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.

With all that is going on with the current broadcast industry and all of the online video initiatives that broadcasters have under way, I still can’t figure out why for the second year in a row the NAB has nothing in the way of conference sessions talking to the online video market for broadcasters. Where are the sessions talking about the new emerging business models? Where are the sessions talking about the technology and work flow issues these broadcasters are having, let alone the reporting and metrics issues that come with this new online distribution business?

Why isn’t the NAB at the forefront of wanting to educate its broadcasters in a public forum? The RTNDA@NAB conference has some sessions about online but primarily all about the radio and news industries. Nothing about video distribution channels, technology, or business models in the entertainment and broadcast industries.

Viddler, another UGC site that launched at the end of last year is now out looking for its first round of financing between $1-2 million. Viddler classifies themselves as an interactive online video platform that allows people to enhance and share video inside of the browser.

I spoke to Viddler’s president Rob Sandie yesterday who gave me an update on their technology and business model. Of course, the first thing I had to ask was how they plan on making any money and how they are any different that all the other UGC sites out there. Rob explained that they want to be the Flickr of web video allowing users to upload long form content, provide the tools for them to be able to edit the video and then allow the user to be able to buy a DVD of their video. I don’t know if there is a large enough market for that but I don’t recall any other UGC sites trying to do this. Selling DVDs is not the only business model they are focusing on but rather taking the approach of creating revenue from advertising, subscriptions to their video platform and the DVDs.

On the investment subject, I hear from a lot of companies all the time who are actively looking to raise a round of financing, but then always tell me I can’t tell anyone they are looking? Usually they say they don’t want their competitors to know. How do you expect to raise the money if you don’t get word out in the community that you are looking? And so what if your competitors know, that should have no affect on your business.

Kudos to Rob for saying he wants to get the word and out wants everyone to know that they are looking for financing. I’m happy to let any company looking for money to use my blog to get the word out. That’s the whole point of a blog, networking with your peers.

I didn’t post anything on the Joost Viacom announcement last week because quite frankly, I don’t really see it as news. While a deal was announced, Joost has not yet launched out of beta and no Viacom content is yet available to the public. While I am closely watching to see what happens, to me, no deal is real until the content is available, especially when a product is still in beta. In addition, there are plenty of other sites out there that gave their thoughts on the deal.

That being said, I came across an interesting article on itwire.com.au website this weekend. Alex Zaharov-Reutt writes in detail about how If you have restrictive bandwidth caps on your broadband connection, Joost TV is anything but free. It’s an interesting read and one that looks at the Joost content distribution from a different angle.

The article is entitled "Joost Viacom warning: expensive bandwidth means IPTV not free" and you should head over to the iTWire site to read it.

I was going to write an in-depth post about all of the lawsuits taking place surrounding major video sharing sites, but Steve Bryant over at reelpopblog.com already beat me to it with a post entitled "A Brief Guide to Online Video Lawsuits". He gives details on lawsuits and subpoenas against Veoh, Bolt, Grouper, YouTube, Google Video and MySpace. Head on over to his site to read it.

Steve will be moderating a panel at the Streaming Media East show in May about "User-Generated Content Tools".

With all that is going on in the online video news space, I am pleased to announce that Martin Nisenholtz, Sr. VP of Digital Operations for The New York Times Company will be the keynote presenter on the first day of the Streaming Media East show.

Martin’s keynote will be talking to how video factors into the historic transformation taking place at The New York Times, and what online video means for the future of journalism.

All keynote presentations are free to attend. Sign up for a free exhibit pass and your in.