A Look Behind The Screens: The Costs of Sharing Video

Forbes takes a professional look at the costs and the potential revenues of amateur video distribution.

"Internet optimists predict that online video, long-rumored to be the next big thing, is finally taking off: IDC estimates that video generated $230 million in revenue but will jump to $1.7 billion by 2010. In the meantime, the best play in Internet video may not be the companies that show off the clips, but the ones who deliver them to users' PCs.

The content-delivery business may be a $500 million a year business--twice the value of Internet video advertising and users fees--and is growing 25% per year, IDC estimates. It is dominated by big, publicly traded hosting providers such as Akamai Technologies and AT&T, as well as boutique shops such as Limelight, which also serves News Corp.'s MySpace and Microsoft's Xbox Live videogame service. Some of the biggest portals, like Yahoo! and Google, have built up their own content-delivery networks and don't need to pay a third party for many services.

The bandwidth companies typically charge video sites up to a penny per minute of video streamed. Big players who buy in bulk get discounted rates: Industry observers estimate that YouTube, which is streaming 40 million videos and 200 terabytes of data per day, may be paying between a tenth of a cent and half a cent per minute. Neither YouTube nor Limelight would comment on their pricing.”

Comments

[Bill]

For those readers looking for an easy software tool to create, host and deliver Video Advertising, then take a look at the StreamerNet Mobile Video Producer.

The company has released the first “plug-and-play, click-and-stream” software program (WinXP) that lets you create your do-it-yourself sales commercial and upload it to your private StreamerNet video library. Simply place the provided link within web sites or AdBoxes and subsequent click-thrus will stream the video ad to the viewer.

More details at http://www.streamernet.com/html/videoad.html

This product is a swiss-army knife which enables simplified creation and management of all things video, such as video email, live streaming, media conversion, podcasting and more.

[Tim]

Thanks for letting me know, Ben. I'll fix it.

[Ben]

I know this is off topic - but your feed just doesn't seem to work (and it's not validating either - I'm speaking of the atom.xml or the FeedBurner burned feed: http://feedvalidator.org/check?url=http://feeds.feedburner.com/Iplot) which means I can subscribe to it but not read it…