It already seems like months since I was down in Argentina. But here's a little composite of some video I shot during a hike up the "Ventana" with two colleagues on our day off. The Sierra de la Ventana is about 500 kilometers south of Buenos Aires, and at the time we were there (mid September), Spring was just around the corner....
Dan Rayburn says things will get worse before they get better for CDNs.
With Limelight reporting earnings last night, it's now clear that the major players in the CDN space, the vendors that control the vast majority of the market share for video delivery, are all experiencing no growth. Akamai's M&E business was down and Limelight, Internap and Level 3 all reported no revenue growth for their CDN business. And with Q3 typically being a weak quarter for the CDNs and some of them setting guidance that shows no growth over Q2, we may have yet to see the bottom.
While Limelight was very optimistic that they will see growth in the second half of this year and that the CDN market as a whole will pick up, I'm not so sure that industry wide, that's going to happen in the next two quarters. While pricing still took a decline last quarter, I see the bigger impact being that traffic growth with current customer is no where near the levels it once was and many smaller content owners continue to go under. While Akamai and Limelight both talked about the future of HD and higher-quality video, more devices on the market, blu-ray streaming etc. none of that will take place any time soon on any kind of large scale to impact their revenue in the near-term.
Are Web-connected TVs going to cause problems for broadcasters?
The first TVs fitted with Yahoo-Intel�s widget engine have begun to ship in Europe amid speculation about their potentially disruptive impact on the TV landscape.
On the one hand web-enabled TVs retailing over �1000 (US $1600) are unlikely to attract a mass market, outside early adopters, given that over the past 18 months the industry has made a pretty successful attempt to encourage people to upgrade to flat-screen HD screens as digital switchover gathers pace.
Yet the no-fuss plug and play internet access that widgets provide, albeit in limited �walled garden� form, will give broadcasters and platform owners pause for thought.
�It�s not a slam-dunk competitor but a development that chips away at the edges of the pay-TV business,� says Nigel Walley, managing director of media strategists Decipher. �Pulling up a widget on the Samsung TV pushes the broadcaster�s EPG to one side, potentially delivering on-demand content outside its control. Widgets will raise the appetite among consumers to use the main screen for more activity, putting pressure on STB manufacturers to raise their game.�
Samsung TV was first to launch in April with a six-month exclusive deal to market Yahoo TV Widgets software in its Internet@TV branded displays. Yahoo's UK channels include widgets for news and sports reports, Flickr and, as of mid-July, YouTube.
Test Driving HD Here's a brief view of "A" Street in Southie, using my new Flip HD camera. 1280 x 720 in H.264. Not too shabby, if I do say so myself...
Maybe some of us simply want to see different things for the industry or judge the success of the industry on different metrics. For me, I want to see companies in the space last for ten years with a sustainable business model that actually generates revenue. To me, that is the only real way any company should be judged in any industry, Internet related or not.
But these days, especially with YouTube, many simply want to only focus on their "market share" or the number of videos being consumed as somehow equaling success for the company. That seems to be the same metric that was used in early 2000 when the vast majority of content portals said that all they needed was a lot of eyeballs to be successful and that the number of eyeballs was all that mattered. How well did that work out?
I've seen a few blogs posts this week that say it really does not matter how much money YouTube is losing since they maintain such a dominant share of the number of hours of videos viewed each month. While that's a nice stat, for me, it means nothing if you can't generate revenue around it. Would you rather run a business that can't sustain itself, but has a lot of market share, or run a company that is profitable, but has less of a market share? The fact that it's so hard to name a lot of companies that are still in business today, from just five years ago, shows that this industry has to be more than just about who has the most "market share" at any one given time. This has to be about creating a sustainable business and that is all that should matter. How many companies really care about their "market share" anymore when their company goes out of business? So when people say things like YouTube has "strategic value" to Google or is "part of the bigger picture", that's all just marketing terms. Try defining them.
