Now Microsoft has sweetened the deal by offering revenue sharing via another one of their services, adCenter. Offering revenue sharing is a smart move from Microsoft. It is hard to imagine that they're really expecting the Silverlight Streaming service to be a big money maker on its own -- i.e., Microsoft shouldn't expect it to compete with YouTube or other video CDNs -- but as a way to push the Silverlight technology to the public, it's a smart idea and revenue sharing should attract more developers to it.

If you're a developer looking for a free place to host your streaming videos, and you're choosing between YouTube and Silverlight Streaming, as long as you can keep it under 10GB/5TB, the prospect of revenue share might tip the scales in favor of Microsoft's service.

Note: there's no way we could mention every single online music streaming service in this poll, but if we happened to miss a major service then do shout it out asap in the comments!

Among some of Watershed's most interesting features are its granular security settings (down to limiting access to certain IP addresses), detailed analytics, and real-time chat and polls.

Competition

Other white-label video streaming services like Level 3 (pdf) or Move Networks offer similar solutions, though they generally only target larger enterprises and media companies. While Watershed's pricing model seems reasonable, the price itself feels rather high, though Ustream's CEO argues that it is comparable to services from other live streaming providers.

Other streaming services like Mogulus Pro tend to charge a monthly fee for their 'pro' services. Mogulus, however, also charges for bandwidth and Ustream argues that its pay-as-you-go service provides more flexibility.

Local Content

Currently, Last.fm Japan features a catalog that is very similar to its offerings in the US and UK, but it doesn't feature a lot of local Japanese musicians. According to Last.fm, it is working on adding content from local Japanese labels in the "near future," but didn't specify any exact dates or names of labels it would like to include.

Streaming Complete Songs = Higher Click-Through Sales

One interesting piece of information in Last.fm's announcement is that it has increased its click-through sales in the US and UK by 119% since launching its free on-demand service in January. Not only does this provide a significant revenue stream for Last.fm, but it also shows that giving listeners access to the complete song instead of just the standard 30 second clips will actually make them more likely to buy the song. Currently, Last.fm allows its users to completely stream every song three times - after that, it also switched to the standard 30 second clips.

About a year and a half ago, we reviewed the site, which then allowed users to download torrents without a BitTorrent client and allowed users to instantly stream audio and other non-video content from those torrents. In the closing remarks from that post, we noted, "Presumably, the same idea can be applied to video -- imagine: streaming video distribution over BitTorrent. Very cool." And behold, Bitlet has made this suggestion very real and quite simple, as well.

Although the service is still in an experimental stage, users are invited to test out the service and view sample videos at the Bitlet video page. This page also gives instructions for those "brave enough" to distribute content through the site.

Standard torrent caveats apply: Less bandwidth, higher quality, and fewer peers/seeds will make for more lag time. Nevertheless, it's a great implementation of Bitlet's technology (queuing bits sequentially so users get the first parts of the content first) and the implications are exciting.

As the folks at TorrentFreak wrote, "Although current bandwidth prices are dropping, most video services such as YouTube are paying millions of dollars for traditional server side streaming. Especially high quality video is costly to stream, and peer-to-peer technology can certainly make a huge difference there."

We can't help but wonder how this news will go over with the entertainment industry, especially in the aftermath of the conviction of the Pirate Bay crew. In addition to offering a serious incentive for users who currently use other torrent clients, Bitlet will be in direct competition with legal streaming video sites such as Hulu.

Although Netflix will try to make a streaming-only service work abroad, the company really doesn't think there's a demand for this type of offering within the U.S. In fact, when responding to a reporter's question regarding Netflix's plans for an a la carte option (there isn't one), Hastings said that while they're "open-minded to" an a la carte service that came without the DVD option, the company hasn't seen much interest in something of that nature in the States. "Everybody also wants to get DVDs," said Hastings. "All the new releases are on DVD, the vast catalog is on DVD. When there is demand, it will make sense for us to meet that demand for streaming only."

...But There is Demand for Streaming-Only

While that may be true - people do want the new releases - the demand for the physical media is arguably an artificial one created by the entertainment industry. Studios simply refuse to offer their movies and TV shows via Netflix's on-demand streaming library until they've been able to pull in a nice profit from disk sales first. This, in turn, forces consumers to not only purchase but also desire the DVD-by-mail part of the Netflix service as opposed to a separate, unbundled option of on-demand content only.

In other words, to say that the demand for streaming-only doesn't exist isn't exactly accurate. After all, Netflix reported that their streaming stats are now at an all-time high with 42% of subscribers having streamed at least 15 minutes of one TV show or movie during the last quarter. This number is up from 22% during the same period last year. Considering that Netflix's subscriber base itself has grown 28% over the past year, this figure means that the raw count of subscribers actively engaged in streaming has now more than doubled over last year. Hastings even said himself that the numbers were "a good marker of increasing streaming adoption."

Although the demand for new releases would probably have many subscribers sticking with the hybrid DVD/streaming service, by forgoing a streaming-only option it seems that the company is overlooking an opportunity to pick up a sizable group of more casual users. There are likely a number of people who would appreciate the option to pay a little less in order to to gain access to the on-demand content only - content which includes a much smaller catalog than what's available by mail. Given the company's integrations into game consoles, set-top boxes and even some TVs, there's actually no need to even own a DVD player anymore to watch Netflix movies. The content is on-demand.

Streaming media is the future, not physical disks. Hollywood knows this too, but as with the music industry, they're fighting tooth-and-nail to keep the old business model afloat for as long as possible. So far, it's working. As long as they control the method of distribution and keep it limited to physical media it will look like DVDs are what the people want. But the people really want streams. From music (Pandora, Spotify) to TV (Hulu, iPlayer) and yes, to movies via Netflix, streaming media is rapidly becoming the method of choice for many of today's consumers. The future is an on-demand world and Hollywood would do better to figure that out now than try to delay the inevitable.

Live Streaming Goes Mainstream

The real news here is that mobile live streaming will now be available to a far wider audience than ever before. Qik is clearly positioning as a mass market product as well, while some of its competitors like Kyte have specifically shied away from going after this market and, so far, only support high-end Nokia S60 phones.

Now that Qik is becoming available to a larger and more diverse audience, it will be interesting to see if we will also see new ways of using it, as well as new controversies around the privacy and copyright implications of live streaming. Hopefully, Qik's competitors, including Kyte and Flixwagon will soon follow suit and release their software for mainstream phones as well.

If you are wondering about the video quality of these live streams, here is a demo from Qik:

Could this mean live streaming is coming to our iPhones?

The Playlists will be Extended M3U Playlist files, a standard playlist file format originally implemented by the Winamp player. These M3U files are plain text documents that contain the location of the media files that should be played. Originally, M3U files only supported audio playlists, but over the years they came to support video as well.

In the new specification, the M3U Playlist will extend the standard file format by defining additional tags called EXTM3U and EXTINF. The first of those two simply designates this playlist file as an extended M3U file and the second, EXTINF, is the record marker that describes the media file identified by the URI that follows it in the following format:

   #EXTINF:<duration>,<title>

The document then goes on to describe how this new specification should operate in more detail - you can read it in its entirety here.

The big question is, what does this really mean? Is a future version of iTunes going to support streaming music and video from our PCs to our iPhones and iPods, or will we be streaming directly from an Apple server instead? Either way, having that option could free up our disk space considerably on our devices - perhaps so there's more room for apps?

Perhaps it's in preparation for the upcoming camcorder functionality rumored to be coming in the next gen iPhone. Once people start saving video files to their hard drives, those disks could fill up fast. Why not make some room by letting us stream our media instead?

Then again, maybe Apple just felt it was time to take advantage of cloud computing and stop limiting how much we carry with us based on iPhone/iPod disk size and the size of our PC hard drives. If so, that would be a fantastic feature. This author knows from personal experience that, in our household, we recently purchased all five seasons of a particular hour-long TV show and lost 30 some GBs on our PC's hard drive in the process. Being able to stream instead of download, in this case, would have been a huge benefit.

A final theory is that Apple is simply getting the jump on Microsoft, who proposed a similar adaptive video stream a year ago called Smooth Streaming but didn't submit it to IETF to make it an RFC.

We don't know how live streaming is going to be put into use right now - we can only theorize. All we know is that it's been developed so we're hoping we'll find out sooner or later. Take a gander at the spec yourself and share your theories with us in the comments section below.

Specifically, the 5% will be streamed and on-demand music data from AOL Music and Yahoo! Music. They are also looking to include other sources, such as Rhapsody. According to Billboard, digital delivery began playing an important role in the chart's composition in February 2005 - when they factored in the sale of digital tracks, "as measured by Nielsen SoundScan from a comprehensive panel of online merchants."

Via PaidContent.org

Apple's forthcoming service, on the other hand, is expected to be compatible with both the iPod and iPhone as well as possibly the AppleTV, which means more viewing options for consumers. By removing time constraints on viewing, something that users of Apple's 24-hour rental service will still need to contend with, Netflix hopes that consumers will overlook the relatively restricted viewing options.

Even though unlimited streaming may help Netflix compete with Apple's iTunes juggernaut, it could also hurt the company financially, says AP writer Michael Liedtke. "Letting subscribers stream as much as they want could erode Netflix's profits because the Los Gatos-based company isn't raising its monthly rates even though its expenses may rise if increased usage drives up the licensing fees owed to studios," he writes.

If Netflix is successful with its unlimited streaming service, could it also revive the rumors of a potential Amazon buyout? Amazon already sells movie rentals via its Unbox download service, and recently went head-to-head with Apple on MP3 music downloads. With Apple encroaching on its turf, combining forces with Netflix may seem like an attractive option (though a potential Internet tax issue could still stymie that idea).

1) We added FineTune and Live365, as they were mentioned several times in the comments to the original post. So if one of those is your favorite, please go ahead and vote for it now.

2) We removed eMusic, as it is not a streaming service (apologies for that).

Besides a few other relatively minor upgrades, Qik now supports more granular permissions and the grouping of videos. Qik has also released an update to its video player, which, next to some cosmetic updates, now includes the option to chat with other users from within the player.

Qik also announced some new distribution partners, including Facebook, MySpace, and Orkut. Also, as we reported last week, CoverItLive not allows for embedding Qik videos into its live blogging application.

Live streaming now also works on the Verizon and Spring networks, whereas it was previously restricted to the AT&T and T-Mobile GSM networks.

Competitors and the iPhone

Qik's main competitors are Kyte and Flixwagon. Both of these services, however, are currently only available for phones running Nokia's S60 operating system, while Qik also works on Windows Mobile phones.

None of these applications work on the iPhone, yet (thanks to the lack of a video camera) - though Qik has shown a demo of its product that works on a jailbroken 1st generation iPhone. Kyte also has an application for the iPhone, but it can only be used to share photos.

While most live video streaming services like Justin.tv or Stickam have focused mostly on streaming from webcams (and Kyte also allows for this), Qik is fully focused on mobile video. This is clearly a growing market, especially as more consumers start considering video on mobile phones as a basic utility. With its broad range of supported phones, Qik is well-positioned against its competition.

Qik already has a number of high-profile users, with Robert Scoble, Kevin Rose, and Jason Calacanis regularly using the service to stream interviews or other events live to their followers.

Now if only its users wouldn't flood Twitter regularly by announcing that they are "streaming live now, come chat!"

In my testing, westream worked perfectly with nary a hiccup. I was able to quickly stream any track, start to finish (I picked a torrent with an ample amount of seeders from Legit Torrents for my tests). Of course, the quality of audio and level of gaplessness you experience will be totally dependent on the health of the torrent you're trying to stream.

The volume control seemed a bit wonky (going from very soft to very, very loud without much in between) and it would be nice to have the option to download the torrent straight away if you like what you're hearing. But in general, westream performs very well.

Westream is a useful BitTorrent innovation that lets users essentially "try before they buy." Presumably, the same idea can be applied to video -- imagine: streaming video distribution over BitTorrent. Very cool.

There seems to be a trend among online video sites towards live streaming. Joost, which just debuted its web-based offerings, is also planning to add live streams to its service in the near future. The U.S. presidential election in particular seems to be a catalyst for live streaming. All the major U.S. networks will carry the debate live on their own web sites, and bothCurrent.tv and MySpace will provide live streams.

Hulu also announced its first premiere of a feature film, a documentary about Crawford, Texas, the site of President George W. Bush's ranch.