It’s been a year since Google acquired YouTube and in that time, the promise of YouTube developing and rolling out a successful video advertising product is only just starting to get off the ground. It’s going to be a long time until there is enough data in the market to suggest if the model will be successful, and YouTube has a long way to go before we find out of it can really generate any serious ad revenue from their content.

Paul LaMonica over at CNNMoney.com has a good in-depth article about the hurdles that YouTube faces one year later with more niche competitors, the Viacom lawsuit, the big media companies entering the space (Hulu) and the problem with getting advertisers to spend money around UGC content.

About two weeks ago, the band Radiohead told customers they could "name their own price" for their soon to be released new album. Starting yesterday, the album was available for download from the Radiohead website and when you download the 50MB file, it redirects you to the Level 3 network for the content.

While not an indication that Level 3 is going to put any of the other CDNs out of business, it is proof that Level 3 is continuing to sign up large customers even though they have yet to announce them. First it was Metacafe’s videos that an analyst noticed were coming from Level 3, then I noticed the live streams for DirecTV’s NFL Sunday Ticket package were coming from Level 3 and now this new Radiohead album. Clearly Level 3 is already starting to get some traction in the market for large scale delivery of video and static content via streaming and downloading. And with many in the industry assuming or speculating that Level 3 is going to offer a cheaper price for their streaming CDN offering next month, and the announcement last week by Level 3 that they are pricing their transit product and static CDN service at the same price, the company is clearly lining up to make a full on assault on the market in this quarter.

The CDN industry, which was once a very quiet segment of this industry even two years back, is now the hottest and fastest growing segment of this market in terms of the number of solutions and providers in the space and entering the fray. The next 24 months are going to be a fun ride.

Since my post in August entitled "CDN Pricing Data: What The CDNs Are Actually Charging For Delivery", I’ve gotten enhanced insight into CDN pricing thanks to many new CDN customers who have come across my pricing post and have reached out to share a lot of new data with me. I’ve probably seen close to 50 contracts just in the month of September alone and many new readers to my blog are sending in data on what they are paying.

Next month, I will be doing an updated post comparing the CDN pricing averages from 3-4 months ago. To make it easy to find on my blog, you can now go to www.CDNpricing.com which will send you directly to the latest post with the pricing data.

I’ll be doing an update sometime in November and had been waiting for BitGravity and BitTorrent to have officially launched so they can be included in the pricing round up as well. I will also have pricing averages from Level 3 as they are expected to launch their CDN for streaming in the beginning of November and I’m already seeing pricing from them on CDN for downloads.

In the mean time, if you are a customer of a CDN and want to share your data, I’m happy to chat with you to share what I am seeing in the market. You can contact me at anytime.

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.