These days, many want to suggest that cable TV offerings will be "killed" or "replaced" by content services being delivered over the Internet using content delivery networks. While that's not reality, those who make these suggestions speak as if the quality of the content delivered online is the same as what consumers get from cable TV. However, thanks to Conviva, we have data from some of the largest streamers on the web, that shows how difficult it really is to deliver video on the Internet, with reliability. In fact, of the 22.6 billion streams Conviva monitored in 2012, 60% of them had quality issues. 60%!

The quality of online video isn't even close to what cable TV delivers today when it comes to quality and reliability – yet many don't want to admit this as it goes against their agenda. I like data because it proves what's really going on

There's been a lot of speculation about what would eventually happen with KIT Digital (KITD.OB) and finally, we now know some details on what will take place with KIT's assets, their employees and what KIT's new management team plans to do moving forward. Late Tuesday afternoon, KIT filed an 8-K and I had the chance to speak to KIT's management team earlier in the day to get more details on what they have just announced. It's a complex deal, there are a lot of moving parts and additional pieces of information aren't being released for a few weeks, details which we need to evaluate the true value of KIT's business going forward. These additional details will come out over time, but for now, here's what the company is disclosing.

KIT Digital Inc., the parent holding company of the assets, has filed will file for chapter 11 bankruptcy. While some

While the next-generation video compression technology, HEVC, is a hot topic, far too many people are getting caught up in non real-world use cases, like 4K, or think HEVC is going to be adopted in short order. In reality, the mainstream market is not yet ready for HEVC, it's still a few years away, and there isn't an ROI to be achieved from being an early adopter of HEVC. (See my post from January on this topic: HEVC (H.265) Adoption Is At Least Five Years Away For Consumer Content Services)

While HEVC probably will serve as the successor to MPEG-4, many myths surround the technology and the rate at which it will be deployed. Yesterday [Tuesday], my co-worker at Frost & Sullivan, digital media Industry Manager Avni Rambhia, lead a webinar discussing the current state of HEVC products and technology, and its strategic implications in the short, mid

While many want to imply and insist that video delivered over the internet is going to one day rival or surpass cable TV as the main broadcast medium, which is an incorrect notion on its own, most are missing the bigger picture and ignoring the business side of the discussion. They want to argue about network capacity, improved compression algorithms, server deployments and other technology pieces without realizing or even acknowledging that the business model of delivering video does not work. Delivering video over the web, even at scale, isn't profitable, unless you're YouTube and you can afford to subsidize the bandwidth of nearly the entire Internet.

Even at scale, you can't make money from delivering video on the web. It's a flawed business because unlike traditional broadcast TV and radio models, with video on the web, each new viewer you get costs you money. You don't have a fixed

Nine months ago, Amazon (AMZN) launched their new dynamic content delivery service in beta and two weeks ago, I posted details on how their product is coming along and outlined new features they have added since launch. Every since Amazon announced their new service, people keep asking me if Amazon will disrupt Akamai's DSA business and drive pricing down in the market as a whole. While Amazon still has a long way to go before that has the possibility of happening, make no mistake, they are gunning for Akamai, even though they won't call out Akamai (AKAM) by name.

Today, Akamai is still the undisputed king of the dynamic site acceleration industry and to date, no one has even come close to taking a large percentage of their web optimization business or knocked them from the top spot. But over the past four or five years, market dynamics

When I joined the military and entered basic training after graduating from High School, as soon as I got off the bus a drill instructor was in my face making it clear to me that by the time my training was over, I will have learned that even the most well laid plans can and do fail. Things change, stuff happens and there is only so much you can anticipate. Learning to adapt and overcome unexpected challenges was something we needed to learn if we wanted to make it and this concept is at the core of what they teach all new recruits, in all branches of our military.

Right now, many vendors are working to finalize their go-to-market strategy, budgets and plans in the New Year, with some making big bets on what will impact their business the most in 2013. A lot of vendors have reached out to

Last May, at the Content Delivery Summit event I organize each year, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced support for dynamic content delivery, also referred to in the industry as dynamic site acceleration (DSA) (video presentation here). Since the launch, Amazon (AMZN) has been pretty quiet on what they have been working on, so I spent some time with the company to get an update on where their support for dynamic content stands. For those not familiar with DSA technology in general, dynamic site acceleration is a suite of technologies and products that deals with optimizing dynamically served content across a network. Traditional DSA services often include TCP optimization, route optimization, connection management, on-the-fly compression, SSL offload and pre-fetching functionality amongst other technologies.

Amazon is targeting customers with their dynamic content delivery service for two distinct applications: content that changes frequently -- e.g., sports scores, weather updates,

Last Thursday, privately held Strangeloops Networks, which focuses on web optimization, announced they had been acquired by Radware (RDWR). Terms of the deal were not announced but multiple industry folks say Strangeloop was valued at under $20M.

Strangeloop is one of the leading companies offering a front-end optimization service in the market and was working with Amazon to give AWS customers the ability to make their sites perform faster by using FEO. Strangeloop has also been working with Level 3 for some time and the joint Level 3/Strangeloop solution was one of the main reasons Akamai was forced to go out and buy Blaze, an FEO competitor to Strangeloop. I haven't had the chance to catch up with the Strangeloop folks but Radware says they will use Strangeloop's technology to target e-commerce and enterprise customers. On paper it's a good fit for Radware as the company already focuses

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), also referred to as H.265, is a video standard that is being developed through an ISO/IEC collaboration. HEVC planning was begun way back in 2004, shortly after H.264 was finalized and the topic has been getting a lot of exposure in the industry over the past few months. Many questions remain about HEVC including how quickly it can be implemented into the current video ecosystem and when content owners will adopt it.

The Digital Media group at Frost & Sullivan, which I am part of as a Principal Analyst, has been doing a lot of coverage on HEVC as of late. Our lead analyst on the transcoding side, Avni Rambhia, has published three reports that include details on HEVC including the Global Broadcast and DTT Video Encoders Market, Global Pay TV Video Encoders Market and Global Media and Entertainment Video Transcoding Market.

Almost five years to the day, the NYT published an article proclaiming that, “TV is becoming obsolete” and was joined by plenty of other media outlets claiming that within a few short years, streaming video could displace the traditional means of video distribution. While some in the industry still want to set false expectations that streaming media technology is somehow going to replace the primary means of delivering video to the living room, the fact remains that five years later, cable TV is here to stay and is still the primary way to get video into the home.

While reading a post on another site on a similar topic, a reader left a comment saying, “streaming is still in its relative infancy”, a false statement I hear often. Some seem to want to use the argument that streaming media technology is new and will improve as a reason why

The media is spending a lot of time regurgitating the Akamai (AKAM) and AT&T (T) press release, but from what I've seen, none are digging under the surface to see what's really going on. Some like the WSJ even said that as a result of the new deal, AT&T and Akamai will now "end competition" amongst each other, which is laughable. Anyone who follows the CDN space, which clearly the WSJ doesn't, knows that AT&T was never competing with Akamai or anyone else for that matter, when it came to its failed CDN business. The simple fact that the WSJ and other sites don't even mention what AT&T or Akamai's CDN revenues are shows they really don't get the market. Others have made comments like, "the deal eliminates AT&T as a rival," which is also not true. Based on numbers Akamai has given out in the past, and the

If you had to pick one person that is the most outspoken advocate of Apple’s (APPL) still non-existent all-in-one Apple TV, it would have to be Piper Jaffray Wall Street analyst Gene Munster. For more than three years now, Gene’s been very vocal in predicting that Apple is getting ready to release an Apple TV set. The moment he says anything about the device, many people in the media make it into their lead story, even though to date, he’s yet to be right about any of his Apple TV predictions. While I don’t know Gene personally, and for all I know he’s one of the nicest guys in the world, I don’t understand why anyone listens to him when he’s been predicting the same thing, year after year, with no results to show for it.

When he predicted in June that Apple could sell 11M TV sets

It seems a week can't go buy without my RSS feed being full of articles talking to the demise of the TV medium and its business model. This in the face of record profits by operators like Comcast (CMCSA), reports from cable operators of no subscriber losses of any significance and MSO's seeing their average revenue per user (ARPU) growing every few quarters. Yet even in the face of all this data, many in the media seem to have a personal agenda of wanting to get others to agree with them that cable TV is a dying medium and that it will follow the downward spiral of the newspaper business.

Their arguments, if you can call them that, are almost always based on the speculation of products that don't even exist yet, think Apple (AAPL) TV, or al la carte pricing, and they try to argue that one medium, like

Today, Netflix (NFLX) announced that they have been actively working to build out their own network of caches inside ISP networks and have officially launched the "Netflix Open Connect Content Delivery Network". With this offering, Netflix aims to lower their CDN costs, rely less on third party CDNs, provide higher quality streaming and most importantly, give network operators more control over the video that flows through their pipes. While their blog post doesn't give out too many details, I had the chance to speak with Netflix earlier today to get some more information on their announcement.

To support the launch of their CDN, Netflix has a new website at openconnect.netflix.com which gives ISPs more details on the hardware and software design of Netflix's caches, details on how ISPs can peer with Netflix and access to a deployment guide. While many might compare what Netflix is doing

On Sunday, Netflix's (NFLX) CEO took to his Facebook page to complain that Comcast (CCT) isn't being fair when it comes to net neutrality principles. His argument is that Comcast's Xfinity TV streaming app on the Xbox 360 doesn't count towards consumers monthly bandwidth cap, yet services like Netflix and Hulu do. While it's a nice try on his part to drag net neutrality in the subject and get people all worked up, he's simply trying to deflect away from the real issue at hand, which is the competition Netflix is facing from Comcast and others.

For their part, Comcast says Xfinity does not count towards consumers 250GB cap per month because the Xbox 360 acts as an additional cable box for your existing cable service. No matter which side you take, the point that is being missed is that today, Comcast's cap doesn't matter. Comcast has said that

This morning Level 3 (LVLT) announced it had expanded the coverage and capacity of their content delivery network. While all CDN vendors are always increasing the reach and capacity of their networks, it's nice to see a vendor put out some real numbers for a change. Level 3 says it has increased its globally available CDN capacity to more than 5.6 Tbps, which is a little more than double the 2.15 Tbps capacity they had in late 2010. In addition the company also announced expanded CDN offerings into multiple countries in Latin America as well as locations in Saudi Arabia and Canada.

Earlier in the week, Reuters was reporting that Netflix's CEO was in talks with cable operators about bundling Netflix's (NFLX) streaming service in with cable TV packages. Of course when then media got wind of the story, most of them naturally assumed something was in the works, yet a quick check with execs at many of the MSOs tells a very different story. Over the past week, I spoke to four different cable TV execs, three in the U.S. and one in Latin America, who all say no such deal is in the works. Add in the recent public comment from Comcast (CMCSA) and that's five major MSOs who say the Reuter's story is "all noise".

Meetings between Netflix and the MSOs take place all the time and one cable TV exec told me that, "bundling was definitely on the table but discussions never went