Thanks to everyone who made last weeks Streaming Media Europe show a success. Attendee traffic grew from last year and we also had more speakers, exhibitors and sponsors participating. Due to the shows growth over the past two years, we’ll be moving the show to a larger location for next year. I had some great conversations with European providers and content customers and brought back a lot of new insight into the European market.

Bloggers are just starting to get up coverage of the show and you can already read some highlights of the show here, including an overview of Ari’s keynote. In Ari’s presentation, he noted that several key challenges remain to be overcome before in-stream video ads become the $1.5 billion market that some forecasters are predicting. Most notably, he pointed to the lack of infrastructure within content publishers and ad agencies to support the degree of integration between video and banner ads to avoid delivering contradicting messages—say, delivering a Coke banner alongside a Pepsi video—as well as the inability to change ad messages on the fly the way they can with banners.

In the next week or so I will be posting MP3 recordings of all the conference sessions along with video archives from many sessions as well. Speakers presentations are just starting to be placed online and we’ll have all the archives wrapped up shortly and will announce attendee numbers.

My buddy Yaron Samid who organizes the NY Video 2.0 Meetup in NYC every month has organized a session at Streaming Media West next month entitled "CDNs & P2P – Is Hybrid Content Delivery the Future or Just Hype?". He has invited and assembled speakers from some of the major CDN providers and those who have hybrid CDN/P2P offerings. Confirmed speakers are:

• Philip Kaplan, CSO, Internap
• Travis Kalanick, Senior Director, Engineering, Akamai
• John Dillon, CMO, CacheLogic
• Stephen Trainor, VP Strategy, Content Markets Group, Level 3
• Todd Johnson, SVP, Worldwide Marketing, VeriSign

Should be a good discussion amongst many of today’s leading providers on where they see P2P playing a role in the CDN business and what some of them are working on as they move to more hybrid offerings.

Register for the show before October 12th and pay only $795 for a full 3-day conference pass.

At the Streaming Media West show next month, I am moderating a session on Wednesday Nov. 7th entitled "Industry Drivers: Leading Analysts Discuss Future Trends and Business Models". We have speakers from IDC and Wainhouse confirmed so far and I am looking to add two more speakers from large research houses.

You can see more details about the show and the session on our website. If you are an analyst covering the online video industry and would like to join the panel, please contact me ASAP.

While I welcomed any vendor to send me open jobs they had for me to list on the blog, I’m getting more than I can possibly feature. Between all of the vendors who offer content delivery services, content management, enterprise webcasting solutions or software and hardware for video platforms, there is a huge void in the market of qualified people.

The biggest open positions are product managers and sales support engineers as well as experienced account managers who know the space and come with a Rolodex. Due to how many spots are open, and how many companies are trying to fill them, there is a lot of money being offered. I have not seen salaries and offers at this level in our space since the 2000 era. Vendors are still raising huge amounts of money and rapidly growing their head counts.

If you are looking for a new position, send me your resume so I can pass it along to all these companies. I’ll pass it on to as many companies as I know who have open positions. While many websites list open jobs in the market, most of them are only focused on content jobs and traditional broadcast TV spots. I see very few focusing on the online video market for vendors. I may set something up in the next few days.

Apologies if I have been slow to respond to any of your e-mails. I hope to be back online in a couple of days and have a lot of posts in the hopper.

UPDATE: On Friday, Barron’s spoke with Level 3 and updated it’s article. LightReading.com also updated their article and removed the quote in question. Good to see both sites do that to make sure the information is accurate.

I am amazed at how quickly some investors and analysts jump to conclusions based on any report on any website without checking facts. I like LightReading.com, but they quoted Level 3 wrong. Lisa Guillaume, VP of CDN Product Development for Level 3, did not say "the company will be offering CDN services at 20 to 30 percent less than its competition". She said to me that CDN services had typically been offered at a 20-30% premium over high speed Internet access. Nothing to do with the competitions pricing.

DataCenterKnowledge.com got is right by quoting Level 3 as saying that "CDN services have historically been offered at a 20 to 30 percent premium to transit." No where is any competitor even mentioned. Saying you are going to cut your pricing by 20-30% is one thing, but Light Reading is implying that Level 3 is cutting it’s pricing 20-30% lower than the competition. That is wrong.

Now Barrons.com and others are quoting LightReading.com in their reports as the reason Limelight and Akamai stock is down in the market today. Is that the reason? Maybe, I don’t know. But if it is, then it’s based on an inaccurate quote.

Yes, I expect Level 3 to come to the market with a lower price when they announce their CDN for streaming later in the year, as I stated back in August. But to date, Level 3 has not announced any pricing discount numbers or percentages.

Today, Microsoft made some major company changes in multiple divisions of their business. Some long time execs including Amir Majidimehr and others are affected and multiple divisions have been reorged. Lots of changes that will affect multiple product lines. I expect we’ll see the changes announced shortly, if not tomorrow.