Jeff Richards' Demand Insights

If you are like me, you visit and link to Wikipedia often (more than 40 million people do every month). Now, you can see who's behind the latest edits to your favorite terms. As covered in Wired and I'm sure elsewhere, a CalTech student named Virgil Griffith has written an app called Wikiscanner that pulls from publicly available data to correlate the IP address of the editor to its corporate owner - thus showing where an employee may be making favorable (or unfavorable, for that matter) revisions to entries referencing the company. Some pretty interesting reads under the Editor's Picks links on the right side of the page.

Posted by Jeff Richards at 6:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm continually amazed at how quickly content and information is viewed and shared in the web 2.0 community. I use a popular site called SlideShare to share ppt slides and other presentations from conferences, etc. and I am continually amazed at how quickly the information I put up is viewed and shared.

For instance, I put my presentation (CDN's: What's Next) from HostingCon in Chicago on SlideShare on Thursday morning. 24 hours later, the presentation had been viewed 60 times. I posted my presentation from DCIA a month ago, and it's been viewed more than 350 times. Neither presentation is funny or entertaining - they're just basic presentation content on CDN's and Peer to Peer technology. Pretty amazing.

Now, let's put this in perspective. The number 1 viewed slideshow of all time on SlideShare is ShiftHappens, which has been viewed more than 170,000 times (it's actually worth viewing - check it out). Remember, these are PowerPoint presentations...

Posted by Jeff Richards at 8:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

On Monday, I spoke at the DCIA P2P Media Summit (held on Monday before this week's Digital Hollywood conference in LA). You can view my presentation on SlideShare.

During the sessions, Eric Garland from BigChampagne presented some pretty interesting data related to hit content vs. "long tail" content. Eric presented download data on HBO's Entourage (aside: easily the best show on tv right now) from the night before on the major filesharing networks.

According to Eric, "overwhelmingly, the new content dominates," and the downloads drop off quickly, reinforcing much of what we're seeing with our VOD services (Ch4, Sky Anytime, AOL) in the US and UK. A few of the more interesting statistics:

Continue reading "Entourage, Big Champagne and the How Long is the Long Tail?" »

Posted by Jeff Richards at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you are interested in learning more about peer to peer technology - in depth - one of our team members found an excellent thesis paper by Raul Jimenez Contreras written while at the Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm. Very detailed and provides a thorough history of the major P2P platforms from the last several years - KaZaA, Bittorent, Kontiki, etc.

Posted by Jeff Richards at 1:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you haven't already registered, the upcoming AlwaysOnHollywood event has a packed agenda full of all the key players in the digital media space - see the full list of speakers on the web site. I'll be speaking at 1:45 on Thursday on "Next Generation Content Delivery Networks," along with our friends from Akamai, Limelight and Level3 - should be informative and entertaining.

Hope to see you there...

Posted by Jeff Richards at 4:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In case you missed it (on vacation, in hiding, haven't started using the Internet, etc.), last week News Corp and NBC Universal announced a joint venture to make television shows, movies and other content from the two companies available for distribution online. Initial distribution partners announced include Yahoo, Microsoft and Myspace. So...What does it all mean?

Continue reading "NewsCorp and NBCU - What Does It Mean?" »

Posted by Jeff Richards at 4:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's hard to escape the attention focused on user generated content and the explosion of video on the Internet. Little known to many observers, however, is the correlated growth in use of video on demand by Fortune 500 corporations. As featured in an article by Bobby White in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday the 13th, companies like General Motors and Coca Cola are using VeriSign's peer to peer platform to distribute high quality video internally and externally.

Continue reading "Corporations Do Video, Too" »

Posted by Jeff Richards at 7:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For those of you who attended CES last week in Vegas, I hope you had a chance to stop by the VeriSign booth and see a demo of our recently launched Intelligent CDN. Covered by Forbes and others, the demo was a hit - seeing a full feature HD video download in a couple of minutes is a far cry from the grainy images consumers are used to seeing on YouTube (that's a 50 inch plasma below, connected to a pc downloading HD video using our secure peering technology).

In addition to current customers like AOL, BBC, Sky and Channel 4, we also announced an agreement with Adobe and featured several content sites leveraging the CDN - NBX and Axiom TV

Posted by Jeff Richards at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As I've written before, and many others on the web have as well, the next generation of the web is all about you - the consumer. Most consumers started with a home page (Yahoo, etc.), then an email address (Hotmail, Gmail, etc.) and are now advancing into news / blog aggregation, etc. Today, and throughout 2007, we're going to see announcements from a broad range of companies launching services that are catered entirely to, and driven by the consumer. The next big wave around the consumer is all about content (and YouTube is just the beginning).

As an example, today we announced the launch of the UK's Channel 4's 4oD service, which lets consumers download television shows, movies and other favorite content. We'll see a lot more of this in the coming months (trust me) - it's a great time to be a consumer!

Posted by Jeff Richards at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As I logged in this morning I received an email from a friend who had watched the CMA's (Country Music Awards - yes, my wife and I are country music fans) last night. He sent me a link to a video posted on YouTube that showed Faith Hill visibly distraught after not winning Female Entertainer of the Year. While many of you may not care whether Faith wins the award, what struck me is how pervasive video is becoming in the new technology arena - in the last week I've been hit with three concepts that have the potential to change the game completely.

Continue reading "The Power of Video" »

Posted by Jeff Richards at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Mark Cuban has another interesting post today on his site BlogMaverick about the YouTube acquisition by Google and how they are dealing with issues around DRM. Involves an escrow agreement with sizeable payments to content owners.

Posted by Jeff Richards at 2:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The rise of "web 2.0" has been surprisingly fast, and is starting to add up to really big $ (see: MySpace, YouTube). When any massive technology trend takes hold, it is always interesting to watch entire industries crop up around said trend (witness the entire market that has been built around Google's AdSense). One that will be particularly interesting to watch is the trend towards paid user content in the blogosphere and product review spaces. Michael Arrington put up an interesting post on TechCrunch yesterday on several new companies (PayPerPost, ReviewMe and others) playing in this space. The issue comes down to trust - can I trust the content I'm reading?

Continue reading "Web 2.0 - Paid "Consumer" Content?" »

Posted by Jeff Richards at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)