In December of 2005, TiVo announced it had partnered with Rocketboom so that TiVo users could watch Rocketboom on their DVRs and TiVo emphasized how this would be the first of many content deals to come. The industry praised this as a big deal for content owners who’s content would now be able to cross over to set-top-boxes and the integration of online content to TV’s.

But since this announcement, TiVo has made very few content deals of any significance. As of now, from what I can tell, they have fourteen content partners via TiVoCast. Aside from the New York Times, all of the other content deals are from small web only properties. Yes, they have the whole Amazon Unbox deal, but when was the last time you even heard anything about that?

You’d think at a time when TiVo’s CEO is saying that "hopefully" they will pull in more subscribers and grow their business based on TiVo’s unique kinds of features that help differentiate its DVR from the others on the market that they would had a lot more content deals in place.

So why hasn’t TiVo done more content deals? Has anyone approached TiVo about a content deal and can comment on what it takes to become a content partner? Is it too expensive to get your content on TiVo’s platform? I’m interested to hear from others who may know as to why TiVo seems to have so few content deals in place.

Thanks to everyone’s support, the blog did over 92,000 page views in the second month, up from 50,000 page views in the first month.

As I said from day one, I believe
that the contents and success of any real blog comes from the community
rather than just one individual, which is why I feel it is important to share the traffic numbers in an open forum. I welcome your continued feedback and
ideas on what you want to discuss and I encourage more of you to use
the comments section.

In the past month I’ve added FeedBurner as the new source for RSS and made all of the posts searchable via Technorati. I’ve also edited the categories section a bit and made them more focused. The new latest post section and previous post links should also make it easier to navigate. If there is something I can do better to make reading the blog easier, please let me know.

I’d also like to thank last months blog sponsors of Limelight Networks, PEER 1, NaviSite and Akamai. If you are
interested in reaching a very targeted group of readers, please contact Joel Unickow for blog sponsorship details. We’ve kept it very affordable, under $1,000 a month, so that many can take advantage of the readership and reach of
the blog.

Next week, I will be posting some thoughts on the business of P2P networks, additional thoughts on Silverlight and my take on the lack of demographics and data for our industry.

I welcome your comments and thoughts at any time. Thanks for your continued support.

One of the most common questions I get asked is for a list of streaming media hosting providers. Aside from the large companies everyone knows, typically referred to as CDNs, there are also a bunch of smaller regional service providers who also specialize in delivering audio and video content via progressive download and/or streaming. Choosing the right provider is all based on what your needs are and there is not one provider on this list who is better than another unless you are talking your specific needs.

This list is by no means 100% complete and there may be other companies that I don’t know about, or forgot. I did not list those providers who simply re-sell or private label one of the providers on the list below or who specialize in hosting just radio stations etc… I also am not listing any providers who only have a P2P offering as I will be doing a post about P2P providers next week.

Below is the list in alphabetical order. Please note that not all of these providers support both streaming and progressive downloads and not all of them support the same video formats. (Flash, Windows Media, QuickTime and Real)

If you feel I have missed someone on the list, please let me know in the comments section.

There’s been a lot of coverage so far about Microsoft’s announcement this week of Silverlight and we’ll be hearing even more from Microsoft in the coming weeks from their MIX event. Of all the coverage I have read about Silverlight, few have really mentioned how Microsoft is marketing Silverlight as a cheaper platform to create and delver content with. While cost is not always the most important factor when it comes to content creation and delivery, cost does always play into the overall decision of what platform(s) content creators will support.

From Microsoft employee Sean Alexander’s blog, "Silverlight will address the rising costs of creation and rich media delivery in two key ways- providing a consistent set of tools for development and design teams building applications for the Web and Windows, and support for lower cost of delivery of audio and video experiences when used with Windows Media streaming".

The cost of content creation and delivery is a big factor and potentially a big advantage for Silverlight for a few reasons. The major reason Windows Media grabbed so much market share over the RealNetworks platform years back was that Windows Media was cheaper to deliver than Real. Content delivery networks had to charge customers more to deliver content in the Real format to cover their licensing costs of the Real server, just like they have to do today when delivering Flash streaming. Windows Media server was free, the Real server software was not. With Microsoft announcing that the new Windows Server, codename "Longhorn" will delivery twice the scalability than Windows Server 2003, it means delivery networks will be able to deliver even more content than Flash at an even cheaper costs.

While the higher cost of creating and delivering in Flash over Windows Media has not stopped too many in the past, it has stopped some content creators from wanting to spend two to three times more just to use the Flash streaming format. And the ones who do pay the extra cost to use Flash streaming, have been happy to do so as Flash gives their users an experience Windows Media couldn’t. But if that quickly changes with Silverlight and both platforms begin to offer the same type of user experience, I expect cost will play an ever bigger factor than it has in the past as to what platform(s) content owners will choose.

In my eyes, cheaper cost to create and deliver content means more adoption and consumption of content which equals a faster growing industry with more successful content business models. If Silverlight truly does allow content owners to create, encode and deliver content faster and cheaper while providing the same if not better user experience than Flash streaming, then Microsoft is going to have the advantage in the long run.

Matt Coppet and the UBS Global Media Investment Research team puts out a great newsletter each day about the online media and telcom industry, typicaly focusing each newsletter on a particular topic. This week, one of the topics was focused on the numerous online video ventures recently announced by many of the major broadcasters.

From their newsletter, here are their "10 conditions of success for any online video ventures": Traffic optimization, advertising integration, brand focused, syndicated model, social media friendly, independent decision making, bandwidth costs control, leveraging data mining, bit sized content
available and predictive marketing

• (1) High web traffic from start is necessary to sustain advertisers’ interest and to soften the impact of higher ad inventories on CPMs. Current CPMs up to $50 would be tough to retain in a basic streaming environment (no targeted ad).

• (2) Integrated ad servicing process is key (no ability for each partner to sell its own ad inventory, which would defeat the purpose). It also eliminates channel conflicts.

• (3) Brands/advertisers friendly (brands should be able to go behind pre roll/post-roll ads. We believe opening the full interface to branding/ sponsorship – including the player skin – is key. Ability for users to bookmark content and distribute segment is important.

• (4) Syndication model can work with compelling content. It is not a surprise to see NBC Universal in the venture. It recently pre-launches the National Broadband Co. (nbbc), a content syndication marketplace. We do not know yet if nbbc would be integrated into the venture or become an infrastructure partner.

• (5) Minimal social-media (web 2.0) function (such as users’ commentaries/ ratings/chat). Over promising in term of user customization could conflict with future branding/sponsorship. For instance, mySpace users would be able to embed those videos from the NBCU-NWS venture on their webpage. Any venture would have to make sure of the integrity of the player branding (against program scripts that could remove them).

• (6) Independence is important Operating power should not be shared among partners, which could slow down the decision making process. It also eliminates conflict of interest.

• (7) Contextual advertising (or predictive marketing) should enable advertisers to focus on branding as well (and not only on shorter term promotion). As relevance improves, brands would likely spend more driving monetization up.

• (8) Managing bandwidth costs is central to any ventures success.

• (9) Moving from simple data gathering to leveraging data. Understanding the customer (analyzing databases) offers a potential viewer "lifespan value".  Package goods companies for instance could be inclined to spend more for addressable advertising.

• (10) Offering content in the format customers want (such the 5 minute signature moment in a sitcom or a specific candidate performance on American Idol). Smaller length would respond their younger demo aspiration and could increase the ratio ad over content.

It’s been a long time in the making and I am happy to announce that today, Microsoft officially announced Silverlight. Silverlight is a a new cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Why am I happy about this? Well for starters, for the past two years I have been complaining to Microsoft that their Windows Media customers feel abandoned. There has been a lack of support for the Windows Media platform for quite some time and Microsoft had ignored the video market for the past few years. Finally, that is now going to change. Customers who use Windows Media and partners who have been building on top of Windows Media are once again going to get the support they need to make the end-user experience better – which is what video on the web is all about – the users experience.

We have a feature story about Silverlight on StreamingMedia.com which gives more details and also covers Adobe’s announcement today of their new media player. (more on that in a later post) Microsoft has kept the development of Silverlight under wraps for quite some time but we’ve been getting the low-down on the platform over the past few weeks so I’ll have a bunch to talk about over the next few days as more details about Silverlight are made public.

This is a big day for the industry. Anytime you have two companies like Microsoft and Adobe both vying for control of the format content creators use for video is a good thing. Competition means we’ll have more products come to the market faster as each company tries to out do one another.   

I know the title of this post is something you hear of every year before NAB kicks off, but this year, there are going to be some announcements that will really change the way consumers interact with video content. We’ve been pre-briefed at StreamingMedia.com on many of these announcements and the editorial staff is currently writing up featured stories on some of these news items. Personally, I am really excited by may of them as it is only going to further highlight in the media and with content owners what is going on with online video and where it will evolve.

We’ll be posting some of the feature stories on the StreamingMedia.com website at 12:01am Sunday night and I will be commenting on the impact of many of these announcements here on the blog next week.