At the Streaming Media East show earlier in the month, there was a lot of talk about how/if P2P distribution will disrupt the world of online video delivery. For me, it’s not a disruptor, but rather a compliment to other forms of video delivery. As some forget, P2P is not best suited for every type of content and every kind of distribution. That said, we’re starting to see some serious interest now when it comes to P2P, yet there is a huge learning curve that is going to have to take place with customers first.

At the show, I had the chance to sit down with BitTorrent and had an in-depth conversation with them about what content companies are asking for in the way of delivery and what trends they are seeing. They brought up a good point. On last year’s P2P panel at Streaming Media East, the vendors on the panel were making the case for P2P. But this year, it was the two customers on the panel, MTV and Turner who were saying how they needed P2P solutions. That shows a shift in the market and a move towards content companies at least being willing to now listen to what P2P based solutions may have to offer.

I also had the chance to hear about the new enterprise solution that BitTorrent just recently started offering in the market. While they call it an enterprise solution, and in our industry enterprise usually means Fortune 500, their solution is really tailored to the media and entertainment companies who are pushing serious traffic where a P2P solution would make sense. This new offering is one that is service based and separate from the
BitTorrent Entertainment Network, which is their portal where you can
purchase content. BitTorrent has spent most of the past few years working on technology and is now ready to aggressively promote and sell their service in the market. They’ve been on a hiring spree lately to be able to support this new offering from a marketing, business development and sales perspective and are still have a few more positions open to fill out the group.

Their new service is based on their technology they call BitTorrent DNA that they describe as "a disruptively effective content delivery technology". Their selling point is that of all P2P based solutions, reduced bandwidth cost, increased performance and scalability and an improved end-user experience. While their marketing pitch is still pretty high-level and is the exact same as all the others, BitTorrent’s solution really does stand out from the others from a technical level as well as how the company operates. For starters, they have an install base of over 150 million clients worldwide, far surpassing any other P2P based client out there. Also, they have a device certification program to ensure compatibility between a hardware solution, whether at the chip level or a consumer electronic device. In addition, customers have told me that BitTorrent’s P2P solution integrates better with other content delivery networks than some of the other P2P services on the market. BitTorrent also mentioned that one of their biggest advantage is that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) recommends their solution to content owners since BitTorrent has worked over the years to make the MPAA happy.

Add all of this up and the fact that BitTorrent raised $20 million back in December and it’s clear that BitTorrent will become a major player in the content delivery market. And if they do go public later this year, like many on Wall Street are speculating, they’ll become even more legit overnight.

For a list of P2P delivery providers, you can see my earlier post on 4/24:

List Of P2P Delivery Networks
https://www.streamingmediablog.com/the_business_of_online_vi/2007/04/list_of_p2p_del.html

Came across this story on Yahoo! from last week talking about how DirecTV showed off its version of Mobile TV, named Sat-Go, at CES earlier in the year. Who is going to carry around a briefcase, to be able to have a portable TV where they go? What are these companies thinking? The article says that the application for this device would be "ideal for tailgating, backyard viewing, and a number of other scenarios." I’d love to hear what those "other" scenarios would be that pertain to consumers. Tailgating, maybe. For the backyard, highly unlikely.

What I completely disagree with from this article is their notion that Sat-Go will somehow challenge video on the mobile handset as it says, "…Sat-Go and similar products from the satellite TV companies could offer a very compelling alternative to what we’ve seen from cell phone-based mobile TV thus far."

Sure, it’s an alternative, the same way VHS tapes are to DVDs. But I think we know the answer to the question of what consumers will want to carry around for video, a briefcase or a mobile phone.

One of the topics that I presented on at Streaming Media East was entitled "Costs for Outsourced Hosting And Video Delivery". (on-demand video here) It was a packed room, with over 150 attendees listening to what the going rates are today for video delivery via outsourced delivery networks for both large and small volume.

It’s a session I do every year and enables me to track the pricing from one presentation to another each year. It also gives everyone an opportunity to hear from the customers in the room on what problems they are having and also what they think the vendors need to improve on. The biggest disappointment to me was that of the nearly 10 delivery networks that were exhibiting at the show, hardly any of them showed up to this session to hear from their customers. I never understood why they miss that opportunity to get direct feedback.

The session went well, with a lot of questions and was very interactive with audience participation. Of all the questions and comments we discussed, the following are the ones that were asked about most often or were pain points that they are experiencing:

• Why is it so hard to find out from a service provider what formats they support, from what geographic regions, for streaming and/or progressive downloads both live and on-demand? Case in point, someone brought up the example that all delivery networks websites show large network maps with lots of locations and peering connections but none of that tells the customer exactly what is supported, where and in what form.

• Why don’t more networks give you an incentive to push more traffic on
  their networks instead of penalizing you when you do overages? I’m discouraged to see that as of late, some providers seem to be going back to the early years with their pricing models where they charge you a premium if you do more than you committed to. We know why the providers do this as they have to estimate how much capacity they themselves have to buy and plan for each month, but this is a broken model. You won’t keep a customer this way, especially when some of them are then using a second provider just so they don’t pay overages. That’s a horrible business model when your overage pricing model sends your customer to your competitor.

• Why is online reporting still so poor? I asked for a show of hands in the room if anyone was satisfied with the reporting they are getting from their current service provider. Not a single hand went up in the room of over 150, the majority of which were all large and small content owners. And talking to specific customers after the session, nearly all of them complained about reporting with their current provider, of which they were all using multiple providers. So this is an industry wide problem and not specific to just one provider.

Those were the biggest points of frustration for customers along with why the pricing varies so much from one provider to another. But that’s something that has been and always will be case. The subject of P2P came up regarding the role that it may play in delivery but we didn’t dive too deep into that discussion since we had a specific session at the show on P2P they could go to. However, it was clear that more customers are looking at P2P and have a lot of questions around it.

The other thing they asked for was a list of service providers, both large and small, for which I pointed them to this list on my blog. The content delivery space is becoming more crowded for the first time in years which is a good thing as far as I am concerned as it helps the customers and more importantly, puts more exposure on the content delivery market and helps the industry as a whole.

UPDATE: As an update to my post from two weeks ago about the size of the CDN market, I have almost completed all of that data and will have it up on the blog shortly. I apologize for not being able to get to it faster but I have a lot of follow up items from the show last week.

A reader of the blog reminded me that one of the questions that was not answered in detail last week at the Streaming Media East show is what sites are getting in regards to CPM rates for video ads running on niche sites with professionally produced video content. We’ve seen numbers mentioned that all over the place in articles and mentioned at conferences, ranging anywhere from $15 – $40. And trying to get real numbers from people seems to be data they don’t want to share. As an industry, we’ve at least got to give people an idea of what is possible depending on the type of content they have and the kind of site it is on. So what are the real numbers out there? What are you paying or charging?

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.