Brightcove Networks pulled the plug on its consumer product, leaving YouTube Inc. as the main outlet for amateur videographers looking to generate ad revenue from online videos.

The move to fold its Brightcove Network service, which had been planned for several months, follows the recent rollout of the company’s Brightcove 3 platform, which is designed to drive increased traffic for videos distributed by Brightcove, and to improve the quality of videos by automatically detecting a user’s bandwidth and delivering the best video quality available based on each user’s settings.

Brightcove sent email messages to subscribers of its Brightcove Network service this week, informing them that they would not be able to access their accounts after Dec. 17. The company also told users they have until Jan. 31 to opt to upgrade its paid Brightcove 3 service.

When the firm launched Brightcove Network in 2006, the company planned to sell advertising and provide content syndication services to users that uploaded videos to Brightcove, but the company failed to gain traction in the ad-sales world.

Source: http://www.contentinople.com/author.asp?section_id=603&doc_id=169555

Akamai, the world’s largest content delivery network, a giant network of servers around the globe which streams video for Reuters, MySpace, Metacafe NBC, CBS, CNN, the BBC and many others, is sponsoring Beet.TV for the next 30 days with an exclusive in-stream advertising message running in our 800 clips.

Here’s a statement about the Beet sponsorship from Akamai’s Suzanne Johnson, Senior Industry Marketing Manager for Digital Media: “Beet.TV offers in depth and on point coverage of the fast paced digital media and Web 2.0 business world. What makes Beet TV unique is its adoption of video as its communications medium and online syndication to extend its reach. Akamai is excited to support Beet in bringing this innovative and very relevant coverage to digital media audiences across the Internet.”

Source: http://www.beet.tv/2008/12/hey-now-akamai.html

Joost’s two year old online video service was a pretty darned smart idea when it first launched. Instead of streaming video through the Joost website, users would download a Mozilla-based client and watch it there instead. The user experience could be more tightly controlled. And more importantly, the Joost client had built in person-to-person file sharing. That meant Joost had lower bandwidth bills. It also meant that Joost didn’t need to worry about overloading servers while showing live events - users would just grab the stream from others automatically.

But Joost bet wrong, as the whole world, led by YouTube and then Hulu, got comfortable with Flash as the delivery method for video. Showing video on Flash meant users could deep link to specific videos, and also embed stuff they liked on their own sites. With the benefit of hindsight it all seems sort of obvious. Joost adapted, though, giving users the option of an all-Flash site in September. Some international users would still be required to use the software to reduce bandwidth costs, and the company was hoping U.S. users would eventually install it, too.

Today they announced they’re discontinuing the software application altogether, but they aren’t saying why. It’s clear that Joost’s strategy has been fluid over the last few months as they try to figure out a way to compete with the much more successful Hulu. It’s honestly not clear that they really can. Joost doesn’t offer anything particularly unique or compelling to users over competing sites with proprietary content (Hulu with Fox and NBC, TV.com with CBS). Joost raised a big $45 million round of financing way back in 2006. It’s not clear how much of that is left. If they want to succeed they’re going to have to do something pretty radical.

Source: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/17/joost-just-gives-up-on-p2p/

Level 3 stock might be trading below a buck, and its future might be cloudy, but the company has to be thrilled with this news from Renesys, an Internet monitoring company, which claims it’s the largest IP network in the world, ahead of Sprint, which apparently just can’t get a break, even though they are growing.

Renesys explains that the rise of Level 3 has been driven by its overseas growth, especially in Asia. Global Crossing saw similar gains because of growth in Asia, where it has started to offer transit services to more carriers. As we have noted previously, the growth in traffic in Asia is driven by the surge in the economic activity in the region, along with increased demand for faster broadband pipes. Here are the top five by rank:

1. Level 3
2. Sprint
3. Global Crossing
4. Verizon (formerly MCI/WorldCom/UUNet)
5. NTT

On its blog, Renesys explains that while rankings are a “crude measure of size, as they are based entirely on the quantity of IP space ultimately transited by each provider,” it is comfortable with the approach. The results are based on routing data which, it says “is inherently public.”

Source: http://gigaom.com/2008/12/18/level-3-has-the-largest-ip-network/

You may have that noticed a number of smaller delivery networks are keen to tout their advanced reporting features and capabilities as a means to highlight “advanced technologies” and “superior reporting platforms.” These small CDNs often leverage web services to provide an impressive collection of graphs and metrics that are heavily relied on by their sales force. But don’t be fooled – these impressive results from online reporting capabilities should be seen for what it is: a lack of traffic, scale and platform offerings.

That’s not to say, however, that reporting and analytical capabilities aren’t vitally important for CDN users. Over 1,000 CDN customers surveyed by StreamingMedia.com responded that analytics and reporting is the number one area they want their CDNs to improve. That’s a request we can’t afford to ignore, which is why the continued development of advanced reporting and analytical capabilities is an important focus area for us at Limelight.

At Limelight Networks, currently accumulate and process over 100 terabytes of uncompressed log files each day due to the sheer volume of Internet traffic we deliver globally on our network. We offer byte-level accurate reporting on this traffic - not a sample or estimate, but an actual accounting of each bit we deliver. Reporting and analyzing this data in a timely and consistent basis is no small task when you are delivering massive traffic volumes. This puts us in a unique position to not only innovate, but also provide analytics and insights that few, if any, companies have ever delivered to their customers.

Many emerging CDNs also have a significantly narrower set of product offerings. Those fewer platform offerings, combined with lower traffic levels than a Tier 1 CDN, means a simpler reporting process. Limelight’s network size creates immense technical challenges in providing actionable results, but we believe the information we provide is not only for the benefit of our customers but advertisers and publishers and other members of the Internet ecosystem.

At the end of the day, the insights that the scale of a Tier 1 CDN can provide are important to online businesses. And on a higher level, the success of the ecosystem of the Internet will rely on a deep understanding of both consumer demands and business needs — and not on just a pretty graph.

Source: http://blog.llnw.com/2008/12/substance-behind-the-graph/

Berlin, Germany, and San Jose, USA, December 15, 2008 - dicas, the German MPEG-4 experts, and Wowza Media Systems, a US-based developer of Flash streaming media server software, have announced the interoperability of dicas MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 encoders with Wowza Media Server® Pro. Broadcasters, operators and enterprises delivering IPTV and streaming services now have at their disposal a versatile and cost-effective conduit for the live distribution of broadcast-quality video content in multiple bit rates to Internet-connected Flash player clients.

Wowza Media Server Pro is an award-winning solution for Flash streaming that counts more than 15,000 global licensees across a broad range of industries. Its popularity is due in large part to its exclusive ability to stream to Flash players using both RTMP and non-RTMP live encoders.

“We knew that a server allowing non-Flash RTP/RTSP encoders for H.264 live Flash streaming would be an extremely attractive product,” says David Stubenvoll, CEO & Co-Founder, Wowza Media Systems. “But we never foresaw such a broad and deep affection for what we have done. Now the combination of Wowza Pro with dicas2020 multiple bit rate ability offers customers a great way to stream Flash while simplifying encoding infrastructure and reducing cost.”

“The compatibility with Wowza Media Server Pro is a natural advancement of our product portfolio,” says Sebastian Moeritz, CEO at dicas. “In addition to the dicas Flash plug-in allowing for H.264 live Flash streaming over RTMP, clients now have the choice of using RTMP or delivering streams to the media server at multiple bit rates over a standard non-Flash transport protocol that best fits with their needs.”

The recently launched dicas2020 multi-format encoder is a perfect complement to Wowza Media Server Pro. The dicas2020 encodes a single input channel into up to six parallel output signals at varying bit rates (adjustable from 40 kbps to 6 Mbps), resolution (from QCIF to SDTV), and transport protocols (RTMP, RTP/RTSP, MPEG-TS). Wowza Media Server Pro can ingest streams over any transport protocol from the dicas2020 encoder, selecting from a bit rate appropriate to the user’s bandwidth and reliably deliver it over RTMP to the Flash player.

Google is taking some heat this morning from a Wall Street Journal piece that argues the company is abandoning its support of network neutrality in an attempt to make sites like YouTube faster than the competition.

The WSJ claims Google has approached major internet service providers “with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content.”

That would seem to fly in the face of the company’s long-standing support for network neutrality, but Google has called the WSJ’s article “confused,” and says that it remains committed to network neutrality.

The contention comes from the varying definitions of network neutrality. The simplest version of network neutrality says all internet traffic should delivered at the same speed over the same network. Unfortunately for supporters of the everything-is-absolutely-equal version of network neutrality, the concept has always been an ideal, more of a myth than reality.

The problem lies with what are known as content delivery networks (CDNs) that use so-called edge servers, located physically closer to you, to cache and deliver content faster. When you request the content from, in this case YouTube, it can be transmitted from the proposed edge servers rather than from Google’s central servers.

That means faster downloads for YouTube, but it also means a significantly less strain on bandwidth for the rest of the web. For example, imagine you download a YouTube movie, the next time someone on the same network wants to access the same file, the network can simply pass through the cached (and therefore faster) version. Edge servers reduce the need for ISPs to handle traffic outside their networks, which is one of the primary bottlenecks for internet speed.

Services like Akamai, Limelight and other CDNs are a common, if expensive, way for larger sites (with the money) to ensure that their data is transmitted faster (for instance, this page you’re reading right now is cached and served by Akamai).

The WSJ article refers to a Google project known as OpenEdge, which (as Google explains on its Public Policy blog) is a plan to put its own edge-cache servers directly inside ISP networks. The idea of the plan is that downloading a YouTube video or Picasa photo album is faster.

Source: http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/12/google-blasts-w.html

Anyone who has read my blog long enough knows that I am always saying that content delivery networks need to offer a lot more functionality in their reporting and analytic packages. Earlier in the year, in a StreamingMedia.com survey of over 1,000 customers, more than 75% of them said reporting and analytics was the number one complaint they had with their current CDN. In April of this year, I posted the top twenty customer requests on ways content delivery networks could improve their offering.

Seeing a real demand in the market, content delivery network Highwinds has been working for the past year on improving their web based reporting product and offering all of the functionality that customers asked for in the survey. In that time, I’ve had the ability to watch Highwinds product continue to evolve and have been able to get a few in-person demos along the way. To date, their reporting package is one of the best solutions I have seen from any of the CDNs in the market.

Highwinds reporting system, called StrikeTracker, enables customers to get real-time analytics, self-service live event provisioning and enable policy-based content-access protection, all via a web based dashboard. They currently offer multiple metrics for live events, something many CDNs don’t have, and soon will give customers the ability to watch individual viewers signing on/dropping off of live events. All customer data is updated typically in 30 seconds or less so it provides actionable information during a promotion or campaign, not just after it has ended. While other CDNs offer near real-time reporting, typically it is at intervals of ten minutes or more.

One of the great things you notice right away when using StrikeTracker is that it was built in Adobe Flex, with a major focus placed on usability and providing a graphically-rich, yet streamlined interface that quickly highlights key statistical information. And because to date, Highwinds has primarily gone after resellers, they have spent a lot of time making sure the system provides reporting for sub-accounts and is viewable through APIs in the StrikeTracker console. Their sub-account reporting and billing data is also rolled up through a hierarchy of parent accounts and can be viewed by sub-account or as an aggregate for all levels.

Source: http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/2008/12/highwinds-reporting-system-striketracker.html

Camas, WA (Vocus/PRWEB ) December 15, 2008 — Abacast Inc. of Camas, Wash. announced that digital media technology and entertainment veteran Nils Lahr has joined the company’s Board of Advisors.

The addition of Nils Lahr as an Advisor adds valuable and deep experience in the development of Abacast’s technology, including our unique Hybrid CDN and advertising injection technologies. We are delighted to have the contribution of Nils’ vast experience and knowledge This appointment will provide us a solid platform for accelerating our development and expansion. Abacast’s technologies are exciting to me as it is clear that the digital media industry requires hybrid solutions to move to the next level and continue to offset demand from traditional broadcast and onto the Internet By utilizing all available delivery options the consumer is provided with the best possible experience 24/7. I’m excited about joining the team and lending my experiences to help scale and accelerate Abacast’s solutions.

Mr. Lahr is the former CTO and Co-Founder of iBEAM Broadcasting and a key architect of Microsoft’s Digital Media Platform. He was also a founder of VXtreme, which was acquired by Microsoft for over $50 million. Mr. Lahr has consulted on technology strategy and projects to numerous Fortune 50 companies. He recently co-founded Synergy Sports, which indexes video of every NBA game, and Lexicon Digital, a startup venture founded with the actor David Caruso.

Source: http://www.prweb.com/releases/Abacast/Nils_Lahr/prweb1751864.htm

BROOMFIELD, Colo., Dec 15, 2008 /PRNewswire-FirstCall via COMTEX/ —
Level 3 Communications, Inc. today announced that the company has expanded its Vyvx services platform to include broadcast video distribution in Europe. The expansion enables more efficient distribution of North American broadcast programming to Europe and provides European customers access to broadcast video delivery over the Level 3 network.

“As one of the largest and most connected IP networks in the world, Level 3 is now capitalizing on the reach of our network to expand the Vyvx services platform,” said Grant van Rooyen, president of Level 3’s Content Markets Group. “This expansion builds on our proven track record of performance in the broadcast industry and provides our customers with the comprehensive service portfolio to continue expanding their global broadcast distribution.”

Source: http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/Level-3-Expands-Vyvx-Services/story.aspx?guid={B2C4F8CE-1BFB-451D-A777-CB0CC3133E03}