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.

As I had written about in an earlier post, Rafat at PaidContent.org interviewed Rob Glaser about the new RealPlayer that allows anyone to save and download videos on the web that aren’t protected by DRM. In a follow up to Rafat’s interview, he posted on his site some additional questions that Rob answered and posted to Real’s blog.

While many of the answers to the questions were vague or didn’t really answer the question, I have to agree with Rafat that others should take the example Real has set and answer questions from the media in an open forum on their own blog. It’s going to drive a lot more traffic to your site, multiple bloggers like me are now posting about the blog and linking to it and ir probably took Rob all of 5 minutes to answer a few questions.

There are a few round-table speaking spots open for the Streaming Media Europe
show, taking place October 4-5, at the Copthorne Tara Hotel in London that I am looking to fill.
First priority will be given to those speakers and companies based in Europe. Vendors welcomed. E-mail me if interested. Open panels are:

Thursday, October 4, 2007

Streaming Video Content To Mobile: What Works Technically and Commercially
Much hype around Mobile TV, but is it really working in streaming video content to mobiles? Which content genres work commercially?  How can one reach consumers without being on the operator portal? Understand the genres that work on mobile; understand that there is an ecosystem of players to help them mobilise content IP.

Beyond Pre-Roll: What’s Next for Online Video Advertising?
As video advertising evolves in the coming months and years, technologies and business models will naturally extend beyond those in practice today. Sponsorships in the form of product placement and brand ‘overlays’, pre-roll teasers that encourage post-roll clicks and other creative techniques, more effective use of in-banner video, creation of standards and best practices, identifying key performance metrics, establishing content syndication models, affiliate marketplaces and other distribution and monetisation strategies – these are just a few of the challenges and opportunities that face the online advertising industry.

Friday, October 5, 2007

From the Web to your TV: New Media Delivery Revolution
AppleTV, TiVo, Slingbox and a host of other hardware and software products are starting to deliver new media content from the Web to TVs. Learn what latest devices are being used to deliver consumer content and find out how content creators big and small are utilising these new tools. Also discussed will be how online content is being treated differently from traditional broadcast content and what potential business models are being created for the monetisation of consumer content.

Delivering on the Three Screen Video Experience
Digital entertainment offers the opportunity to engage consumers on a multitude of devices, creating new opportunities to market, sell, boost ratings and increase customer loyalty. Speed to market and the quality of the service delivered often define success. This session will discuss how content creators can best prepare today to take advantage of the opportunities created by the rapid growth of new media audiences. Learn which business models are most likely to work and why a cross-platform approach to the business of new media is essential.

This morning, Microsoft announced that it had updated its IPTV software platform, providing several new capabilities and renamed the product Mediaroom. The new capabilities include music and photo sharing, picture-in-picture capabilities, digital terrestrial television support and mostly importantly, an application development toolkit. Opening up the platform is a crucial step for Microsoft as it now allows developers access to a once closed system and gives them an opportunity to develop new applications for Mediaroom.

Microsoft’s press release states that "more than 18 of the world’s leading service providers have selected the Microsoft Mediaroom platform for their digital TV offerings, and commercial deployments are currently underway with 10 providers."

At the time of this posting, both the www.microsoftmediaroom.com and www.microsoft.com/TV websites were not working and giving directory listing errors.

While we’re on the subject of IPTV, I think there is a lot of confusion as to what an IPTV service offering is and how that ties into streaming media technology and the online video industry. I hear the term IPTV and Internet TV used in the same manner but it’s important to remember that IPTV is a closed network, the Internet is not. The two are very different technologies and distribution platforms.