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?

I have been noticing this for years and can’t understand why many vendors still don’t get it right. In many of your press releases, marketing sheets and on your website you spell QuickTime and RealNetworks, among other companies names, incorrectly. It’s QuickTime, one word, not two, with a capital Q and T. Same with RealNetworks, one word, capital R and N.

You pretty much throw all of your credibility out the window when you print and publish materials that don’t highlight company’s names correctly. Especially when this mistake is on a press release announcing how good your product and service is or even worse when it is in a research report on the industry and the first page talks to the "expertise" of your organization.

It may seem like something trivial, but if I get a release from a company and they have it wrong, I don’t even read it as I feel the release is not legit. And while we are on the subject of press releases, when you send out a press release, PUT THE WEBSITE OF THE COMPANY IN THE RELEASE! I get so many release where there is no URL and I have to hunt on the web to find the website. What is the point of putting out a release if you’re not giving the media the ability to visit the company’s website?

I don’t personally know Rob Enderle, an independent analyst at the Enderle Group, in fact I had never even heard of him until I read this article on Reuters talking about the Wal-Mart movie download service. But I really have to wonder what these analysts are thinking.

He’s quoted as saying Wal-Mart’s download offering is a "game changer" that will help set off "a long decline" for DVD sales. "We are talking about the beginning of the end for DVDs." The end of DVD’s?!? How can you make a blanket statement like that to the media and expect anyone to take you seriously or think that you have any expertise in the online video market?

The fact that Wal-mart has movie downloads is not going to change anything unless they make it a service that works and is friendly and more importantly, a service that consumers adopt. It does not support Mac users, the website can’t be viewed in either the Safari or Firefox browsers and nowhere that I can find does it say how these movies are compressed. What is the quality? And why can’t you transfer a download to the media center, iPod or another device or burn yourself a copy? Because that technology is currently "limited" as a Wal-mart executive was quoted as saying.

Of course, Wal-mart is under the belief that their new service is revolutionary Kevin Swint, Wal-Mart’s divisional merchandise manager for digital media said, "…this is an unprecedented offering of video content, features and capabilities currently unmatched in the market". Really? Back it up with facts that support those statements then. Bambi Francisco from MarketWatch has a video interview with him on her blog.

Isn’t this the same thing Wal-mart said when they came out with the DVD rental service and tried to complete with Netflix? And that lasted what, maybe a year? So far, to date, consumers in the U.S. have not had the desire to get their movies via downloads. Will that change if the services on the market are easy, affordable and provide options customer’s want? Yes. But movie downloads are never even going come close to affecting the traditional DVD business.

While there are a lot of blogs out there already, none of them really focuses on the business aspects of the industry or they cover other subjects not pertaining to online video. As you well know, there are a lot of exciting things going on in the industry but it seems many of them get overlooked and the majority of what you end up hearing about is YouTube. The goal of my blog is to focus on all kinds of online video technology (not just streaming) and the business associated with it. I also plan to use the blog to include profiles and mini interviews with other executives in the industry and will use the blog to highlight conference sessions at the Streaming Media East, West and Europe shows so that I can get feedback on topics people want to hear about.

For me, this blog is yours just as much as it is mine. I welcome you to send me topics you want to see discussed and I will post them on your behalf with your name and company. I look forward to your involvement.