We are truly looking forward to attending the Sportel International Sports Convention for Television and Media in Monaco that is taking place October 11 – 14 this year.  From what we are seeing sports is the first sector to get itself positioned for the highest quality delivery of content. The issue of  ensuring a perfect viewing experience with absolutely no interruptions is especially crucial here where a split second can change everything.

We hope to meet you at Sportel in Monaco and tell you all about our streaming operations in this exciting sector.

I think this year we will be seeing even less flash than last year, and a lot more serious conversations about how we can all cooperate to bring viewers exactly what they want to see, right when they want to see it, and on the device of their choice.  The big question is whether all this freedom is really satisfying us though? Not really. Because what we really want to feel is connected. Streaming video helps us feel connected and live events make us feel like we are right there with thousands of others.

So this year we should really be concentrating on creating the right environment for helping everyone feel connected. On finding the partners that are focused on getting to the next level.

One thing is for sure in these uncertain times, broadcasting provides the foundation for bringing us all together. It will continue to play a significant role as we evolve from being a bunch of countries to understanding that we are all in the same boat together in this journey called life.

We are loving this optimistic forecast about live streaming from imedia connection because it demonstrates so clearly what we have been feeling for the last six months or so.  That live streaming is going  mainstream and now is an ideal time to prepare ourselves for this great new stage online.

This is probably also a good time to mention that 3Dcdn supports the delivery of pre-roll,  mid-roll and post-roll video advertisements to iPhone and iPad devices that can include images, text, html, flash (SWF) ‘click to web’ and ‘click to play video’ overlays and companion banners. Here is the full article below.

According to a recent report by Cisco, internet video will account for 91 percent of all consumer internet traffic by 2014. Historically, short clips and video-on-demand (VOD) have accounted for this growth, but the study also indicates that live content will account for 8 percent of consumer traffic.

Extrapolating from these numbers and using eMarketer’s forecasts as a guidepost, of the $5.2 billion spend on internet video advertising in 2014, around $379 million will be on live video. Whether it’s the success of Hulu, the “stream now” model that Netflix has embraced, or the availability of live content such as MLB.tv or the NCAA Tournament, rights holders and broadcast networks are beginning to see that online content augments traditional business models. Now the business models and technology exist to help content owners fully realize the monetization potential of all types of live content.

Subscription model
Major League Baseball is clearly an innovator in the space, driving a reported $500 million in annual revenues. Roughly half of that comes from seasonal subscriptions and the rest comes from advertising. Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM) supports digital viewing experiences across a wide variety of platforms, including the iPhone, iPad, laptop, and even a set top box like the Roku. What differentiates this content from its broadcast brethren? The ability for viewers to touch the content, interact with it, and share it with friends.

Advertising models
While MLBAM has the ability to charge a subscription fee for its content, not every rights holder has that luxury. March Madness On Demand from CBS Sports is another example of how viewing habits and business models have evolved in the broadcast space. Not only does this annual event drive some of the largest streaming traffic numbers, it also generates the lion’s share of annual digital revenues for CBS.

Additional success stories for monetizing live content include NBC’s online coverage of the 2010 Winter Olympics as well as its Sunday Night Football Extra, which allowed viewers to choose between multiple camera angles and watch instant replays.

The common theme with these examples is that they all adopted a hybrid monetization strategy consisting not only of traditional banner ads, but also in-stream advertising models that are similar to what you would see in a broadcast setting. Let that sink in. Utilizing the same advertising components as they do for traditional broadcast, these organizations have been able to derive additional revenue from the digital components. For small incremental capital expense, the broadcaster can create infrastructure that will deliver significant returns on investment for years to come.

Moving toward better monetization of live content
There are a few reasons to insert an ad specifically meant for content that’s being distributed over the internet. The primary reason is that if a broadcast feed containing an ad is simply encoded, then distributed, and viewed on the internet, that ad impression can’t be measured according to standards established by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). The IAB has set up a number of guidelines to help standardize audience measurement and reporting, which is an important step in attracting big name advertisers to the medium.

Display ads may bring in a few digital dimes, but what if we could offer broadcasters the flexibility to replace the ads in a TV broadcast with different content that’s more appropriate for the online audience watching the streamed version?

Previous experience tells me that the reluctance to deploy more live content is based on the operational cost of delivering it with little or no opportunity to monetize. Again, not every content owner has the resources of an NBC or CBS or the scale and profile of the Olympics or March Madness. However, as the technology and workflow necessary to insert advertisements into live video and to target consumers has become more commonplace, organizations of all shapes and sizes can better monetize their live content.

This is the real promise of internet advertising. Ad serving technologies excel in targeting consumers with relevant messaging, allowing networks to monetize each view of every piece of content as effectively as possible.

For example, while a national Coke advertisement plays in a live TV broadcast, an ad for discounted tickets to a Dallas Mavericks game would run for Texas-based viewers watching the same live content online. Alternatively, another online viewer in a different geographical area might see an ad unit for a local Ford dealer. Furthermore, once the live content is repurposed for on-demand consumption, new ads could run in place of those that aired during the original broadcast, allowing the same ad opportunities to be monetized repeatedly.

Steps to internet ad insertion for live video:

1. Detect ad opportunity: The method for this often varies by content or by content provider. Some broadcast signals contain markers (SCTE-35 /104) that can be used to automatically detect ad opportunities. If the content does not contain these markers or if the content is less predictable (as with live sports), operations staff can monitor a feed and mark ad opportunities as they arise.
2. Remove broadcast ad: If you’re repurposing a broadcast feed that contains advertising, oftentimes it’s necessary to remove that ad. This can be accomplished with a slate, which blacks out the original ad.
3. Insert new ad marker for internet ad: At this point it’s necessary to insert a marker for the new internet ad. Different rich media platforms, including Apple, Adobe’s Flash, and Microsoft Silverlight, call for different ad markers.
4. Detect the new marker: Use internal development resources or work with a partner to build a video player that responds to the new ad markers.
5. Insert new ad: The video player should detect the new marker, and make a call to a third-party ad serving company, which will help target ads for viewers.

Other tips and tricks:

1. Make sure that ad inventory and reporting mechanisms adhere to IAB standards. If you can’t verify viewing numbers with third-party accounting, it’s hard to justify your CPMs to potential advertisers.
2. Use enterprise-grade streaming appliances. This is a live event. You have one chance to wow your audience, so you can’t afford any downtime.
3. Adaptive bit rate is your friend. Adaptive bit rate streaming ensures that end users are watching video at the highest possible quality for their network connection and computer.
4. Don’t skimp on bit rates for ads. Make sure the video quality of ads matches the quality of the live content. A lack of continuity will result in a poor user experience.

Matt Smith is senior director of systems architecture for Inlet Technologies.

First up is the NAB Show April 12-15 in Vegas that will have a special Destination Broadband area. The conferences start two days before on April 10 2010.

Streaming Media is holding a Content Delivery Summit on May 10 and the Streaming Media East show is right after that on May 11-12.  Both events are being held at the Hilton just south of Central Park in New York.  Central Park in the spring! It really doesn’t get better than that.

A few months later and all the way across the Atlantic we can look forward to the IBC 2010 show in Amsterdam September 10-14. Rumor has it there are plenty of hotel rooms available this year.

Then there is Streaming Media Europe in London October 14 – 15, with the Content Delivery Summit a day before the main conference on October 13.

The Online Video Strategies conference runs concurrently with the main Streaming Media Europe conference for two days. Online Video Strategies offers the opportunity to reach and educate the ever-growing number of organisations that need to publish and distribute their own video content.

Well all this activity should keep us on our toes for a while. Hope to see you out there!

I like this guys’s enthusiasm. Jim O’Neill just posted Wow! Oof! Online video world is buzzing with ideas and he’s giving a really great perspective of a very happening sector: “There’s a ton of news coming out of the online video industry daily; new services being launched, new products debuting, big money being made–and lost.”

The real question is – where is all this going? Who will survive in the long run? If we knew what the big goal was we would know exactly what we need for the journey.

All these games and gadgets are great but are they necessary or even vital for the next phase? The online video sector is abuzz with activity but we would be smart to use this momentum to do good in the world. To work together to solve some of the big issues we are facing. I’d like to see someone get us all excited about that. It will probably require way more bandwidth than we are currently consuming.

As online video continues to grow and expand, sites of all sizes will be seeking out partners who can help carry the load, get their content featured in places they never imagined possible, and provide a solid foundation for generating more income. Now is a good time to take a good look around you and decide who you want on your team for the long haul.

This comes as no surprise of course but according to Nielsen online video viewing is up 25% per user, while the total online video streams are up 41% from last year with the obvious leaders being YouTube, Hulu, Yahoo!, MSN, etc.

With all of us glued one way or another to our PC’s a few hours each day watching video, whether for business or personal pleasure (even those boundaries are starting to merge/blend into a single component) online content continues to evolve and diversify. Now that the online content industry is evolving so rapidly, we are seeing the CDN market move far beyond delivering static content.  Evolution is the most natural thing in the world so instead of resisting it we should prepare properly for what is coming.

The biggest shift in content demand is the growing prevalence of streaming content – especially video – and the special technological capabilities and infrastructures that enable true live streaming. Everywhere you go people are talking about live broadcasts, over the top streaming and adaptive bit rates. As the demand for live events increases, customers will be looking for providers that can deliver and support the most advanced streaming. As long as competition is fierce and differentiation between CDN providers continues to blur, customers should especially be focused on seeking out innovative new methods of delivering content that go beyond traditional proxy-cache models, such as solutions that optimize the last mile for viewers in a profound manner.

3Dcdn has developed breakthrough Quality of Service Analyzer technology, for ensuring that media delivery performance levels are measured and monitored at all times. What does this mean in plain English? We collect objective real time performance data from viewers, to provide detailed and objective performance and availability metrics. Covering critical issues such as denial of service, latency, player’s buffer problems, length of picture freeze/disappearance, missing frames, disconnects and more in this manner, allows us to assess performance in real time.

We are also very proud of our Quality of Service Optimizer that allows media clients connected to the 3Dcdn network to dynamically route their requests for media to the best sources available to them. In this way clients can pick the right servers and also switch between them on the fly – with no picture halts – to overcome last-mile and ISP related network problems.

The ability to ensure viewers actually receiving what you deliver, when and how you planned for them to receive it is an art form in itself. A lot of things have to be synchronized perfectly in the background for that to happen and it usually involves leveraging our togetherness in the most profound manner to pull off the best results. Ultimately what really transpires in the last mile is based on the extent of the preparation put into the effort. Granted viewers simply click in to enjoy the results but connecting all the different points to work harmoniously together requires quite a lot of orchestration and planning that the person on the receiving end is generally blissfully unaware of.

Everyone is talking about the big concert U2 gave online Sunday night via YouTube. Well actually, what they are really talking about is the fact that 1 million people were watching the live stream. YouTube announced early last week that the stream would broadcast to about 16 countries including Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Even Bono himself said in an interview that the focus should be on the audience for making history. Wow. Extremely insightful. No wonder the whole blogosphere and Twittersphere are still posting about it. How often do people from so many different cultures and countries have an opportunity to participate in a big happening like this? I think we can expect more and more of this in the future as users tire of the virtual islands they have created for themselves online, and are now seeking to get back that fuzzy feeling that makes us human.

There is a lot of educational info in the coverage by MediaPost:

Jim Louderback, Revision3 CEO, who will participate on a panel at OMMA Video Friday in Los Angeles, Calif., says the Internet was not designed to deliver real-time streaming media, but rather built to “store-it-forward.”

When it comes to video, many people believe picture quality is more important. But when streaming a band, audio is just as important — sometimes more. Dropping a frame or two every now and then isn’t a big deal, but fans immediately notice a hiccup in the audio.

“To get audio and video to arrive at the same time you need a lot of bandwidth,” he says. “It’s not like television where the feeds are shared. If they are delivering a million simultaneous streams, every person watching has a unique stream being sent to them. If you have one million people watching, you have one million streams feeding from the content delivery network out to the homes.”

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YouTube will release actual figures about the live broadcast later on in the week but I would just like to point out that this is exactly what sets 3DCDN apart in this sector. YouTube had to stream one million unique streams for every single person watching. That’s quite a lot of bandwidth and we all know Google can afford it …

However 3Dcdn has developed a very unique and advanced technology that actually leverages the fact that so many people are watching the same event, to deliver a superior quality broadcast that consumes a lot less bandwidth. That is what ‘optimizing the last mile’ in our pitch is all about. Granted we are not in a position to take on Google at this stage but in an increasingly green world, it is good to know that the technology for doing more with less is coming of age.

According to a brief about Frost & Sullivan’s upcoming webinar, Content Development Network Market Improving, But Latest Pricing Data Shows Challenges Still Lie Ahead
it is clear that the CDN market will start showing growth again in the New Year. This is based on discussions they had with content owners and content delivery networks. But the problem is that where there is growth, there are new players coming aboard and that is creating difficult challenges for competing companies. The pricing pressure continues to dominate this emerging sector. Especially with the industry consolidating and carriers entering the market, vendors will have to learn some new tricks to retain their piece of the pie.

As explained in the brief, “as video content delivery services face commoditization, providers are quickly evolving to move up the value chain and provide more video ecosystem pieces. But with change come challenges from carriers and the pricing pressure being exerted in the market. How can content development network (CDN) providers – carriers, standalones and combinations of the two – position themselves to succeed, as the CDN sector continues to evolve?”

So the real defining issue is not necessarily about the pricing, but how they will position themselves to succeed. Of course money issues are very significant today but we believe that savvy users will make their decision by taking a much closer look at the features they are getting. The streaming media industry is no longer just about giving a company some bandwidth. It has evolved to really serve the unique needs of customers and it is actually newcomers who have the best handle on providing highly sophisticated features being the new technology is simply more advanced.

But hold on a second. Savvy customers may not be the issue at all in the next wave. We may be looking at an entirely new generation of service providers or marketeers who do not want to have to involve IT departments, engineers or third parties in every decision they make. They want to have the freedom to set up their business by themselves and reap the benefits. They want to have an online management system for streaming media that they simply log into and define in real time.

Granted pricing is a big issue but no matter how far we evolve there is still a very basic thing called service and that never goes out of style. The best guide about what CDN players should be focused on is outlined very clearly in Stef van der Ziel’s Modern CDN Requirements, which demonstrates how their vision evolved over the years to serve customers better.

So what it all comes down to really in a nutshell is our ability to evolve and change with the times. Foresee what’s coming to prepare and adapt ourselves to a new reality. Once you’ve mastered that a little thing like a pricing war will not really affect you, right?

According to Wikipedia, “a content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a system of computers containing copies of data, placed at various points in a network so as to maximize bandwidth for access to the data from clients throughout the network. A client accesses a copy of the data near to the client, as opposed to all clients accessing the same central server, thereby causing a bottleneck near that server.”

So basically CDN technology enables offloading heavy content from major data centers to servers that are closer to end users, to make the whole process of delivery content more fluid and efficient. But there is a lot more than meets the eye because highly advanced CDN technology can add a lot of value to the content delivery chain to enable a much more optimized and cost-effective experience for all types of content providers.

Sophisticated CDN technology enables dynamically optimizing the last mile for video to provide and in-depth analysis of the actual viewing experience on the user side and guarantee a superior overall service with no breaks or buffering – even for live broadcasts to large audiences. The kind of CDN you want to integrate enables you to cost-effectively deliver your content anywhere, quickly, easily and reliably, and watch your satisfied customers coming back for more every time.

The major issue you want to pay attention to is having the ability to stream in a globalized world. As a content owner, site owner, or media service provider, you should be able to expand your reach by seamlessly publishing, managing, monetizing and delivering your content over a global network.

Our next generation CDN will provide you with just that – for live games and concerts, for on demand feature films, for your global web casts, and for your radio, over PCs, handheld devices and STB connected TV. Nowadays, with the right partner you can have all that and more right at your fingertips. And it just takes a few minutes of your time to get up and running.

People don’t want to be sitting reading pages of information nowadays to get up to speed. We are the most sophisticated generation to ever inhabit the planet and that is why everything is so accelerated all around us. A big part of that is wanting to feel that we are part of whatever is happening and high quality streaming video content is the key to providing that immersive experience that customers are craving. We all want to connect to something bigger than our everyday lives. We want TV quality content wherever we happen to be.

We have been in this high-tech era long enough to expect everything to work with the click of a mouse exactly how we want it to work. But that’s not really the case. The truth of the matter is that internet users are still experiencing all kinds of breaks and buffering when watching their favorite streams and we are not just talking about YouTube. Even some of the biggest brands in the world cannot deliver on the online video viewing promise at times. It’s surprising and disappointing but that is reality. When that happens the brand looks really bad because we have just come to expect certain standards in this digital age we are living in.

So actually in this unique era of transition where everything is still pretty much up in the air, and technology has reached the point where we have a level playing field, players of all types and sizes from all over the world are presented with an unprecedented opportunity to play in the big leagues. Stream compelling content like the major players do. Share your content with global audiences. Connect with people everywhere.

Sounds pretty good, right? The only real question left is what are you doing to get there? At 3Dcdn we are enabling all types of new players to deliver content for VOD and also for streaming live events to large audiences. It’s sort of a dream come true and the dream is really happening right now. Beyond the pure entertainment aspects of quality streaming content, soon the whole world will be connected through online video for all kinds of educational and global purposes that are coming in to play. And we are looking forward to being there when that happens.