I’ve been a Verizon FiOS customer for over a year now and I have to say I am still amazed at how good it is and how good a job Verizon does at supporting it. I know, it sounds odd to say a phone company is good at anything, and over the years I have had nightmares with Verizon for DSL. But when it comes to their FiOS offering, it really does seem too good to be true.

For those who don’t know, FiOS is Verizon’s fiber-optic technology where they run a dedicated fiber line from the street into your house. In my town in Westchester it currently supports only data and voice  but in other cities around the country, it also supports Verizon TV. A year ago, I signed up at $45 a month for 15MB down and 3MB up. About 6 months after it was installed, Verizon upgraded me to 20MB down and 5MB up – at no charge. Since when do phone companies give away anything for free?!? If you ever need to call tech support, you get a special number that puts you directly in touch with the special FiOS department. I’ve called support 3-4 times over the year with various random questions, (not service outages) and every time I got someone who truly knows what they are doing and they even knew how to support a Mac user!

At the end of Q4 of 2006, Verizon had 687,000 FiOS customers out of the 4.8 million homes that can get FiOS for a penetration rate of 14 percent. While that is not a lot of households when it comes to market penetration, imagine what FiOS can do for content owners when adoption truly takes off and more people become aware of the service. Content companies will then have the ability to mesh TV and Internet video distribution on a real scale. Verizon could very easily and very quickly become a content syndicator capable of reaching consumers that it knows has the ability to consume high-quality video. Today, we all talk about "broadband" video as being this great high-quality file yet it is typically encoded at 300Kbps or 500Kbps, which is nothing if you have a 20MB connection. I can’t even find any content encoded above 750Kbps and feel like I’m only getting 10% of what my connection is capable of.

For any product or service to be truly adopted by the masses it needs to be easy to understand, cheap, easy to buy and have good support. So far, Verizon truly has all of this with its FiOS service. 20MB fiber connection for $45 a month? Many people pay more than that for DSL or cable for speeds ranging from 3-6MB. I can’t wait till FiOS does some content deals and I’m able to see videos encoded at a couple of Megs a second.

I think FiOS is a service to really watch over the next few years. It is the one Internet offering above anything else that truly has the ability to change the market for consumers and content owners. Do you have Verizon FiOS? Are you as happy with it as I am?

The American Advertising Federation released a report last week that says 73% of U.S. companies say They’ll advertise in new media. Some of the findings:

• Seventy-three percent of respondents said that one to twenty percent of their budget is reserved for experimentation and new media properties. Significant, however, is the finding that 12.37 percent of respondents list 21 to 40 percent of their budget as reserved for these items.

• In 2006, the most expected innovations in the media landscape were 1) the availability of TV programs on the Internet, 2) the mass adoption of text messaging in the United States, and 3) the importance of social media/networking as part of the communications plan.

The real question is, what percentage of that will be allocated to media that incorporates online video? What numbers are you seeing?

This one has me stumped. I know this was announced in Q4 of last year, but I’ve just being doing some reading up on the service and frankly, I don’t get it. Who in the U.S. is going to pay to watch a two-hour movie on their cell phone? We all know that short videos to mobile devices, for the right application has some potential. But full-length movies? When are technology companies going to understand that just because you can do something technically, does not mean that consumers want it? All that matters is what’s adopted and there is no way consumers in the U.S. are going to adopt the idea of watching full-length movies on a mobile. They don’t even watch movies downloaded to a PC in any large quantity.

That being said, what applications are you seeing in the market for short videos to mobile that does show promise and has some traction?

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?