Now that we have our Brigthcove video player up on StreamingMedia.com, I am looking for someone who knows the Brightcove system well enough who can help customize our player using Brightcove’s API as well as setup a bunch of new video titles and lineups for us in the system. Will pay an hourly rate to get the work done and it can be done a little at a time. If interested, please send me an e-mail with your hourly rate and  some background on your expertise with the Brightcove system.

Thanks to ScribeMedia.org and Brightcove, we now have all of the conference sessions archived in video from the Streaming Media West 2007 show. You can access the videos from the home page of our website or at: www.streamingmedia.com/videos

In addition, I will be adding to our Brightcove player all of the videos from our past East, West and Europe shows as well. However, it will take me some time to upload all of the 300+ videos so please bear with us.

I’ve got another moderator spot open for someone who wants to organize a session at Streaming Media East around H.264 and talk to the major announcements that took place in the past year and what will become of H.264 next year. This session is probably more geared towards a technical discussion but should also cover content trends and usage adoption taking place in the market. H.264 is a hot topic and is only going to get hotter next year.

Ideally, the moderator is not from a vendor company or someone who is selling a product or service involved with H.264 of any kind or can convince me you don’t have a conflict of interest. Again, bloggers and others who write and cover this topic for the industry are ideal. Send me an e-mail if interested.

I’m looking for an individual who covers the lifecasting segment of the industry and has been keeping a close eye on companies like Kyte.tv, Justin.tv, Zannel and Seesmic. I plan to have a session about this topic at the next Streaming Media East show in May in NYC and am looking for a moderator who wants to organize and lead this session.

The ideal candidate would be someone who is writing about these companies in the market, has a blog of their own, or has experience in what is required as a moderator to produce a quality session. If you’re interested, please send me an e-mail along with a brief description of why this is a fit for you.

As many sites have been talking about over the past week, the new Jackass 2.5 movie by Paramount Pictures will be distributed exclusively on Blockbuster.com starting next week. The content will be using Microsoft’s Silverlight platform and will be delivered by Limelight Networks.

I was going to wait to post about this until later this afternoon when I have a call with the companies involved, but a Microsoft blog posted about it last night. I will post most about the project later this afternoon.

Cisco currently has a job opening in San Jose, CA for a senior product manager focusing on CDN with both technical and marketing expertise. The position is responsible for identifying and driving Cisco strategy in the enterprise and service provider wholesale CDN market segments. The focus of this position is to build and implement the product and solution strategy for Cisco in these markets, working with the line product management team for strategy execution.

The individual filling this position will have extensive experience in the CDN market, most likely gained through mid/senior level career experience in engineering or technical marketing or product management at one of the CDN service providers or, possibly a CDN equipment company. The key requirement is that the individual have an excellent grasp of the factors driving the CDN business at the business and technical levels, plus demonstrated ability to translate this grasp into business strategy.

If interested, contact Brent Rogers at Cisco who is looking to fill the opening.

This morning, I had about half a dozen e-mails from analysts asking about AT&T and their CDN business. Yesterday, at AT&T’s analyst day they announced that they will grow their streaming and caching services by 6x and said they were going to increase their CDN capabilities. Because of this, an analyst at Cowen and Co. downgraded Akamai on concerns of greater competition from AT&T.

Now I am the first one to say I am not a financial analyst, I don’t own shares in any company and I have no vested interest at all whether Akamai or any other stock goes up or down. And while I don’t pour over the numbers like financial analysts do, I listen and hear what is really taking place in the market from customers. Numbers and spreadsheets only tell you so much.

For the past 4+ years AT&T claims to have been in the CDN market for the delivery of static content and video. Yet in that time, I have never spoken to or heard of a single customer using AT&T for any CDN services pertaining to video. I have never seen AT&T even bid on any RFP, have not seen any customers listed on their website, have not found a single customer case study, have not seen AT&T put out any data on their CDN business and have not seen anyone from AT&T speak at any conference or event about their CDN business. If AT&T is in the CDN business today, and I don’t mean via the way of customers delivering content via AT&T’s co-location or IP services, where is the business?

Could AT&T be in the CDN business? Yes. But are they today? No. I find it amazing that analysts are going to think AT&T is competition to Akamai or anyone else when they don’t have a real offering today, and even by the analyst’s own omission, AT&T would not be a competitor until late 2008. You’re downgrading a stock based on what a company "may" do a year from now? Am I the only one who does not see the logic in this? It took Level 3 acquiring the CDN assets of SAVVIS and 12 months of build out just to get a basic offering out the door. If AT&T does not acquire anyone, how long would it take them to  be at even 30% of the capacity Akamai is at today? They can’t do that in a year. And what about streaming support? Whatever limited CDN service AT&T has today, it does not support delivery via streaming, live or on-demand, has no support for Flash, no content management system, no video reporting etc…. all things Akamai and others have today.

In the report the analyst wrote, "AT&T’s extensive network reach could shrink the average distance between a CDN node and a customer to as little as 100 miles versus Akamai’s 25O-plus miles." Ok that may be, but what does that mean for Akamai? How does that affect them? That statement alone does not say how that is suppose to impact Akamai’s business. Plus, AT&T is not going to place servers for CDN services at every location in their network, just like Akamai doesn’t, so it’s not valid to look at AT&T’s entire network and say they can leverage that for one specific service offering like CDN.

If AT&T were to go out and acquire someone like Limelight Networks, which they should do if they are serious about being in the space, then they would have a real shot at the getting into the CDN business and providing real competition to the market in the next 12 months. But if they don’t acquire any company or assets, they will have little to no offering when compared to Akamai or others 12 months from now.

Also, does anyone remember back around 2000 when Quest, MCI, AT&T,
Sprint and others all had CDN offerings and divisions? They lasted
about 12-18 months in the market before they all decided to no longer
be in the CDN business. Yes, they had a lot of factors going against
them in those years, especially being in the market in the wrong time,
but how many people "assumed" they would make it just because they are
big named networks?

In my opinion, many analysts are too quick to listen to what vendors tell them without doing enough research to really know what is taking place in the market. Speak to customers. Look at RFPs. Evaluate pricing trends. Know what products companies actually offer. Compare product to product, not company to company. Anyone can say they are going to be a competitor in any market, but they don’t get any creditability in my eyes just because they are a big company.