In more funding news this week, Veoh and Kyte.tv both announced investment deals.

Veoh raised $26 million in a series C funding led by Goldman Sachs and existing shareholders Spark Capital and Shelter Capital Partners. For Veoh, this gives them a combined total of just over $41 million raised to date, by far the largest of any of the user generated video sharing sites. That’s a lot of money for a site that shares videos and I know I speak for many in the industry when I say that I can’t wait to see how they will monetize this type of content and show investors a return on their money.

Kyte.tv, a new company on my radar which launched its website in May, said on Tuesday it had received funding from the investment arm of Nokia. Kyte.tv which aims to take the video sharing model on the Internet over to the handset, did not disclose the size of the investment. Kyte also lists as investors Swisscom and Niklas Zannstrom, who started Web phone service Skype.

I’ve covered the topic of patent litigation in the past as it pertains to the online video industry and from recent announcements, it shows no sign of slowing down. Acacia’s not the only company aggressively pursuing these hot patents
as potential revenue generators, and target companies need a sound
response strategy should Acacia or any other firm come looking for
licensing fees.

Last week, Nokia filed a counter-infringement lawsuit against Qualcomm accusing them of infringing on six patents in Nokia’s MediaFlo mobile TV service amongst other things.

In May, Streamcast Networks was seeking an injunction against Joost and also last month, Media Rights Technologies and BlueBeat.com issued cease and desist letters to Microsoft, Apple, Adobe and RealNetworks over technology that controls access to copyrighted material.

Tracking all of the litigation taking place that pertains to video over IP continues to be very important and staying on top what is taking place is crucial if you are involved in video. It is important that you and your customers are aware of how this is and will continue to affect the online video industry. Suppliers and vendors in the IP video industry as well as content creators need to have the background information to make eductaed business decisions. With that in mind, myself and the Analysis Group wrote a featured article for the Streaming Media sourcebook that covers this topic.

The article, entitled, "Digital Media Patents for Profit", can be read on StreamingMedia.com and gives an overview of what all companies should be aware of.

While most people assume that the cost of bandwidth is continuing to decline, the cost of delivering video over a content delivery network has gone up slightly this year. The big price drop in bandwidth has been on the network side of the business as opposed to the delivery side. Since most CDNs still charge on a per GB delivered model, that pricing has been pretty stable over the past 12 months and in the last 6 months, we’ve seen a price increase of between $0.02 – $0.03 per GB delivered.

The reason for this is primarily that CDN providers are no longer selling on price alone. They are selling on customer service, SLA, geographic reach, customized reporting and additional value ad services like content management and the like. And on the flip side, customers are now buying services based on these factors as opposed to just who gives the lowest pricing, which is the way they should all be buying.

Based on the pricing I have seen in the market which comes directly from customers contracts and RFPs that are sent to me weekly, asking for feedback, below is a breakdown range on the latest pricing trends for delivering audio and video content, across CDNs like Akamai, CacheLogic, Internap, Limelight Networks, Mirror Image, NaviSite and VeriSign.

• 1TB: High, $2.00GB, Low $1.50GB
• 5TB: High, $1.60GB, Low $0.95GB
• 10TB: High, $1.20GB, Low $0.89GB
• 25TB: High, $0.95GB, Low $0.75GB
• 50TB: High, $0.65, Low, $0.45GB
• 100TB: High, $0.29, Low, $0.19
• Above 100TB: It’s all over the map

While delivery pricing will always vary based on many factors, the most important of which is the customers needs, the above pricing is the going rate today for delivery on all of the major CDNs. While I have seen that pricing rise slightly, I don’t see the trend continuing for the rest of the year. I think the slight rise we have seen for the per GB delivered pricing model will pretty much flatten out the rest of the year.

For more details on pricing, you can watch my presentation from the Streaming Media East show in May entitled "HOW TO: Costs for Outsourced Hosting And Video Delivery" and can read my article from February entitled "How to Shop for Video Hosting: Five Questions To Ask".

I am actively looking for keynote presenters for the Streaming Media Europe show, taking place October 4-5, at the Copthorne Tara Hotel in London. Keynote presenters should be from a company that is based in Europe that is currently using online video in some way that can talk to the adoption, deployment and success that they have seen from the technology and how it has helped their business. They can be from the media and entertainment, enterprise, broadcast or government verticals.

At this time, I am not accepting any vendors or suppliers for these presentation spots however I am interested in hearing from any vendor who may have a customer that would fit into the requirement. You can send me e-mail or call me at 917-523-4562 with any suggestions.

PermissionTV, the self described "Internet TV technology platform provider" announced today that it had received $9 million in funding from Castile Ventures and Point Judith Capital. Both are new investors in the company joining the other six investments firms who have already invested in PermissionTV. The  press release also says the company has signed over 30 new customers in the past year.

PermissionTV falls in the category of other companies like Narrowstep and Maven Networks that allow companies a platform by which they can create branded Internet TV channels and monetize the traffic via ad supported content, subscription based and various other means. There are a lot of players in the Internet TV platform space, whatever that means, but quite frankly, I can’t really tell the differences between most of them. They all seem to focus on professional content, nothing user generated related, and sell the platform as more of an ASP model. The suite of features and functionality they have is all pretty similar but does vary from one provider to another.

For me, it all boils down to what exactly is defined by the term "Internet TV"?

Yesterday, Oversi, a P2P caching and content delivery company headquartered in Israel announced it had received $8 million in funding led by Cisco. The release says the funding will enable them to expand Oversi’s sales and distribution channels and will help fund the development of new products in the P2P streaming and delivery space.

I know there are at least two other P2P based delivery networks that are currently closing funding which would give vendors in the P2P delivery market a lot of dollars combined. I would expect/hope to see many of them really push hard into the market shortly with their value propositions.

There has been a lot of talk about Rocketboom as of late (read Frank Barnako’s Story on MarketWatch.com) as to how they are going to monetize their videos as they try to generate revenue. I think Rocketboom is a great example of where sometimes, our industry and the media that covers it, really goes overboard. From day one, Rocketboom was always talked about as being "successful" simply because they had a ton of traffic and eyeballs. Everyone talked about Rocketboom as the example of how to build a video business on the Internet even though enough people out there were saying, "where’s the revenue"? What’s the business model? Where’s the syndication strategy?

Rocketboom should serve as a wake-up call to those who think that simply having traffic equals revenue and a sustainable, growing business model. Or to those that think online video advertising alone is going to generate a lot of revenue in today’s market. Even companies like ABC and others are supplementing their advertising with corporate sponsorships, and in ABC’s case, they have content that is professionally produced and is content people actually want to watch, unlike many of the other content sites on the web.

As an industry, we should be judging the success of any company based on revenue. I hate to say that as it sounds like something you’d hear from an analyst on Wall Street talking about a public company, but without real revenue, no company can survive. Sure, not all companies need to be huge and do tons of revenue. There is nothing wrong with being small, growing slowly and capturing more eyeballs or market share. But at some point, it all does come down to generating enough revenue to keep the company going, no matter how many eyeballs or notoriety your site has.