UPDATE: Guillaume Courouge was selected as the winner using a random number picker website.

The nice folks over at MediaGate sent one of their MG-350HD Wireless HD Media Players for me to review, but with the holidays and other deadlines I am under, I won’t have a chance to do a product review anytime soon. I did however find a really positive product review on the unit over at HomeTheaterBlog.com

Since I won’t be able to review the unit, they have nicely said I can give it away to a reader of my blog. All you have to do is leave one comment on this post with a working e-mail address. I will pick one user at random a week from today and ship it out to the winner at no cost.  

If any company is interested in getting exposure for their video related product on my blog and is willing to give away the product, contact me. I will post pictures of the product, link to the company website and either write a product review or link to other reviews on the web. It’s great exposure on a blog that does over 300,000 page views a month.

Hot on the heels of EdgeCast announcing it had raised $6 million dollars, content delivery provider CDNetworks announced late yesterday that it had raised $96.5 million in private placement. For CDNetworks, this funding now gives them the ability to make a serious push in the U.S. market for content delivery of video and static content. The funding announcement also coincides with the launch of a new company website.

To date, CDNetworks primary business has solely been in Asia but over the past few months they have been out in the U.S. market selling services and ramping up their sales team. From the pricing I have seen in RFPs, they are not the low cost leader in the space and they are not, I repeat, not undercutting Limelight and others on price just to win market share. I think all CDN providers understand by now that they can’t give this stuff away just to win market share and expect to stay in business. The pricing "war" that so many analysts are "speculating" on is completely overblown in the market. Just because a new provider enters the market does not mean they are selling on price.

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.