The March edition of Business 2.0 magazine, which arrived in my mail today, has some good stories about the online video market and in particular what some of the vendors are working on. Erick Schonfeld does a feature story on "Make Way For Must Stream TV" and talks about Diggnation, Joost and Veoh and how they are targeting content to niche audiences. It’s a good read but I don’t see it on the Business 2.0 website as of yet. Erick just e-mailed me to let me know the article is now online.

Another article in the issue talks to the "25 Hot Startups To Watch" and includes a page of online video related companies. Unfortunately, none of the companies mentioned  are really classified as startups in my mind and I would have liked to see them highlight companies who haven’t been in development for at least a year. They highlight Joost and Revision3, two companies already thoroughly covered in Erick’s article and they also highlight blip.tv, Metacafe and Dabble. Not what I would really call startups except maybe for Dabble.

There are also some other editorial pieces in the issue that talk to online video advertising and some other rich-media applications.

Aside from the consulting I do, I also work with institutions to provide independent, unbiased, industry specific data on key investment sectors in the online video, telco and wireless industries to institutional money managers.

I do many calls each month with these money managers and probably 50% of the calls I do are in reference to Akamai. That probably does not come as a surprise to anyone considering how hot of a stock Akamai has been and just how many money managers follow them due to their size in the market.

That being said, here are the questions I am asked most frequently that I don’t have answers to:

• what percentage of Akamai’s revenue comes from audio and video delivery? be it via streaming, downloading, webcasting etc…
• what percentage of traffic delivered over the Akamai network is from audio and video content? again, type of protocol used is not important.
• how many of the 20,000+ servers on the network are dedicated to delivering streaming content and what percentage of them are Flash and Windows Media?

Akamai has said they don’t make the answers to these questions public but I think it would only help them if they did. For instance, Akamai is known as being a thought leader in the industry, people think of them that way and everyone knows they have the most market share for the services they offer. However, that being said, there is no data in the market place as to how big the content delivery market really is, what market share percentage a company has and what percentage changes hands each year from one provider to another. Why not make that data available and tell people we have x percentage of the market? Money managers are always asking me, what is the size of the market and how much if it does Akamai have? And my answer is always the same, I have no idea and anyone who throws out numbers is purely guessing.

My point is this. If you do have as much market share as everything thinks, and if you are growing your audio and video delivery business like we all know you are, why not tell people? You would have to think it would make people want to buy even more of your stock if they thought you had x percent but you really had twice that. And it would also give you the ability to be a thought leader in telling people what the size of this market for delivery services really is.

Hopefully, over time this data will be made available. Are there other questions you would add to the list that you would want to see answered?

Talking with an analyst this morning got me thinking to just how many companies have recently gotten a third round of funding. Brightcove, Anystream, The FeedRoom and CacheLogic to name just a few.

How many more rounds of funding are investors willing to do before they ask to see some real revenue numbers and profitability? With online video being such a hot topic in the market, the pressure by investors on all vendors in this space has to be more than it was 12-18 months ago. With the market perception of online video being large than life, it’s still important to remember that few companies are really making a lot of money from this, yet. And in most cases, we don’t even know if they are breaking even. Since most companies don’t release any revenue numbers to the public, the perception of revenue being generated is complete speculation.

I know it’s not common for most companies to give out any revenue figures when they are private, but I think it would only help companies rather than hurt them. If your numbers are really that good and if you are a leader in the space like you say, then why not show how your revenue is growing? It’s not the year 2000 anymore when customers were buying services from vendors based on the perception of how big of a company they were. Today, as we have all clearly seen, size does not always equal quality in the market and a lot of smaller players in all sectors are actively closing business.

I don’t see the harm that comes from releasing your numbers. For one, myself and other members of the media would give you more coverage and would want to talk to you more about your business. And you’d be able to say you are profitable and actually have people believe you, instead of having to say the phrases I hear all day like "our business is growing", "we are exceeding our expectations" and my favorite, "our revenue is growing faster than we can keep up".

What other companies besides Limelight Networks are releasing numbers publicly even though they are private?

Every since the Google acquisition, many times when I go to play video clips on YouTube they don’t load as fast as they use to or they have to stop half-way through to re-buffer. For me, this is happening more and more. Yesterday, it took nearly 2 minutes for a 30 second video to start to play and it was a video that had only been viewed 6 times. There has been a lot of speculation on how Google was going to
integrate YouTube’s videos into the Google delivery network and I have
to believe that they are clearly having some performance issues.Has anyone else seen a drop in performance in the playback of videos since the acquisition?

With all that has been going on with JetBlue the past week, it’s great to see their CEO David Neeleman use video to talk to his customers by posting an embedded YouTube clip directly on the JetBlue.com website. With all of the services that are out on the market today, making it so easy for anyone to quick post and deliver their message, you have to wonder why more companies don’t use the medium to reach out to customers.
Usually you see only technology companies like Cisco, Dell and others use video like this to deliver a message from an executive, but I can’t recall the last time I saw a company use video on it’s website to explain why something happened and how they were going to fix it. Seems like a no-brainer to do, but it does not seem to be done often. Have you seen other companies using video this way?

I’ve been debating this for a long time with lots of people and it seems everyone has a different opinion. Many vendors have been describing their services as being that of "Internet TV". But is that really the right term to be using? For years now, many of us online video folks have been explaining over and over how the TV and video on the Internet are not the same. We’re always giving examples of how different the user experience is, the way content is distributed etc…. but still, Internet TV seems to be the phrase put forth by many.

Personally, I think it’s incorrect. We are so many years away from being able to truly think of the video we see on the computer as being compared to the video we see today on TV. Some of this is a good thing as we don’t want the video we see on TV to be the same via the Internet. The whole point is that online video is changing the way the TV industry thinks about content, advertising and eyeballs, which is a good thing. But I still think combining the words Internet and TV together, at this stage in the game, just sets expectations incorrectly.

I’d love to hear your take on this subject in the comments section.

Last week, Magnify Networks (www.magnify.net) announced that it has closed on an investment of $1.2 million to accelerate the growth of its search-and-sort platform for Internet based, user-generated video channels.

Founded by industry veteran Steve Rosenbaum, who some say is widely regarded as the "Father of User-Generated Video" from his ground-breaking work with MTV Unfiltered, Magnify.net enables publishers to create their own video channel featuring targeted content for their niche communities.

Magnify.net was one of the companies featured at the Demo 2007 Conference and Steve will be doing a demo of the Magnify platform at the Streaming Media East show in May along with demos from VideoEgg, and Motionbox among others for the "User-Generated Content Tools" session.