I find it very hard to fathom but I still run into a lot of marketing folks in person at events who say something like "I’d love for you to write about our company and to look at what we’re doing but didn’t know how to contact you." Or it’s the line of "I saw this month’s copy of Streaming Media magazine and noticed that you wrote about our competitor but not about us, why?"

Come on now, those are bad excuses. Where are your marketing skills? Marketing 101 says you always know how to contact someone in the media who may be covering the industry you are in. And if you can’t find my e-mail and phone number on this blog, on the home page of StreamingMedia.com, on DanRayburn.com or all the other sites out there that list it, then you should not be in the marketing profession.

As for the idea that any member of the media can and should cover every vendor, product or service in any industry – that’s just not possible. There are only so many hours in the day and vendors should make it easier for the media to know what they are doing. Especially since unlike a lot of the other blogs out there where the blog is their only job, this blog is just one of the many, many things that consumes my time. Why is it that so many vendors as me why I don’t call them?!? How about being proactive and calling me?  Or how about looking at our editorial calendar on StreamingMedia.com and calling the Editor of the magazine, Eric, before we write a story and it goes to print instead of asking us when the story comes out why we didn’t feature you. This happens way too often.

Now some companies do a great job. No question, there are those out there who have marketing folks and teams who help to keep us in the loop and do a really good job. And I know that not all companies have the resources of entire teams at their disposal. But there is one thing that many, many companies do that really irks me and is just dumb for your business.

Many times, I will e-mail a PR or marketing person at a company that I have dealt with before only to have two things happen. One, the e-mail bounces back to me saying no person with that name exists. Ok, so if the person has moved on, why the hell doesn’t the company have that address setup to forward to another PR or marketing person!!! Now I am stuck with no PR contact and not even an automated message in the e-mail telling me who the new person is to contact. How is that good for your business? Many of you may be surprised but this happens all the time.

Second, the e-mail won’t bounce back but I will never hear from the person. After having to call around in the company, I’ll find out that the person is no longer there and there is either a new person to contact or no one knows who you should contact. How can this be? If the person has left the company, have an automated reply come back when I send the e-mail letting me know that. Bouncing the e-mail is bad, but accepting it and then not following up on it is even worse as I have no way of knowing the person is now gone. This is why many times, someone from your company gets invited to speak at a show one year and not the next. Your speakers placement person has left the company and I am e-mailing someone who is not there.

Also, why I am ranting about marketing issues, why do companies post press releases on their websites as PDF documents? It makes it a lot harder to search the release for specific words, it’s harder to share a link to a PDF with someone in an e-mail and Google and others don’t index the contents of PDFs so you lose out on potential traffic. The whole reason to  put out a press release is to get it in front of as many "qualified" media people as possible, but you put it in a format that is then hard for us to work with.

Also, many times we are on deadline, which you should understand but many companies don’t. If any member of the media e-mails you with a question, speaking invite, quote request etc… and says they need to hear back within a certain period of time, why do you respond literally a week after the deadline? Now if you don’t want the press or don’t care about the coverage, ok, that’s fair. But when you call back a week later and act all surprised that the opportunity is no longer available, why do you seem so surprised? This happens quite often as well.

Again, not all companies are like this. Many are very good. But way too many aren’t. The bottom line is that many companies need to be more proactive and follow basic marketing rules that all companies should be applying to maximize their exposure in the industry.

Note: The editorial calendar is not currently on the Streaming Media magazine page as we just took it down and are creating a new one for the second half of the year. It will be up shortly.

There is a good article from Fast Company this month that profiles Comcast’s online video business which has been around for over five years now. It’s an interesting read since most cable companies have only recently begun to have online video strategies while the Comcast.net portal was launched in 2001 amidst down times in the industry. The article highlights the correct mentality that Comcast had back then to know how important a role online video would play to cable companies years later.

This summer, Comcast’s new video portal FanCast is expected to launch and will contain content from the newly formed NBC and News Corp. joint venture.

I like BusinessWeek. It’s the one publication I always make time to read no matter how many start to stack up on my desk. But an article from last week entitled “A Better Way to Stream TV?” features a profile about a Israeli based startup, Arootz, who says it can satisfy Web video demand using multicasting and cheap hard-drives.

By itself, not a bad topic to cover, but there are many places where the article never questions the hype clearly being fed to the author by the vendor. Why are so many people in the media falling for the idea that the web is breaking when it comes to video delivery? Four sentences in, the article starts with the hype saying, “The demands of streaming video over the Net are already starting to put a strain on both the infrastructure and the business models of the world’s Internet service providers (ISPs).” Really? Please give one example.

The article explains that Artooz says it has devised a solution that greatly increases the Net’s ability to deliver video without requiring substantial new infrastructure by multicasting and by using “off-the-shelf hard drives that can store vast amounts of data fast and cheap.” Apparently, the author thinks or was told by Artooz that, “The combination of the two represents a radical new approach to using the Net.” Wrong. Multicasting has been around for at least ten years and is anything but new. And using cheap hard drives to store videos, well that’s what everyone has been doing for years. Where is the radical approach? Store and forward models for video have been used for years.

The article goes on to say that, “The company figures that all of Israel could be served with just one server farm, while the U.S. could be covered with about 20.” More hype. 20 servers to cover how many users? Also says that, “Providers of Net-based TV services, such as Joost (which uses a P2P architecture) and Babelgum, are bound to be interested in what Arootz is up to”. Why? Multicasting has been around for so long now, that if multicasting was a reasonable option, more networks and ISPs would be multicast enabled, but they aren’t for many reasons.

What the article doesn’t say is how this technology is going to work to deliver content to someone who uses an ISP that is NOT multicast enabled. More questions than answers.

The next NY Video 2.0 Meetup will take place Monday July 9th in NYC at the Columbia Business School. I’ll be moderating a panel entitled "Beyond Pre-Roll: What’s Next for Online Video Advertising?" starting at 7pm. The panelists for this discussion will be:

• Kevin McGurn, VP, Advertising, nbbc
• Jeff Minsky, Director of Digital Media, OMD
• Robert Victor, Product Manager, Emerging Media, DoubleClick
• Jed Savage, EVP, Strategy and Development, ScanScout

This is a great chance to come hear if anyone is making money with online video advertising and learn the going CPM rates for video ads. As always, the event is free but the room size is limited to 200 attendees. As of today, there are only 26 spots left, so RSVP now if you want to attend.

Have any questions for the panelists? Leave them in the comments section and I’ll ask them during the Q&A portion of the session.

On Friday, District Court judge Rya Zobel issued a preliminary ruling in the patent infringement lawsuit that Akamai filed against Limelight Networks. Shares in Limelight rose over $4 after the ruling. While I have not had time to read the entire ruling yet, essentially the court rejected the notion that Akamai could patent the way files were delivered over the Internet as per an article on Light Reading.

The article on Light Reading includes quotes that say, "What happened was Akamai was trying to patent the process, as opposed to its technology," Stimson said. "And the judge said, ‘That’s not a process you can patent."

I have not had a chance to speak to anyone from Limelight Networks or Akamai personally yet and neither of the companies have yet to put out an official statement on the wire about the ruling. IF this is the end of the litigation that would be good for both companies and the industry. While lawsuits are part of all industries, they distract all companies involved and don’t allow them to focus all of their efforts on their core business.

I expect we’ll hear more from Akamai and Limelight Networks with official announcements about the ruling before too long.

Last week, I saw a lot of bloggers and news sites talking about a press release put out by Ellacoya Networks, a communications equipment company, that says YouTube accounts for nearly 10% of all traffic on the Internet. Yet, I didn’t notice any bloggers who questioned the report or the data in it. The idea that any company would put out a report that says "YouTube alone comprises approximately 20% of all HTTP traffic, or nearly 10% of all traffic on the Internet" without data to back up such a claim, is absurd.

Looking at the details they announced it says they "released findings based on usage data of approximately one million broadband subscribers in North America". So how does 1 million subscribers in only North America account for all traffic on the Internet when the Internet is global?

Plus, Ellacoya Networks can’t even take the data it has and present it properly. It says, "Breaking down application types within HTTP, the data reveals that traditional Web page downloads represent 45% of all Web traffic. Streaming video represents 36% and streaming audio 5% of all HTTP traffic." Say what? If is is "streaming video" like you say, then how can it be HTTP based? Which one is it? Streaming or HTTP?

They use the term streaming and download in the same phrase twice in the four paragraph release. "Presently, as a result of streaming audio and video in Web downloads, HTTP is approximately 46% of all traffic on the network." Are you talking progressive downloads or streaming?

And they end the press release with a quote that includes them saying, "The way people use the Internet is changing rapidly – from browsing to real-time streaming. We expect to see new applications over the next year that will accelerate this trend." That may be, but you didn’t report on anything that was "real-time streaming" based.

The news sites and bloggers should be doing a better job of questioning data like this and not just posting highlights of a press release just so they have another blog post for the day.

As Blu-ray and HD DVD continue to battle it out over which format will dominate the market, last week, HD DVD released its first title that incorporates new user features that involves online video. These new features allows anyone who connects their HD DVD player to the Internet via a broadband connection the ability to download trailers to other movies, change menu styles and download other subtitles.

But the most interesting feature is that it will allow anyone to re-edit the movie, arranging the scenes as they want and then allow them to upload their edited video to a server hosted by the studio, in this case to Warner Brothers, for the movie 300. The other users can download that version of the movie to their HD DVD players and watch the re-edited video. What I’m trying to find out is what the technology is behind this, what compression is being used and how large of a file is the user uploading from their house to the studio. And where is the file saved that is being downloaded? To some sort of drive in the HD DVD player or to the disc itself? I can’t find any technical details on the HD DVD site.

All of this seems like a bit of last ditch effort for HD DVD which clearly is not getting the market penetration over Blu-ray. Yes, from the data I have read, more HD DVD players have been sold than Blu-ray, but it’s all going to come down to what content is available. The content will dictate which format wins. And the announcement by Blockbuster two weeks ago that it would not stock HD DVDs when it expands the high-definition section in its 1,450 stores next month and will only stock Blu-ray, is another bad sign for HD DVD.

I say good, let one of these formats fall by the wayside and lets get some standards when it comes to something in U.S.