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.

At the Streaming Media West show last year, I did a presentation entitled "Flash Versus Windows Media: How to Choose the Right Format". One of the purposes of my presentation was to compare the two formats on a factual basis. Not which format has better codecs or compression but rather highlighting what each format did or did not support, like live streaming, DRM and other platform functionality.

One of the strong points about the Windows Media format is that it is the dominant format for webcasting. When it comes to live broadcasting, Windows Media is the format that is used hands-down. But this year, Adobe seems to be making progress in giving Windows Media a run for it’s money. More and more I am hearing from customers who want to try out Flash for live broadcasting and content delivery networks are actively working to build out their networks to support live Flash. Add that to the recent release by Adobe of their live Flash encoding tool, and the Adobe Flash format is quickly starting to pique webcasters interest. Yes, the quality of live Flash at high bitrates is still not as good as Windows Media and the Adobe live Flash Media Encoder is missing some features, but it’s expected Adobe will work quickly on fixing those issues.

It’s an exciting time in the industry as both Adobe and Microsoft are really stepping up to the plate this year with new announcements and product offerings for their video platforms. Later in the year, it’s going to shape up to be a real platform battle and round two is just getting underway.

For a long time now, the term streaming media has been thought of as something sold by vendors. For the first few years of any new technology, the terminology is bound to get confusing and used in the incorrect manner. But 13 years since streaming media technology was first used on the Internet, I think it’s time we describe the technology and services correctly.

Streaming media is not a service. You don’t sell streaming media. It’s a technology, plain and simple. I see a lot of websites by industry vendors that list streaming media as one of their services. What they should be saying is they sell content delivery. If that content is delivered via streaming, downloading, progressive downloading, webcasting etc…who cares? I know that many use the term this way because that’s what the market bears, it’s the way customers refer to it and it’s what everyone has gotten use to. I’m guilty of the same, as that’s how I sold the service back when I was at Globix. But I think 13 years later, we are at the point where as an industry we should be working together to describe and sell the services correctly.

I am looking to hire someone for a few months to help me with the planning of the Streaming Media Europe show taking place October 4-5th in London. Primarily, I am looking for someone to work with me on the following:

• conference agenda. talk to people in the UK about what topics they want to see at the show, help write session descriptions and help organize the show format
• speaker placement. help me go through all the submissions I get, help me reach out to and invite other speakers, and create a list of speakers we want to target to get to the show
• be on hand at local networking events to represent the Europe show and talk to people, collect cards, network etc…. we do a few of these leading up to the show. the next one is March 6th that we are doing with Kendra
• at the show, help me get speakers into the rooms, make sure all runs smoothly etc..

We have a good local UK pr, marketing and sales team already in place so there is no help needed on sales, marketing and all the really hard work. Of course, we always open to ideas on how you may want to help there but the biggest help I need is really the speakers and the shows agenda.

There would be some months where there would be work, and other months were there would not be any. The busy months would be in April and May when we would have to plan the advance program and then September the month before the show and of course the 3 days of the show in October. In June, July and August there would not be much to do aside from some e-mails.

If you are interested, please contact me ASAP as I will be making a decision this week. You MUST be based in or around London and your current job must not be a conflict of interest.