About six months ago, I was really convinced that P2P might start to get some traction in the new year and that we would see some content owners commit to the technology. But aside from the Pando Networks and NBC deal, as we enter Q2 not much has transpired from the end of last year. P2P networks are still talking up a storm in every interview I read about how much cheaper their pricing is as compared to CDNs and leading with price as the major value proposition. Most P2P companies are still missing the point that cost is not the only thing customers care about and if it was, then P2P networks would have a ton of business by now, which they don’t.

Some are going to say that the announcements we have seen between P2P providers and the likes of Comcast and Verizon are a big deal, but those announcements are more for press than anything else. They are not creating any revenue for the P2P providers in the market, customers are testing the waters with P2P but not committing and most P2P providers are still all using the same marketing message and not distinguishing themselves from one provider to another.

Last year, I thought the biggest push that P2P might get would be from the content delivery networks. As much as some P2P providers think they compete with them, the fact is that P2P providers can’t survive on their own. Around Q3 of last year, many of the major CDNs were investigating the purchase of P2P networks, white labeling a P2P based service, or re-selling one of the many existing P2P solutions on the market. Since that time however, the major CDNs have changed their minds and have done almost nothing with P2P. Limelight, Level 3, and Akamai all have no real interest in delivering a P2P based offering to the market at this time. They don’t need the product today, the market opportunity is not big enough and even for a company like Akamai who acquired a P2P based company, you wont see a P2P based product from them anytime soon. Internap announced a deal to integrate Pando Networks P2P solution into their CDN, which was the first non-hybrid CDN to do such a deal, but since that announcement five months ago we have not heard of any customer deployments.

From what I can tell in the market, P2P is not as big of a story as it was at the end of last year. The topic has cooled off a bit except when its being discussed as it pertains to carriers blocking or filtering of P2P based traffic on their networks. Aside from that, customers are not asking me about P2P and 55.2% of those we surveyed about their content delivery needs said they did not plan to even look at P2P as a delivery solution for 2008. I hate to see how hard it is for P2P vendors in the market as I believe that the technology really does provide value to certain customers and with certain kinds of content. But until the CDNs start to offer P2P as just another one of the many ways they can deliver content, I don’t see P2P getting any real traction anytime soon.

Digital Fountain’s new streaming video CDN is now live with the recent launch
of its DF Splash Beta website. The new website gives an overview of their CDN offering, provides live demos of their solution and is open for visitors to
join their beta program to add streaming video capabilities to their own
web sites. One temporary draw back right now is that the demo requires you to download a plugin that only works with XP but I’m being told that will only be for a few weeks longer. Since I’m on a Mac, I can’t say what the quality looks like so I hope others will take a look and post what they think about it in the comments section.

I appreciate all of the calls and e-mails I am getting from those who want to know how my trip to Akamai week last went. Spending a whole day in Cambridge gave me a great insight into Akamai’s business and they were really open and helpful in showing me many of the things I wanted to see. I have quite a lot to write about and hope to have my first post up later today or tomorrow.

Following up on my post about customers needing better reporting and analytics, Skytide, a sponsor of this blog, is interested in doing 30 minute calls with customers to get their feedback on what additional metrics and features content owners want to see in the market. They would like to hear the pain points customers are having today and they are offering a $100 Amazon gift certificate as compensation for your time.

If you are interested in giving some feedback about your reporting needs and what is missing from the market today, they’d love to speak to you. Those interested can contact Lynn Anderson directly at Skytide.

Of the 1000+ customers who took our CDN survey and were asked "What value added services are you willing to pay a premium price for", over 75% of them said something having to do with better reporting and analytics with the most common answer being something along the lines of "Better reporting – and did I mention better reporting!!!"

So it will come as no surprise that analytics and reporting was also the number one answer when we asked "In your opinion, what is the one thing your CDN needs to improve on". While most CDNs I speak to know how big of a deal reporting is, very few seem to be taking the issue seriously. Much of what customers are getting today in terms of data is very basic and is at most, raw data that is presented to look pretty but with no analytics to tell them what the data means. I know that some CDNs will say that reporting and analytics is hard as the log files they are dealing with are so big and that many customers have custom reporting needs. That is true, but there should be some base line minimums, and when many CDNs reporting interface can’t even tell a customer during a live event how many simultaneous streams they are doing, the basics are missing.

Looking over the survey data, here were some of the most common comments from customers:

• real-time reporting for live events
• analytics reporting is technical only, not enough marketing oriented
• reporting based on geographic region
• reporting based on sub-accounts
• monitoring/analytics APIs
• self service reporting tools have a terrible interface
• access to geographical based reporting, such as the map in Google analytics to determine local advertising impact
• analytics for Flash content
• providing metrics in a timely fashion
• looking at how long each video is played on average, are people dropping half way through?
• Analytics a little bit limited, e.g. can’t choose custom time frame (3 day for instance), also the reporting does not translate UTC to our local time
• Reporting over longer periods of time (currently only 6 months)
• detailed user analysis (who watched what for how long from where)
• an API for accessing and displaying the tracking data, so that I could create my own "dashboard" to show real time stats
• I would like an API where I can get raw metrics to feed into our internal report structure. We use several CDN’s and each has their own reports. We spend too much time translating data to produce a single comprehensive report.
• reporting and analytics and the ability to parse it out by stream/customer
• push default reports I want to me, rather than me have go get them
• views per day, views per geographic location, length of each view then an aggregate % per day

From all the customers I speak to, the feedback I have heard is that Akamai and EdgeCast have the best reporting products in the market. That’s not to say that others may not also have a good functioning products, but those two are the ones I hear the most compliments about from customers. I think every CDN in the business should have a real reporting account on their homepage that anyone can log right into so that you can see first hand what their reporting and analytics package looks like. Too many times customers tell me that when they ask about reporting, most CDNs send them a product sheet with some screen grabs of the interface.

Reporting, and more importantly analytics, needs to get better a lot faster. Customers have to be able to show the value in these services, measure their success and justify why they should spend more money to deliver more content. While I see many of the CDNs all going to the market with the same message about performance, reliability, high-quality etc…. most of which don’t really mean anything to a customer anymore anyway, why not create a really good analytics package and use that as your go to market message? It would stand out from the rest of the commodity marketing terms CDNs use, would resonate well with customers and is a functionality of the service all customers need.

VeriSign is expected to sell its Kontiki P2P division this month to a group that has been previously involved in the company. Barring any last minute problems, the deal should be closed and announced in the next few weeks. Whether or not they will keep the Kontiki branding remains to be seen but they are expected to re-focus their offering to target the enterprise market. While VeriSign won’t comment on the sale, the "rumored" buy back price people are circulating in the industry is around $40 million, which would be about 3x revenue.

In the past two weeks, I have received over 100 job openings from many companies in the online video industry. In particular, the CDN vendors have many openings which really comes as no surprise considering that nearly all of them are flush with recent capital and are expanding their sales and engineering groups. Since I can’t possibly highlight all of the open positions, I have decided to highlight a few of the ones below and provide links to where all the openings are listed. In the order they were sent to me:

Akamai: Has multiple job openings in San Diego, Cambridge, San Mateo and New York for Senior Software Engineers, Technical Project Managers, Senior Solutions Engineers, Major Account Executives, Systems Administrators, and Quality Assurance Engineers. You can see all the details on Akamai’s job openings on their website.

BitGravity: Has openings for Director of Engineering, Live Broadcast Engineer, Flash Developer, Director of Operations, System and Support Engineers, Director and Manager of Product Marketing, Inside and Outside Sales Reps, and Sales Engineers. You can see all the details on BitGravity’s job openings on their website.

Limelight Networks: Has job openings in Arizona for Strategic Account Managers, Account Executive and Operations Technician. They also have one opening for a Account Executive in London. You can see all the details on Limelight Networks job openings on their website.

EdgeStream: Has job openings for Senior Sales Executives in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. For more details contact Rajeev.

Panther Express: Has job openings for Sales Executives, Sales Engineers, Senior Software Engineers, Quality Assurance Engineers and Customer Support Engineers. You can see all the details on Panther Express job openings on their website.

Level 3: Has many job openings which you can see on their website including a Streaming Product Manager based in Denver and several Operations positions. They also have an immediate need for  Account Directors and anyone interested in that position should contact Mary at Level 3 directly.

WorldNow: Is looking to fill two openings. A Vice President of Video Technology and Senior Director of Video Technology. Anyone interested in the positions should contact Su Ming.

If you are looking for a new position, have taken a new job or are a company that has a job opening, let me know. In many cases I will highlight it here on the blog – free of charge.