source support, Better multi-core performance, Improved aspect ratio handling, Pre-processing enhancements

Better Silverlight Interactive experiences: New templates, Template Parameters, Gallery Templates, Template preview, Edit in Expression Blend, Partial rebuild, ASP.NET Development Server, Hooks for Silverlight 2 templates

Enhanced Content Creation tools: Brand new imaging pipeline, Burn-in of moving overlays, Cuts editing, Smart re-compression, New Timeline UI

In addition Microsoft says, "there are some really exciting new features that you’ve asked us for that we are not ready to announce just yet. Stay tuned for more details." In addition to the new features, what else do you want to see? I’m particularly interested in hearing what functionality webcasters are looking for.

This past Monday, Oprah webcast her second class online and peaked at 200,000 simultaneous viewers. While that was down from the 500,000 simultaneous viewers she had for her first class, it’s to be expected and is not any indication of failure.

Having done a lot of series of webcasts myself over the years, the first webcast typically gets more traffic, more promotion and has more excitement around it since it is the first one. And with eight more classes to go, Oprah still has a lot more viewers she will be picking up along the way.

One of the interesting metrics of the webcast is that the average user stayed on for almost the full 90 minutes. Most webcasts don’t have an average viewing time that long and you see a lot of people dropping in and out of the webcast along the way. Considering the nature of the content Oprah is talking about, I think you have to be pretty into it to begin with, so it didn’t surprise me that the average viewing time was so long.

Some in the industry have criticized Oprah for not making it a pay-per-view event or for doing more advertising during the webcast. They are almost seeing it as being a failure since Oprah didn’t monetize it the way they think she should have and some even went on to say how she didn’t leverage the traffic properly. I think they are all missing the point.

For starters, Oprah did have three sponsors for the event; Chevy, Post-It and Skype. I saw commercials run just before the webcast started for Chevy and Post-It and those ads are still running where you to go to watch the archives. But the biggest point I think people are missing is that Oprah does not need to make it a pay-per-view event. Not every piece of video on the web needs to be monetized or charged for. As an industry, we need to stop being in the mindset that if we don’t somehow charge for every piece of content or show enough ads with the content that it is a failure. Many companies use webcasting and on-demand video all the time as marketing and promotional platforms and are quite happy with the results.

These webcasts give Oprah a way to reach an audience outside of the one hour a day she is on TV. In many cases, she is reaching a different audience in parts of the world who can’t get her show on TV. It enables Oprah to further expand her reach, get more awareness and increase her brand. She’s taken her content and made it available on demand and portable via iTunes. She is using many different platforms to reach the widest possible audience on many devices. She’s doing what any smart content owner would do who already has a huge audience they can tap into and easily grow.

I expect once all of her webcasts are over you are going to see her talk about just how well this platform worked for her, how many total views she got from the content and she will make a commitment to do more events on a regular basis. I think Oprah will very quickly become one of the biggest advocates of webcasting on the Internet and will become a regular webcaster.