We have some great sessions at the Streaming Media East show in May talking about the business of user generated video.

Consumer-generated video was a big story in 2006 and continues to be so in 2007. From the latest media companies to garage-bound startups, it seems that everyone is incorporating user-generated content and community into their business plans. But questions still remain: Will business models emerge to drive profitability? Will marketers embrace this new type of media? Is UGC all a bubble waiting to burst? Hear how these sites are tackling these questions while looking for ways to differentiate themselves in a crowded space. Tap into what’s next on the horizon for sharing video content and new innovations in social media. Find out about the positives and negatives surrounding copyright issues and content ownership. Come to the Streaming Media East show and hear about business models and potential revenue streams related to user-generated video communities.The panelists include:

• Moderator: Raghav Gupta, Director, Business Development & Strategy, Brightcove
• Panelist: James McQuivey, VP, Television & Media Technology, Forrester Research
• Panelist: Daniel Blackman, Strategic Partner Development Manager, Google
• Panelist: Dmitry Shapiro, CEO, Veoh Networks
• Panelist: Brian Kalinowski, COO, Lycos
• Panelist: Bambi Francisco, Columnist and Correspondent, MarketWatch

What topics or points would you like to see discussed at this session? Please include them in the comments section for your chance to win a free conference pass to the show.

I follow very closely the costs that content delivery networks and service providers charge to store and delivery audio and video content that is both downloaded and streamed. I get my data primarily from the customers, the people who are actually buying these services. They routinely call to ask if they are getting a good deal, want to know what others are paying, what the going rate is and what future pricing trends will be.

For me, this is the best way to get data; from talking to the people who are signing the contracts and actually paying for these services. The people who call are everyone from large media and entertainment companies who have sites that are in the top 20 most visited per month, to small companies who have only a few videos. I am amazed at how many times customers do not take the time to shop around. They don’t know what the going rate is and don’t know what the market is getting for these services, which is why I am always happy to take their calls and questions. Recently, I helped re-negotiate a contract for a large entertainment company with their service provider and with very little work, they saved over $1 million dollars the first year. It wasn’t hard to do and wasn’t time consuming, yet, the entertainment company simply didn’t know that they could be saving money.

Pricing continues to get lower for delivery and storage and content companies need to continue to evaluate their contracts on a regular basis, especially if they are a company who’s traffic has grown a lot since you first signed your contract. You should be paying less per GB for the more that you do and be given an incentive to push more traffic. This is something the delivery networks are usually very willing to do but you need to reach out to them to initiate it.

That being said, I am now routinely seeing pricing in the sub $0.20 range, per GB delivered, for customers doing more than 100TB a month and committing to that level monthly. With the increase in bitrates and increase in the length of time videos are being consumed, there are now more and more customers doing over 100TB a month in delivery.

The point is do your homework and know what the going rate is. Reevaluate your contract on a quarterly basis and see if there is a need for you to adjust what you are committing to. It is in your best interest and in the best interest of a good service provider who wants to give you an incentive to use more of their delivery services.

If you want to know more about pricing trends, you can read my article from last months Streaming Media magazine entitled "online video delivery and storage pricing guide" or post any follow-up questions you have in the feedback section.

I follow the content delivery market for video probably closer than any other facet of this space because it’s how I got started in the industry and I really enjoy how fast the CDN market changes.

While most CDNs are talking about and working on the delivery of video over the Internet, Ortiva Wireless has a taken a different approach and has built out a CDN specific to the delivery of only mobile video. I recently completed a survey of content owners and current CDNs and found out that most CDNs have no offering for mobile delivery or have one that is very limited. The reason for this is simple. Mobile delivery in the U.S. is not yet a real business. Traditional CDNs can’t spend a lot of time and money to invest in mobile delivery if they can’t get near-immediate revenue. But for a company like Ortiva Wireless, they have the potential to create some real revenue based on the fact that it’s all they specialize in. Content owners I spoke to, both large and small, found that mobile delivery over traditional CDNs was complex, expensive and confusing. Delivery of video for mobile is not easy from a technical perspective as delivering videos to PCs is.

I first met the executive team from Ortiva Wireless at the Streaming Media West show at the end of last year. I heard their pitch and liked their technology and the fact that they are focused on offering a single product and service. They know what content owners want for mobile video delivery and have confidence about the business they can build over the coming years as mobile video starts to get adopted. Yes, there are some big potential hurdles that mobile delivery in the U.S. has to overcome, but at some point in time, video to mobile will become a real business and Ortiva Wireless is looking to lay the groundwork now to be a major player when it hits.

Since I started this blog two weeks ago, I have received a lot of calls and e-mails from people based on my contact info I have on the site. People are always amazed when they get a response to their e-mail or actually have a number to call when they have a question. I know what they mean.

I have contacted a lot of bloggers before who are running business blogs, blogs they are making money from, blogs where their sole business is blogging, and many times you never get any response from them. Too many times they either don’t have contact info on their website, they don’t return e-mails or more often than you would believe, don’t even have an e-mail address listed on their blog. And when was the last time you saw a phone number on a bloggers website?

There are over 58 million blogs on the Internet today and only a small percentage of those are business blogs with real traffic. You would think all bloggers would want to build a good, lasting relationship with their readers and stand out from the crowd. With all the blogs out there, readers have a choice. Are they going to  visit a blog that helps them when they have a question or one that simply wants to dish out news and comments without giving anything back? This does not apply to all bloggers, some are great with communication, but as I have seen first-hand, way too many aren’t. 

I don’t like making predictions. In fact, I stay away from them whenever possible as too many predictions made are done just for headlines. But in this case, I think blinkx is really the only vendor in its vertical niche who has a product that works far superior than anyone else. They also have great momentum in the market, some smart folks at the company and based on their recent profile in the New York Times, they clearly know their strengths and more importantly their weaknesses. In my eyes, they have a lot of options for being acquired by a large portal or even from a large content creator who wants their search technology. While their founder and CTO Suranga Chandratillake told me that they are "making money" that does not really mean anything without numbers. He said "we don’t comment on how much (revenue) or how close to break-even". So not knowing how much real revenue they are doing and what their burn rate is it would be hard to say what their evaluation would be. So far, blinkx has raised about $12M and with a small head count under 30 they are probably not burning that much cash. My guess is that they are still an affordable acquisition.

As for Brightcove, they are a bit different as they have a lot of competitors in their vertical niche, but so far, no one has really stepped up with a technology offering that seems to be actively competing with them. There are some who have competitive offerings for pieces of what Brightcove offers but not really for the entire solution. We know they have a lot of cash and can burn through it for some time with no worries and they continue to expand their market and customer list. There is no guarantee that even with the exposure they are getting that they will make money from their current business model or how long that may take them but I see them as being an acquisition soon from a large portal and media play who wants to speed their time to market.

While any company can always be acquired, who do you feel are the ones that have the best shot at being purchased this year?

If you are looking to hire someone who has hands-on experience with the entire webcasting workflow process, Nico Mclane is someone you should talk to. Until last week, Nico was the VP of Broadcast and Streaming Media for JPMorganChase. Over the past seven years at JPMorganChase, she helped build, deploy and manage their internal webcasting solution including the hardware, software, distribution, A/V production, web developers etc…saving the company an estimated $3M is communication costs in 2006.

I have known Nico for many years and would vouch for her experience in the webcasting market. If you are looking for someone with her expertise, contact her 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.

I speak to a lot of companies that do their own hosting and delivery for video content, be it downloads or streaming, live or on-demand. Many of them are enterprise organizations who have found it makes more sense for them to distribute their own content across their private networks because it is cheaper, gives them more control of their content and gives them additional flexibility. In addition to Fortune 1000 corporations, there are also a lot of smaller content owners and publishers who have a few servers setup to stream audio and video.

With all those servers in the market, to date there is still not a single good software package that you can buy off the shelf that will parse your raw logs and give you the kind of data you need from the logs. I’m talking about a software package that is setup just to parse raw logs for streaming and not something like WebTrends which was not built for video and does not work well for streaming. Back in the 2000 era you had a reporting product made by Lariat, which was then bought by EnScaler, which then went out of business at least 5 years ago.

In that time, there have been no other solutions on the market. Yes, there are a lot of third party tools out there, many of them free like FunnelWeb, Sawmill etc… but they all have many limitations, especially when it comes to large log files. So my question is this. Why has no software company created a package that is specific to a particular hosting platform? The demand is there. I hear from companies all the time who say they would pay $1,000 for a software package like this. Just think of how many companies are out there in the enterprise with Windows Media servers, that market alone is huge. And right now, they all try to do it themselves, write their own software, or use a third party tool that does not give them what they want.

Why has no one jumped all over this and developed a solution? Once you develop the product, the only overhead you have is support and upgrades and you could easily have a consulting side to the business that builds something specific for a customer. Why is no software company addressing this need in the market when there is such a demand and it’s not complex or expensive to do?

Someone somewhere needs to built this product and I want to work with them to do it. A product like this would go a long way to helping our industry as a whole.