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.

New York based Pando Networks, a P2P content delivery network has raised $8 million dollars in new money from existing investors. Reports that Pando is looking to raise $20 million are incorrect. Combined with the previous funding, Pando has raised $20 million dollars to date but it not looking to raise $20 million in new funding.

Pando Networks plans to use the money to build out its sales and marketing force. Back in November I profiled Pando Networks win of the NBC Direct contract with should be going live in the next few weeks.

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This morning, Highwinds announced it had raised $55 million from General Catalyst Partners and Alta Communications. Highwinds plans to use the capital to do additional build out of their network named "RollingThunder" which includes a CDN offering.

While most CDNs are all going after the same customers, Highwinds is taking a different approach by going after those who want to resell content delivery services to their own clients. To date, most CDNs either don’t have a reseller program at all or their tool sets don’t support resellers properly. Resellers need products that allow for sub accounts, reporting based on multiple directories, self provisioning and many times custom branding. To date, most CDNs don’t deal with resellers well, don’t have the proper customer support for resellers or don’t have the tools to allow for a lot of the specifics resellers need.

For me, the real question is whether or not there are enough resellers out there to really scale a business past $30-$40 million a year in revenue. I know some are going to point to Akamai’s 2007 revenue of $636.4 million and say that about 20% of it came from resellers and hence the market is there, but we don’t know how much of that nearly 20% in reseller revenue came directly from Akamai’s content delivery services.

With Panther Express and Velocix (CacheLogic) having announced their funding a few weeks ago and now Highwinds, that pretty much leaves only Pando Networks, BitGravity and Voxel.net as the remaining CDNs from the list of 30 who have not raised money in the past 12-18 months or are public companies.