Steve Bryant who is moderating a user generated content panel at Streaming Media East in May has an excellent article over at Google Watch, an eWeek blog, entitled "18 Reasons why Google and YouTube are Guilty of Copyright Infringement".

Steve outlines Viacom’s argument as presented in their official complaint and edits it down to the core points as Viacom sees it. Head over to Google Watch to read it.

No surprise here, we all knew it was coming. Today, Viacom announced that it was suing YouTube and its corporate parent Google for alleged copyright infringement and is seeing more than $1 billion dollars in damages. Viacom is seeking an injunction prohibiting Google and YouTube from using any of its content on their websites.

In it’s press release Viacom said, "“YouTube is a significant, for-profit organization that has built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to others’ creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google. Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws. In fact, YouTube’s strategy has been to avoid taking proactive steps to curtail the infringement on its site, thus generating significant traffic and revenues for itself while shifting the entire burden – and high cost – of monitoring YouTube onto the victims of its infringement."

There is both good and bad to this. The good is that online video will
continue to get more exposure in the press and with consumers because
of all the coverage this suit will get. The bad is that many people
will still reference online video as a product that no one has been
able to create a business model from. While that is not true,
perception is reality in any industry and even more so in the Internet
space.

This should make for some interesting times as I expect we’ll now get to hear even more information about Google and YouTube that we didn’t know about before regarding their business, the buyout and potentially revenue. The comments form is open.

On of the largest investment banks in the world is looking to fill the job of "Global Head, Enterprise Video Platform". I’ve been asked not to say what bank it is but the job is based in London and they are looking for someone with a proven track record within a large corporate environment. You must have experience with enterprise content management systems and internally hosted distribution platforms specific to video delivery.

If you’d like to know more, please e-mail Phil Erwood directly.

If you are looking for a new position, have taken a new job or are a
company that has a job opening, let me know. In many cases I will
highlight it here on the blog – free of charge.

Darren Aftahi, VP of Digital Media Research at ThinkEquity Partners has some of the best institutional research in the Analyst community about companies in this space. While he covers a broad spectrum of digital media technologies, much of what he writes about has to do with content distribution and online video.

I’ll be doing a round up of all the analysts I like in this space over the next week or so. If you are an analyst that wants to get on my radar please contact me ASAP.

This morning, he did a write up on Akamai’s stock price and one of his points in his brief was that "Media companies should continue to choose CDN network performance and scalability over price, to enable their online media businesses, especially when models are monetized via advertising dollars." It’s a great point and one that many media companies don’t adhere to. Many major media companies I speak to always seem be looking for the lowest price as opposed to the lowest price WITH good performance.

As content delivery pricing has already pretty much hit rock bottom, I expect we will start to see customers become more aware in the market in regards to more than just price. I think in many cases, we are already starting to see companies win business based on performance, customer service, reporting and other value add services, which in my mind, aren’t really value add, but more things that you HAVE to do right if you want to keep customers happy.

I am already starting to see the signs of the price per GB delivered going up slightly from where it was last year and the content delivery networks not prcing large volume deals as low as they use to. It’s not a drastice change, but I expect that by the end of this year, we will actually start to see
prices for content delivery rise for the first time in many years.

Last week, Forbes.com launched a new video show called "The Download", a weekly program they classify as "an in-depth yet concise look at the Internet technology".

For the first episode they look at what the mobile carriers are offering in the way of mobile TV and how it all works. They discuss cost, the handset hardware and what the barriers to entry are. You’ll have to watch it at the Forbes.com site as they don’t allow anyone to embed their videos and the quality of the video seems a bit poor, but I like the laid back style of the show so far.

MovieBeam, the one time high-profile Disney spin off was bought by Movie Gallery for $10 million dollars. MovieBeam re-launched last year with nearly $50 million in funding and the rumor was that they spent many millions more on the now defunct project. You have to ask yourself why any company would want to spend $10 million dollars to acquire the assets of a company that has no revenue and no customers. Apparently, Movie Gallery bought the technology so they can develop a movie delivery service of their own.

Say what now? Your going to replicate a service that has already been proven to be one that consumers don’t want? Am I the only one who thinks many of the companies out there today are not looking at mistakes made in the past? The history of the Internet can and does teach us many valuable lessons, if we are willing to learn from them. All that matters is what customers adopt and are willing to buy. The technology behind the service means nothing if it’s not adopted, as was evident from the MovieBeam service.

Love him or hate him, Mark Cuban’s blog always makes for good reading. He’s got a short little post from last month that explains the differences between TV and web video entitled "Snacks and Meals – The difference between Online Video and TV". It’s a great analogy and some of the readers comments on the post make for good reading as well. Head on over to Mark’s blog to read it.

Why is it that so many of us in the industry are still spending way too much of our time explaining to people the differences between online video and TV? Doesn’t everyone get it by now? It is not a hard concept to grasp yet it seems like years later we’re still having to point out the differences.