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.

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.

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.

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!"

Interestingly, Disney-owned ABC.com, which just struck a deal to syndicate its videos on Hulu, saw the largest decline in streams since March, with a 15.9% drop in total streams.

Given that few of us here at RWW fall into MTV's demographic, we are just as puzzled as Peter Kafka at AllThingsD about the rapid growth of MTV's streaming video business. MTV grew faster than any other of its competitors among the Top 10 online video streaming sites. While MTV just launched its streaming video service in Japan, Nielsen's data is for the U.S. only. Looking at MTV's site though, there can be no doubt that MTV has made streaming video the center of its online strategy - and apparently this strategy is paying off.

Older Users Drive Hulu's Growth

On Hulu, according to Nielsen, the time users spent on the service increased by 119% since last November, mostly driven by the impressive growth that Hulu saw among users between 35 and 49. These users now make up 30% of Hulu's viewership and they spend far more time on Hulu than most other demographics (416 minutes per month - 10% more than any other group).

At the same time, however, the total number of video streams per users dropped from 19.4 to 17.4, which is slightly puzzling. QuickPlay attributes this to the growth in adoption of live mobile TV, which generates fewer streams, but longer views.

QuickPlay provides video services to a large number of mobile carriers in the U.S. and Canada, including AT&T, Alltel, Bell Mobility, Aliant, Rogers Wireless, Telus, and Sprint.

News, Music Videos, and Trailers

In terms of content, the most popular genres for live TV streaming were news, music videos, and weather. For regular video streaming, music videos and movie trailers were the most popular genres. The most popular categories for mobile downloading were music, sports, and comedy.

Will this Momentum Continue in 2009?

One of the reasons for this increase might be the rising interest in smartphones, which make accessing video content a lot easier. At the same time, though, it remains to be seen if consumers will continue to be willing to pay for extra mobile video services in the current economic climate.

By the Numbers

Here are the exact numbers from QuickPlay:

Video Streams

• Total live TV and video streams viewed grew 118% from Q3 to Q4 2008, compared with a 27% increase from Q2 to Q3
• Total streams per user dropped slightly to 17.4 in Q4 from 19.3 in Q3
• Average stream duration in Q4 2008 was slightly longer at two minutes and 48 seconds when compared to two minutes and 47 seconds in Q3

Video Downloads

• Average download per user experienced its best quarter of 2008 with an average of 6 per user vs. 4.1 per user in Q3
• Total video downloads showed an increase of 73% from Q3 to Q4 vs. 87% from Q2 to Q3

Image credit: Flickr user Ville.fi

Great Video Podcast Player

The area where Miro excels is as a video podcast client. Thanks to the Miro Guide, adding video podcasts like Democracy Now or the Onion News Network is just a two click process. The Miro Guide, which is very well designed, now features over 6000 video podcasts. It is important to remember, though, that this content is bound to your desktop, as Miro doesn't feature any support for portable players.

Too Much Competition

We really like the idea and people behind Miro, but while the promotional video calls it the "best internet video application available," others like Vuze or Boxee are currently offering a wider range of features. Maybe the comparison with Boxee is not necessarily a fair one, though, but the current trend is also clearly towards a convergence between TV and the Internet, and Miro doesn't offer a Boxee-like solution for bringing this content to your living room.

Here at ReadWriteWeb, we've remained proponents of live streaming video, claiming more than once that it is "going to be huge." If that's the case, why is Yahoo! pulling the plug on Y! Live so quickly?

One answer might be the competition. Yahoo! has seen little traction from its user base for the service during a period when services like UStream and Mogulus seem to be growing exponentially. Midway through Yahoo!'s Y! Live experiment, for example, UStream - one of the leaders in the space - boasted nearly 10 million unique viewers per month for its live video streams.

And then there's the slumbering giant that is the promise of YouTube's live streaming.

Long story short, Y! Live never really gained enough of a following to warrant the Brickhouse team continuing to spend development resources on it, according to today's announcement:

Our mission here on the Brickhouse team is to quickly develop product ideas that can add value to Yahoo! as a whole. To do this effectively we constantly evaluate our early-stage products and sometimes have to make the hard decision to move on, in order to continue exploring new territory and developing new products.

So where will the Brickhouse team be focusing their efforts now? It's a safe bet that current Brickhouse darling fire eagle - a service that helps users share their location information with others - will be garnering more attention, especially with the ever growing popularity of geo-aware devices and software entering the market, these days.

And there's always the chance that another Yahoo! experiment will get the green light. What might that be? We'll just have to stay tuned to Yahoo! Next* to see.

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.

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).

The BBC already uses Adobe's Premiere Pro and Production Premium as its desktop creative suite, so it will now be employing and end-to-end Adobe-powered solution for the creation and delivery of its online video content. I spoke to Mark Randall, the Chief Strategist for Adobe's Dynamic Media Organization, who told me that the company was excited to be partnering the world's largest content producer (the BBC creates over 14 terabytes of digital content per week), and that he thought this would be an excellent showcase of Adobe's end-to-end capabilities for digital media producers.

The choice of Adobe's Flash technology makes sense. According to Adobe, Flash is deployed on over 99% of Internet-connected computers and the latest version of the Flash player supports the H.264 codec. Further, the 1.0 release of AIR should also incorporate Flash's HD video capabilities, so should the BBC wish to bring Flash video to the offline version of their iPlayer, Adobe's runtime will support 1080p. I was told that the BBC will be evaluating the possibility of using Adobe's Media Player in the future.

iPlayer allows residents of the UK to watch the past 7 days of BBC television programming on their computers and store it for up to 30 days. For more analysis, check out the post at our network blog Last100.

Because in the past Flash Media Server has cost so much (upwards of $45,000 per license), streaming flash media has long been a very cost-prohibitive endeavor. The high price, commonly referred to as the "Flash tax," led many to seek out alternative media servers like the open source Red 5. The latest version of Flash Media Sever, which will ship in January 2008, will be come in three versions, ranging from free to $4,500 -- a price drop of 90%.

Other important developments in Flash Media Server 3: the debut of streaming HD video. FMS3 will offer H.264 video streaming, as well as support for High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) audio that can be streamed to Flash player, AIR applications, or Adobe's Media Player app. The new version of the software also includes support for advanced seeking, meaning you can skip to any part of a streamed video and start streaming again almost instantly. FMS3 also includes significant performance increases over the previous version. Internal Adobe benchmarks show that at 20% CPU usage, Flash Media Server 3 can support more than double the number of streams as version 2.0.4. At 95% CPU usage, the performance gains become even more pronounced.

Image via Adobe.

Flash Media Server 3 also brings improved content encryption in the form of an enhanced Real Time Messaging Protocol and SWF verification. One final addition of note: FMS3 will offer streaming of Flash video content to Flash Lite 3 enabled mobile phones. As we reported earlier today, over a third of the world's population is now connected using some sort of mobile device. 2008 could end up being a huge year for the expansion of the mobile web and the delivery of high quality media over mobile networks. Flash Media Server 3 supports both prerecorded and live streaming to mobile devices and comes with features that help overcome the specific constraints of streaming to mobile platforms, such as limited memory and bandwidth.

As we said earlier, probably the most significant thing Adobe has done with Flash Media Sever 3 is make it more cost effective for small media producers to stream Flash video content. "By offering the Flash Media Server 3 product line coupled with new pricing options, Adobe is reducing the barrier to entry for content owners who want to deliver streaming video or real-time communications online," said John Loiacono, senior vice president of Creative Solutions at Adobe in a press release.

More information on the additions to Flash Media Server 3 can be found at Adobe's FMS3 FAQ.

Once you have added video to your live blog, users will see it at the top right of the application, but they can also pop it out and resize it. This is quite similar to how CoverItLive already handles YouTube videos, though the option to see videos in their own windows is new. One major advantage for bloggers here is that they can handle text and video all in one application.

CoverItLive provides writers with what they call a 'Writer Console,' which is quite different from what end-users see (see screenshot). The console is the main hub of the application and allows you to add polls, images, audio files, and now, live video. It also displays reader comments on the right side of the application.

One major advantage of CoverItLive is that it allows various writers and editors to work collaboratively, so that one person can handle the writing, another the video, and yet another blogger can focus on interacting with the audience.

Adding live video turns live blogging into a more interesting and immediate experience. Thanks to the proliferation of Qik on mobile phones, we will surely see more events being covered this way. We already liked CoverItLive a lot when we first reviewed it, though it did experience some outages when a lot of people used it during the January Macworld keynote. Since then, though, the platform has become a lot more stable.

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.