Today, Joost announced that it had signed up Creative Artists Agency (CAA) to scout and secure new content for distribution on the online entertainment platform. This agreement shows the importance that online video distribution is going to play over the coming years for professionally produced content. CAA clearly represents some of the best music, movie, sports and media talent on its roster and potentially provides Joost with access to a vast amount of new content. I expect this deal will also enable some brand name stars to use the Joost platform to launch their own channel or online content offering. They should have more success via this route as opposed to another online video network as Joost will make sure the content is professionally produced and has nothing to lose by giving some stars a shot at creating their own programming.

On2 announced yesterday that it had acquired Finland based Hantro Products Oy in a cash and stock deal valued at around $58.4 million. Hanto provides video compression technology for mobile, consumer electronics and IPTV devices. The press release says that Hanto’s technology has been implemented on more than 200 million devices and in mobile phones produced by 5 of the top 6 handset manufacturers.

On2 said the Hanto business is expected to generate between $8.1 and $12.2 million in revenue this year which should really help On2’s bottom line. For a company that has excellent traction in the market, a set of really robust products and many happy customers for its Flix product line, I always found it odd that On2’s revenue has always been so low. For Q1 of this year their revenue was only $2.8 million.

On2’s move of focusing on the chipset comes as no surprise considering how mobile devices are finally starting to become adopted in the States and already have better traction overseas. If On2 can give increased video quality with lower power consumption demand and lower silicon costs for manufactures like they say, then this will be an interesting product offering to watch.

Limelight Networks has started its roadshow this week and investors have started calling asking for details on the content delivery market as a whole and what the competitive landscape looks like. Limelight has also set its proposed IPO terms and will be offering 14.4 million shares between $10-$12 a share. It plans to trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol LLNW.

The real question is what Limelight plans to do with the money once raised. Speculation is that they need to do some small acquisitions and increase their service offering by providing more in the way of content management and they clearly need to improve their media reporting options. Acquiring a company who has a content management solution is possible as there are a few small players on the market who could easily be taken out. But on the reporting side, there is not much on the market when it comes to reporting, so expect them to spend some of the newly raised capital to improving their own reporting product.

Everyone keeps asking, but I don’t know the date when they are going public. I don’t think an exact date is really decided till after the roadshow. But I’ll make a guess and say July 9th.

While we see many of the online video technologies converging across the media, broadcast, publishing, advertising and entertainment industries, I don’t think there are enough companies and executives in those verticals who are converging with one another.

While it is great to see just how many new people from multiple verticals were at the Streaming Media east show this year, all shows still seem to be made up of people from different industries who don’t talk to one another. The broadcasters don’t know the publishers. The media guys don’t know the advertisers. I see this at all shows. The same holds true for how all these executives network with one another and where they go to get their news. The broadcasters don’t know about the blogs and news outlets the entertainment guys know about and vice versa.

For instance, I was asking many attendees if they knew of local networking events here in NYC and in most cases, they only knew of them if they were from the industry the event was about. For instance, the publishers and broadcasters know about the NY:MIEG events, but the media and advertising guys don’t. And the media and content companies know about the NY Video 2.0 MeetUp, but the advertisers and publishers don’t.

The technologies are becoming less fragmented and more intertwined but I don’t see many of the executives in all of these verticals really crossing over to other shows, blogs, networking events in the way I think they need to be.

Been a busy past three days at the Streaming Media East show, which ended today. I’ll be following up on a lot of meetings and conversations I had at the show and will be posting in more details some of the more interesting things I talked about and heard from others.

I think the biggest theme from the show is that content creators and content distributors are finally starting to see all forms of video distribution as being equal. Yes, we call the show "Streaming Media" but it’s really about all forms of video based IP. Streaming, progressive downloading, webcasting, P2P, podcasting etc….all these forms of distribution should be used or at least considered depending on who you are trying to reach and what type of content you have.

The biggest thing I saw at the show is that the industry as a whole is progressing, customers are becoming more educated and there is growth on all sides. The question is what it will take to get us to the next level as an industry and how we can push the business side of the equation forward.

Another busy week for investments, this time from small content startups.

• Vator.tv has announced some funding, details of which can be read about at VentureBeat.com, a great site for those of you who don’t know about it. Bambi Francisco, the founder and CEO of the company is speaking at the Streaming Media East show this week on a panel about "consumer-generated video sites".

• Jeff Jarvis announced on his blog that he has invested in Black 20, a company he is calling a creative small-TV content company. Jeff and Black 20 are speaking on a panel at Streaming Media East this week about "creating the new television".

• Mogulus, a service currently in beta that allows for personal webcasting online, announced that it has raised just over a million dollars. I’ve been looking into the service and last week chatted with the CEO Max Hoat and I expect to have a demo account to play with over the next week or so. Max will also be at the Streaming Media East show this week.

• ScanScout, a company that monitors video content announced it had received $7 million in funding.

• It’s been reported that WallStrip.com is going to be acquired by CBS for around $5 million. While it has not yet been confirmed by anyone at CBS or WallStrip.com, other sites are reporting it as a done deal. Adam Elend from WallStrip.com is speaking at the Streaming Media East show on Wednesday so I’ll see if there is anything he can talk to by then.

I know of a few more investments announcements that will come out this month as well so expect this to be a really busy month for funding.

A few weeks ago, I posted on the topic of content delivery providers with a post entitled "Comprehensive List Of Stream Hosting Providers". I put an asterisk next to Level 3 as I had not heard much from them as to where they stand in the CDN market since their acquisition of the SAVVIS CDN assets about four months ago.

This week I got an opportunity to speak to Level 3 at length and got an overview of what they plan on doing with regards to their content delivery product offering. As anyone who follows this industry knows, it’s a good time to get into the content delivery market due to the high demand for delivery services and the fact that there are only about half a dozen providers or less who truly provide global delivery via streaming and progressive download.

After hearing Level 3 give their take on the what they want to accomplish, they are an interesting one to watch for a few reasons and should have a few unique advantages when they bring their product to market:

• They own and operate their own network and data centers. I know this model well from my days at Globix where we owned and operated our own network and data centers and use to sell to customers that "we can control your content from creation to distribution". It’s a different value proposition and one that resonated well with our customers at the time and I expect still does with many content creators today.

• They own the Vyvx business which allows them to be able to ingest content directly into the Level 3 network. Add a few encoding studios, and customers have the ability to ingest, encode, host and deliver their content through one provider. That’s something that no other delivery network has the ability to offer today.

• They have contracts with many of the big media companies already for other services like data and networking that gives them an immediate sales pipeline for a content delivery offering or any new product for that matter. In addition, they can provide customers with the build out of smaller networks for some of the content creators who are building out their own private delivery networks.

That’s not to say they can do all of this tomorrow or that they will automatically be successful, but I think they have a good shot at being a serious player in the industry if they put the right pieces in place and move fast enough. They are going to have to roll out functionality of the network in phases and I expect they will start to talk about what they have to offer very shortly, if not next week at the Streaming Media East show where they are exhibiting.

When it comes to the CDN business and assets that they bought from SAVVIS, the only real value there was the assets for the delivery of static content, not video. Anyone who knew the SAVVIS streaming network knows how old and outdated it was since it was mostly the legacy infrastructure from the Cable & Wireless days which is who SAVVIS acquired it from. So Level 3 has a lot of work to do building out basically a new CDN for streaming as well as adding all of the services that goes along with it like reporting, storage, content ingestion etc…. not to mention all of the internal work that needs to be done to sell and support such a service. But done correctly, with all of the right pieces, it will be a valuable offering in the market.

While it won’t put the other content delivery networks out of business (there is enough business out there for everyone) they do have the opportunity to be a serious player in the game with an offering that talks to more than just the delivery of bits. For the most part, it’s a different kind of offering where they can sell the service to full-fill more of an entire ecosystem need to content creators, as opposed to just selling the delivery aspect. This is a trend we are seeing all of the CDNs move to as they begin to add more services to their offering like content management and transcoding.

In my opinion, the biggest competitor to Level 3 will be themselves. Many big companies never really get a product off the ground to mass market adoption because they move too slowly, have too much internal politics and red tape and take too long to decide on anything. For the most part, the smaller content delivery networks have been able to grab market share by staying quick and nimble. If Level 3 can combine the advantages of being a big company with the ability to move fast like a small company, then this can be the real deal. We’ll be watching.