A few days ago, I added a new session to the upcoming Streaming Media East show in May that’s going to talk to p2p distribution and whether or not it will ever have any mass-market adoption in the U.S. I’d love to hear in the comments section what you think the session should focus on. What are the p2p topics that people need to know about?

Here’s my thinking. I don’t know of any company besides the movie studios who use p2p to distribute content. And the only sales pitch I ever get from p2p vendors is that it "reduces the cost of bandwidth". Is that really all they have to sell? Reducing cost? And if so, why haven’t more companies adopted it? What is reporting like when it comes to p2p delivery? Does it support live streaming? I’m no p2p expert, but for all the talk I hear of p2p, I still can’t name any customers who actually use it. And no matter who I ask, they don’t know of any companies either besides the movie industry using BitTorrent, which launches it’s legit video store when?

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Update: Christopher Levy from the Distributed Computing Industry Association (DCIA) just let me know about the organization and what they are up to. The DCIA is a voluntary organization representing all sectors of the distributed computing industry. This includes content providers, software developers and distributors, and service-and-support companies. The DCIA is engaged in developing standards-and-practices to advance this innovative consumer-based distribution channel. Good to see, I didn’t know they existed.

SplashCast Media posted a great video that talks about the differences between all of the consumer facing video sites on the web today. The companies compared include:

• blip.tv
• Brightcove
• Veoh
• Vimeo
• Mixpo
• Panjea
• Revver
• YouTube
• Metacafe
• Daily Motion
• MySpace video
• iFilm
• Joost
• ClipSyndicate
• Grouper
• VodPod

The ones I see missing from this list are VideoEgg, AOL and Yahoo’s video offerings. Who else would you put on this list?

We have some great sessions at the Streaming Media East show in May about the online video advertising market.

One of the sessions, moderated by Kate Kay, Editor, News and Special Projects for ClickZ News talks to what criteria, beyond impressions, will publishers be held accountable for as video advertising matures. The panel will be discussing topics like pre-roll vs. post-roll, ideal commercial length, and ad formats (interactive components, companion banners, etc.) are just a few of the applications that must still be studied for their relative effectiveness in driving performance for both brand and direct response advertisers. The panelists include:

• Christine Peterson, Associate Media Director, Carat Fusion
• Rob Aitken, Online Video Product Manager, AP
• John Ellis, VP, Product Management, ValueClick Media
• Beth Higbee, SVP, Interactive Brands, Scripps Networks

What topics or points would you like to see discussed at this session? Please include them in the comments section.

A nice detailed ist from eConsultant.com with a comprehensive list of 62 video sharing and video community websites for creating, discovering, searching, sharing and storing videos.

Will be interesting to see at the end of this year how many of these sites are still around. What do you think will be the number one downfall when it comes to sites like these aside from the lack of a clear business model?

At the 3GSM World Congress, Adobe announced that support for video will be included in the next generation of their Adobe Flash Lite software. Flash Lite 3, expected to be available in the first half of 2007, will bring the Adobe Flash Player video format to mobile phones and devices. Beet.tv has a video about the news story on their blog.

It was only a matter of time before this happened and it will be interesting to see how Adobe competes with others in the market, including Microsoft and RealNetworks, who have long integrated their video platforms into handsets. Since Flash games are so widespread on phones, you’d have to think that Adobe is going to be able to get some good traction when it comes to the development community. I think the deciding factor though will be the licensing cost from Adobe to the phone manufactures and carriers.

How much video do you currently watch on your mobile?

Why is the ability to search videos on the net still so hard these days? In enterprise video deployments, search is considered a standard function. But search for consumer-based content on the web is still very hit or miss. Google will only search content from it’s own Google Video site or from YouTube. Does anyone know if this will change now that Google has announced that Google Video will become a video search engine? AOL’s and Yahoo’s search function will only give you content from their networks and while there are some small sites out there that index some videos, most of it is only content from YouTube.

It seems that blinkx has a lock on the market and quite frankly, I can see why. Their search function works very well and seems to be the only site you can go to that has indexed a large amount of video and gives you the ability to display it easily. Seems to me like there is only one game in town when it comes to search and that blinkx has a lock on the market. They seem like a natural acquisition for someone looking to integrate their technology into a content offering or search engine.

Anyone track any other companies out there when it comes to searchable consumer content?

Online video is not taxing the Internet. Anyone in the industry that deals with content delivery knows first-hand that while there is more demand for and consumption of video, traffic on the Internet is not being broken by video. Some of these network operators, who don’t actually deliver content but rather sell or lease pipe, talk as if the Internet is in danger of crashing due to video.

Nortel’s CTO John Roese told Reuters "Soaring demand for games, video and music will stretch the Internet to its limits" and Nortel expects service providers will make big investments in its technology to avoid a crunch.

The second part is true. Networks are making investments in servers and bandwidth to increases their capacity to be able to handle the delivery of video. But speak to any of the content delivery networks today, and they will all tell you that adding capacity is not an issue. Most of them currently have somewhere in the range of 30% of their current network un-utilized, a common practice in the space to allow for surges in traffic.

What do you think could be the biggest factors that would slow the growth of online video consumption?