Limelight Networks has filed for an IPO on the NASDAQ global market under the ticker symbol LLNW. The filing, which was made public Thursday by the SEC, says Limelight is looking to raise $201 million. According to the filing, Limelight earned $64.3 million for the year ending December 2006 and reported a loss of $3.7 million.

Limelight has been marching towards the IPO since mid last year when it raised a round of $130 million led by Goldman Sachs Capital Partners and brought on a new CEO Jeffrey Lunsford, who led his former company WebSideStory through a successful IPO.

This is good news for all the companies in the content delivery segment of the market as it will bring additional exposure to the services these companies provide. Also, with Limelight now having to put on paper every quarter all the details of it’s business, it will help to give us a better picture of the entire content delivery market.

I’ve put a call into Limelight to see if they will give a date range of when they expect to go public. Waiting to hear back. The company was not able to provide any estimated date range.

NBC Universal and News Corp. announced today that they are joining forces to launch a new video portal this summer enabling them to better control their programming and give YouTube some competition. It’s about time. What’s taken these major content owners so long?

I like this deal for two major reasons. One, this new video portal will have real syndication in place since they are teaming up with Yahoo, Time Warner Inc.’s AOL, Microsoft Corp.’s MSN, and MySpace as their initial distribution partners. In addition, they are going to focus on producing professional looking content as opposed to most of the junk you see on YouTube. Some have said this new video portal can’t be compared to YouTube since YouTube is all about allowing users to upload their own videos and the new NBC Universal and News Corp. portal has not yet defined what roll user generated content will play.

It’s hard to know how much of YouTube’s traffic comes from user generated video or from TV produced content, but we know that a vast majority of traffic comes from TV content. I mean, how many jackass style videos can you really watch each day?

For me, the outstanding questions about this deal are:

• How will this new NBC Universal and News Corp. portal distribute content? Will they use a firm like Brightcove or try and keep most of the technology in-house? If they don’t have a user generated function, then all they are doing is delivering video which they can easily do. But if they need to have transcoding and other functionality, my guess is they will partner with someone so that they enter the market faster.
• What will be the role of user generated video in the new portal?
• How many other content providers will jump on board with NBC Universal and News Corp. to add their content to this new portal? If it is successful when it launches, many other content owners will quickly want to join.

It seems every time there is a big deal announced people always seem to call it a "game changer" even when the new offering has not yet launched. In most cases, I think it’s a bunch of hype and they use the term simply to create drama, but in this case, I think this announcement really does have the potential to change the economics for some content owners.

Mediapost has a good article on their website today that reviews some of the sessions going on at the OMMA Hollywood conference this week. Specifically, this article talks to how the role of the agency will need to change to keep up with the emerging media planning platforms.

This is not unique to our industry or a media business. This applies to companies in any industry that allow themselves to not embrace change and work with it, instead of against it. The record industry is a great example of an industry that in my opinion has never kept up with or embraced change.

The call for speakers for the Streaming Media East conference and exhibition taking place Nov. 6-8th in San Jose is now open. I typically receive ten times the number of speaking submissions I have available so I strongly suggest you submit your proposal early, as they are reviewed and possibly confirmed upon receipt. The submission deadline is May 11th.

It should be noted that we are always looking for speakers from the media who cover and track this industry via print, web and blogging. For the East show in May we have speakers from Economist, Business Week, Wall Street Journal, eWeek, ClickZ News, MarketWatch and About.com amongst other media outlets.

If you are interested in moderating your own round-table session at the show and are looking to help organize and participate in the topic and creation of a session, contact me immediately via e-mail with your idea.

As you are all aware, the online video market is hotter than ever and our shows continue to grow each year and continue to attract more and more speakers. The demand continues to grow for speaking spots so I can’t stress enough how important it is to get your submissions in on time.

AT&T Inc., Ericsson, France Telecom, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Siemens Networks, Sony, and Telecom Italia today announced the founding of the Open IPTV Forum, an industry consortium that will work to define an interoperable end-to-end specification for delivery of IPTV services.

The release says that the forum, which is fully open to participation across the communications and entertainment industries, will focus on development of open standards that could help to streamline and accelerate deployments of IPTV technologies, and help to maximize the benefits of IPTV for consumers, network operators, content providers, service providers, consumer electronics manufacturers and infrastructure providers.

As with any organization or association, I’m skeptical only because we have seen so many of these types of groups launch with big fanfare but they end up having little impact on the industry. Many don’t end up actually doing anything or get so caught up in their own internal politics that they can’t get out of their own way. That being said, I give these companies credit for joining together to try and accomplish something instead of just sitting on the side and doing nothing. I hope to see them succeed.

Other companies in the online video industry should take note. There is no where near enough co-opetition going on amongst vendors in this industry which in many cases is just short sighted thinking. There are way too many important decisions being made about our industry, by those outside our industry.

Years ago, I’ve used to be on a lot of boards of companies from hardware manufactures and content creators to non-profits and service based providers. I really enjoyed the positions as it gave me insight into other segments of the industry and allowed me to continue to always learn more. I’m looking to do more of that again and have been getting a bunch of offers as of late. If you know of an interesting board position or have one at your company and think it’s a fit, please drop me a line. I am more interested in companies who have an actual product or service out on the market as opposed to companies who are still in stealth mode and have no proof of concept.

I’m open to any ideas and will be evaluating all of the offers and picking two or three companies to work with starting this year. It could a company involved in any form of IP based video content/service across any kind of network. I like working with companies who want to build a real long term business and who’s business model is not to build something in twelve months and then try and sell it.

I know I am not the only one that struggles when it comes to using the correct term to classify this industry. Now some would argue that streaming media or online video is not even an industry to begin with and they are right. Streaming media is a technology and online video could be an industry but it also describes the technology used.

So how do we classify this industry? Clearly there is a need to come up with a term that the industry settles on because as this market grows, there are times the industry is going to need to work together on many fronts. For some time it seems the "digital media" term is what’s used, but to me that’s completely generic and really does not describe what we do.

So how would you classify this industry? What terminology do you think best represents what we are doing as a collective group?