Yesterday, there were a bunch of interesting announcements that came out at the IAB Digital Video Leadership Forum in NYC, the most interesting being from NBC Universal.

NBC announced that it would no longer run or accept pre-roll ads longer than 15 seconds for short-form content. They did not define what length "short-form" is to them, but also said they would still run 30 seconds pre-roll ads in front of full-length episodes. This is a smart move on their part. I know a lot of sites already run 15 second ads, but in most cases, the advertiser really ends up deciding the length of the ad as opposed to the site.

NBC also announced that it had partnered with a handful of rich media companies including Unicast, Eyewonder, Pointroll and EyeBlaster to create new forms of online ads that let users direct the playback of advertisers’ messages and that enable branding in the video player itself, thereby giving more control to the viewer. Another smart move on their part as it is giving the viewer more say in how the ads are consumed. Instead of just forcing viewers into an experience that you know they don’t want, why not give the viewer the ability to customize the ad playback so that it’s a better user experience and gets the advertiser better branding. I think I am like many viewers on the web where when I see a 30 second pre-roll ad, I hit mute and go do something else for 30 seconds until the ad is over. If NBC can keep that ad down to 15 seconds and allow me to better customize my experience with the ad, I’d probably sit through it.

NBC set a July deadline for implementation to allow advertisers time to prepare for their new standard.

The Streaming Media East show is only one week away and we are working hard on all the last minute items. We’re going to have a lot of great coverage from the show, much if it in real-time. TVWorldwide.com will be webcasting the sessions, Beet.tv will be doing live interviews from the On2 booth, LostRemote.com will be blogging sessions and IPTVEvangelist.com will be doing on-demand video interviews.

We’ve also got a bunch of bloggers and writers moderating a lot of sessions who will have show coverage including Jose Castillo, Jeff Jarvis, John Havens, Robert Scoble, Steve Bryant and others.

We also have pre-registered press from Advertising Age, AlwaysOn, Broadcasting & Cable, Business 2.0, ClickZ News, CNET News, eWeek, GeniusDV, Wall Street Journal and  The New York Times amongst many others.

We will be adding links on the home page of StreamingMedia.com to all of the sites that plan on doing show coverage, so if you want to be listed, please contact me ASAP. If you are a blogger or media professional, it’s not too late to get a press pass.

Ryan Stewart over at ZDNet has one of the best blogs out there when it comes to the subject of rich Internet applications and the development community. With all the recent announcements from Microsoft and Adobe, many people are not fairly comparing platforms and don’t know what each one truly does. In his post entitled "The how and when of Adobe and Microsoft’s Rich Internet Application technologies", Ryan has created a guide for how and when you would want to use different rich Internet applications from Adobe and Microsoft including Silverlight, Flash, Flex 2, Apollo and other tools/platforms.

It’s a must read for anyone who wants to truly understand the differences between all of the platforms out there.

This week, Forbes published an article written by Chad Hurley on it’s website. I don’t know if the article also appears in print but I imagine it does since on the website it says it’s published date is three days from now.

I expect Forbes to publish a better article than this. Chad spends the entire time talking about how YouTube allows new talent to be discovered and gives people the ability to get in front of a lot of eyeballs and basically just tells us all how great YouTube is. Come on. We all know that YouTube allows new talent to be discovered and allows users to get eyeballs to their videos that normally no one would ever see. Is that the best thing that you can write about?

What about writing an article that explains how you plan to monetize YouTube? Or maybe some details on how the revenue sharing will work for video advertising you plan on rolling out this summer? Why not tell us what it’s been like integrating YouTube into the Google infrastructure? Or better yet, talk about when you plan on rolling out your content filtering technology and what that will entail.

There are so many things about YouTube and Google that people want to know about and probably need to know about that could have been discussed in detail in this article. But instead we just get another piece about how great YouTube is. Disappointing.

Todd O’Neill who is organizing a track on Evolving Delivery Systems for the upcoming Media Communications Association-International conference (ProTracks), is actively looking for some speakers in three areas:

• video production for streaming – SD/HD; production gear; post production
• delivery methods – hosted or not; digital signage; iTunes; Slingbox; Intranet; mulitcast; etc.
• strategies – the "why" of streaming; pitfalls to avoid; enterprise approaches; independent producer approaches; vlogs; etc.

MCA-I (formerly ITVA) is an association of professionals primarily in the corporate and business media space. The show takes place in September in Chicago. Contact Todd O’Neill directly if you are interested.

Microsoft will be making a bunch of announcements this week from their MIX event surrounding Silverlight and StreamingMedia.com’s Editor Eric is at the event and will be covering the announcements shortly.

From the week of NAB, Microsoft was distributing with its press kit the below chart comparing Silverlight’s features and benefits with that of Flash. I have not had a chance to really review them side by side but this is how Microsoft sees their platform stacking up to Flash.

We have some great sessions at the Streaming Media East show, May 14-16 in NYC talking about P2P and other forms of content distribution. One of the sessions on May 15th is entitled "Is P2P The Answer To Large Scale Video Delivery?"

Moderated by Rich Mavrogeanes the Founder and CTO of VBrick, this session discusses whether P2P will finally revolutionize online video distribution. They will discuss whether the cost savings advantage with P2P is real, how P2P will translate into a competitive advantage, how P2P distribution may affect the networks and CDNs and what some of the potential problems are that P2P technology may face from the telco’s. The panelists include:

• Nick Rockwell, CTO, MTV Networks
• Christopher Levy, Chairman, Digital Media Management Working Group, DCIA
• Monty Mullig, SVP, Internet Technologies, Turner Broadcasting System
• Brian Taptich, VP, Business Development, BitTorrent

Register for the show and come hear the debate on whether P2P is the answer to the fundamental capacity limitations for large-scale video audiences for today’s Internet. Are there any topics or points would you like to see discussed at this session? If so, please include them in the comments section.