In all the years of watching Apple, Microsoft, Real and Adobe (Macromedia) talk about their video players and platforms, I’m still amazed at how quickly Adobe seems to be able to get people to talk about their products before they’re even available. In this industry in particular, perception can quickly become reality, like it or not. I credit Macromedia will really being the first to market like crazy their Flash player in that regard, talking about some of the functionality and uses for it before much of that functionality was even available, thereby creating a "perception" in the market that the player always had the functionality. I still get people who call today saying that DRM works well in Flash or that Flash video works great on mobile devices, when in fact neither is yet the case but they assume it is since they have heard of other Flash products that Adobe is working on to address those problems.

It’s the same with Apollo. I keep reading news articles, like the one on Yahoo! news today, where people say things like, "Adobe’s new media player downloads video for offline viewing." What new media player? Apollo, now named Adobe AIR, is NOT available for download, only the SDK is. Yet many in the press, investment community and the industry keep asking me or telling me that the new Apollo player is working really well or that it is changing the way content creators develop for offline viewing. Maybe it will, but considering the Adobe Media Player is not even available for at least another few months one can’t say that those things are happening today. Even more interesting to note is that this same article on Yahoo! talks about the new RealPlayer and says, "which will be available for public testing next week" but then it doesn’t say anything about the Adobe Media Player not being out till the fall. A great example of how Adobe seems to just always stand above the others in the perception factor.

But that’s the kind of perception Adobe has in the market with its Flash product line, people just assume all sorts of things about it, right or not. Sure, it’s good for Adobe and bad for its competitors and it has both a negative and positive effect on the market. Yes, anytime you can get a content creator interested in creating more compelling video for consumption and get people excited, that helps the industry. But at the same time, customers with wrong expectations then are harder to work with on adopting technology that they think should already be there. Yes, it gives me and StreamingMedia.com a chance to educate people, but I’d rather educate them on facts as opposed to "perception" in the market, but I seem to do more of the latter of late.

Other companies should take note on the way Adobe markets its entire Flash product line and the ways they go about getting others to talk about it. In my eyes, other companies could learn a lot from Adobe’s marketing skills.

The entire market for user generated content, in particular video, has just gotten completely out of hand. I must get 2-3 releases a week now from new UGC sites that are launching, yet none of them say anything about their business models. They all talk to how their player is different, their video looks better, their search capability is improved or some other aspect of the user experience.

What about the business model? Where is it? By my last count, there were over 60 UGC sites on the web that I am tracking, the majority of which I have no idea how one differs from the other. Yes, some of them are more focused than others and provide content for just one vertical like comedy, or independent films, but still, there are too many of them. It is only a matter of time before this UGC bubble bursts and these sits consolidate or disappear completely.

Mediaweek published an article yesterday about ManiaTV and how they are shifting their business model away from UGC to focus solely on original content. Will it help? Too early to know, but I give ManiaTV credit for realizing that much of UGC is purely hype. ManiaTV’s chief marketing officer Peter Clemente said it best in the Mediaweek article, "Hype doesn’t necessarily equate to profitability."

This Thursday, I am moderating a panel at the OMMA Video show in NYC entitled "TV Content Comes Online: Prime Time on the Web" with panelists from ABC, FOX, Yahoo! and AOL. I plan on focusing the discussion around the "business models" that are trying to be established around professionally produced content. My questions will include:

• do the major broadcasters really see Internet video as "TV on the Web"?
• how many people are really watching this content on the Web?
• what does it costs to sponsor/buy ads around video content?
• how many eyeballs do content creators need to get before advertising can support and cover their costs of producing and distributing video online?
• has anything been successful from a sponsorship or advertising side of monetization of video?
• who has real numbers on how many more eyeballs the networks are getting to the TV, where they make their real money, because of their use of video on the Web?

What other points of discussion do you think should be discussed?

Readers of the blog can get a discounted pass to the show ($395) by registering here and using discount code VEDISCSTRM.

Ortivia Wireless, a network specializing in mobile video and multimedia content delivery announced that they have raised $15 million in its Series B funding led by Comcast Interactive Capital. I first met Ortiva at the Streaming Media West show last year and profiled them on my blog back in February.

The size of this funding should be a clear indication to the industry that mobile video delivery is starting to gain traction and will soon become a real business. Using a content delivery network that has been built to deliver content just for mobile devices is going to become a requirement for content creators, especially since the traditional CDNs are setup to do very limited mobile video delivery. Of the nearly ten content delivery networks in the U.S. today, seven out of ten of them don’t have any mobile video delivery offering at all. And the few that do offer a very basic service in some cases charge up to 10x what they charge for regular CDN delivery as they are not properly setup to truly deliver video to mobile.

InternetNews.com just profiled the CEO of Ortiva Wireless, DeWayne Nelon this past Friday and did a Q&A interview that discusses some details of Ortiva’s offering. Ortiva is one to watch.

On Friday, BlueCrest Capital Finance announced that it had provided The FeedRoom with $5 million in new debt financing. To date, The FeedRoom has previously raised nearly $50 million in venture equity funding and recently opened new offices in Toronto and California.

Back in February I posted about The FeedRoom and other companies who had just recently gotten received a third round of funding and was questioning how many more rounds of funding can all of these companies get before they have to show investors some real revenue numbers. Before too long, there is going to have to be a tipping point in our industry where the VC money is not going to be as easy to get as it is now.

Ok, so I’ll put my money where my mouth is so to speak. If you are interested in doing a blog about some facet of the online video industry, we’ll setup the blog for you, drive traffic to it, promote it on StreamingMedia.com AND sell sponsorships and ads on the blog and split the revenue with you. All you have to do is blog, which is enough work by itself. I’ll even blog with you on your site to start.

We can get you the traffic if you can provide the content. While I am open to all ideas, in particular I want to start blogs on enterprise video, mobile video, webcasting and P2P video. I own domains already like p2pvideoblog.com, enterprisevideoblog.com, webcastingblog.com etc… and you can use one of them if you so choose.

So that’s about as easy as I can make it. You’ll get a login to TypePad and can just blog, we’ll do all the rest. If you are serious about it, please contact me.

As my previous post has pointed out, many times there are a lot of questions members of the media have for vendors and suppliers in this industry that should be getting answered on that companies blog. I understand that not all questions will be answered but why is it that bloggers and others in the media have such a hard time getting companies to respond to questions in an open forum?

Why don’t more companies in our space have blogs? It costs you nothing to have one, it drives more traffic to you, it gets you more visibility and you’re seen as being a thought-leader. The excuse I always hear is "we don’t have the time", which to me means you’re lazy. If you are really small company, that’s understandable, but when you’re a hundred plus organization, there is no excuse. People also say to me, "we’re not StreamingMedia.com and you can easily get traffic to your blog". You’re wrong. Google sends more traffic to my blog than StreamingMedia.com does. Each month, Google accounts for over 60% of all the traffic I get simply based on people typing in phrases they are looking for. If done correctly, with the right tags and feeds, your blog can get a lot of traffic too. This blog does over 100,000 page views a month now and it’s only been online for four months.

All day long people contact me to write about them, feature their product, etc….. and to many of them I ask why they don’t have a blog to talk about what they are doing? Or better yet, team up with two or three other companies that are in the same vertical industry you are and do a blog together. Why are there no blogs that I am aware of about topics like "Enterprise Video" or "Mobile Video" or "Webcasting" or better yet "P2P Video". Yes, I know there are some sites about P2P applications, but P2P for video is a great example of a product that is not understood by most in our space and even more so by customers. Why hasn’t three or four of the P2P/grid computing/delivery vendors gotten together to start a blog to educate customers on what exactly P2P is all about? What are you waiting for? Customers don’t know what you do, I can’t explain it as well as you can, so where is the outreach?

And I’m not just picking on the P2P guys, although they are at the top of the list as that subject has more confusion than most. Myself, StreamingMedia.com and the other sites out there can only educate the market so much for you. We have limited resources, we have to cover so many technologies, products and vertical markets that we can only get to so many things. Vendors and suppliers need to step up and start educating the market at well via channels like blogs.

If your company wants to do one, wants to work with others to do one, I’ll even help you as much as I can – free of charge.