Today is the start of a new phase for the team at Delve Networks.  We have been acquired by Limelight Networks (read press release).  Our entire team, including myself, will be joining Limelight Networks where we will become the Video Platform Solutions business unit.

Last Thursday, Limelight’s CEO, Jeff Lunsford, flew up to our Seattle headquarters (see flight videos) to celebrate with members of the Delve team (see photo below); it was a fantastic experience and we are all fired up. Limelight’s team culture, vision, and philosophy are very similar to our own and we feel this is a great fit. They value customer relationships first, think at ‘Internet scale,’ and do a great job of making the very complex seem easy.

Even though we are now part of Limelight, all of the things that matter to you will stay the same. We’ll still deliver a powerful, yet easy to use, online video platform with content management, analytics, monetization, player customization, and rich APIs. We’ll continue to provide the same level of support we’ve always delivered. And we’ll still work with CDN partners beyond Limelight Networks for content delivery in keeping with our belief that open ecosystems are important.

What’s new is that we’ll now have access to more resources. As Delve, we built an award wining product and signed up over 120+ customers, such as, Cleveland Clinic, American Hospital Association, ESPN, CDW, Standard & Poor’s, Hallmark, Lego, World Vision, and several professional sports organizations (see customer showcase). We’ve manage to grow our business with far less resources than many of our competitors, which is a testament to our team’s talent, commitment and determination.

Now that we’re joining Limelight we can accelerate our growth, better service larger customers, and enjoy the benefits of Limelight’s global sales organization. Limelight has an unparalleled presence around the world and the capacity to transport huge amounts of content over its intelligent delivery platform. Adding Limelight’s global infrastructure to Delve’s video platform offering increases our ability to scale and innovate for our customers.

To all of our customers, employees, investors, and partners, thank you for helping us succeed in an industry that has grown rapidly in recent years. We’re very excited about the opportunities for innovation ahead, and look forward to doing great things as part of Limelight Networks.

Onwards and Upwards!!

Sincerely,
Alexander Castro
Vice President & General Manager, Video Platform Solutions
Limelight Networks

Over the last few years, the consumption of video on the web has exploded. Unfortunately, there are no free and open standards for video. The use of H.264 has gained popularity and has become widely used, but H.264 requires users of this standard pay a licensing fee to the MPEG-LA, a consortium of companies that control the patents for technologies associated with H.264.

The MPEG-LA has so far not aggressively pursued licensing fees for publishers and content owners using H.264, but there exists the possibility that they will do so in the future. The potentially significant added expense associated with H.264 could negatively impact the health of the video ecosystem on the Internet.

Until today, there was no free and open alternative to H.264 that enjoyed broad support by industry leaders. However, that has changed with the introduction of WebM, in addition to Delve Networks, leaders like Adobe, Google, Mozilla, YouTube, Opera, and many others have thrown their support behind WebM.

What is included in WebM?

• VP8 Video Codec – This is a high quality codec developed by On2, a leader in video codec technology, and acquired by Google. The VP8 codec has been made available under a royalty-free license.
• Vorbis – This is an existing open source and widely accepted audio codec.
• A container format that is optimized for a web-based playback experience, e.g., quick start-times, seeking into video.

What are the benefits of WebM?

• Free & Open – Publishers, content owners, technology vendors, advertisers, can invest in the encoding of their content into the WebM standard without fear of vendor lock-in or threat of excessive licensing fees that would harm their business.

• Superior Video Playback – WebM has been developed with web playback in mind, which results in a codec and container format optimized for fast start-times, seeking within video, support for sub-titles and video transcription.

• Low CPU Impact - WebM video can be decoded for playback on any device, e.g., mobile phones, iPads, laptops, without requiring a lot of CPU cycles. This ensures a smooth playback on devices that lack powerful CPUs and reduces the impact on battery life.

It is still early and H.264 will remain prevalent and important for our customers. However, we believe that WebM is an important step forward for the industry and that is why we’ve chosen to support it as an open and free video standard for the web.

Alexander Castro, Founder & CEO

Update: Alex offers more of this thoughts on WebM in an interview with Brier Dudley

Here at Delve, we’re passionate about entrepreneurship, that’s why when I was asked to speak atStartupDay 2009 I jumped at the chance.  StartupDay 2009 is a unique conference because it focuses on ‘pre-entrepreneurs’ which are folks who want to start or join a startup but haven’t already done so. The goal is to take out some of the mystery involved and give folks who want to be entrepreneurs a big dose of encouragement and a kick in the pants.

I’m excited to be part of a great lineup of startup CEOs like Rich Barton (CEO of Zillow), Kelly Smith (CEO of Inkd and Partner at Curious Office), Matt Hulett (forner CEO of Mpire and Chief Revenue Officer at Real Games), and Marcelo Calbucci (Founder of Seattle 2.0), and many more.

So if you are interested in joing a startup or creating a startup of your own, pleae join us – http://www.startupday.com/.

I think the author has a point, Google has struggled to turn YouTube into a business. But I think YouTube has reached it’s peak not just because of economic issues (Google can afford some product welfare), but video will naturally fragement leaving YouTube as one of many sources of video. I’m not predicting that YouTube will vanish, but I think YouTube is our generation’s AOL. It is a walled garden, and I strongly doubt that all of mankind’s video will be hosted on a single site for the rest of mankind’s existence.

YouTube’s biggest problem may be its own tremendous success. Video is increasingly becoming a “normal” part of the Internet. We don’t have a single website will all the images in the world. Millions of websites all over the world use images and photos today. In the future, websites of all types and sizes will utilize video. Video consumption will fragment much like text-based web content, online travel, e-commerce, etc., before it. The web is by its very nature decentralized, and YouTube, unlike it’s parent company’s search engine which drives traffic to destinations, is fighting against this very nature. AOL tried this and it failed, although it is still a very large web presence. YouTube won’t go away, but it won’t own the world’s video either.

These are certainly impressive numbers, but ComScore’s metrics don’t tell the whole story. The report covers internet video sites. What it doesn’t cover are views on sites that ComScore doesn’t consider to be “internet video sites.” As video becomes more “common” on the web it will show up on sites that aren’t considered video sites. We don’t think of the web as a bunch “internet text sites” do we? We think of entertainment sites, e-commerce sites, travel sites, etc. Video will be no different.

For example, I just recently I came across a site called TVtrip, which provides video guides for hotels around the world. I continue to be impressed by all the creative ways companies and people are using video across the Internet. One of our customers, 1800Flowers, has begun producing high quality video for their increasingly popular site – Celebration.com. If you are looking for ideas for a bridal shower, birthday party, BBQ party, etc., then check it.

More and more companies are realizing that online video can be an asset for their organization. It’s not just about YouTube and Hulu anymore.

We invite you to experience President Obama’s inaugural speech using our search inside technology. To do this, type what you’re looking for into the player searchbar above. A heatmap will show you where information related to your topic appears in the speech. You can move your mouse over the heatmap to see the matches. Click to jump to that place in the speech.

The Heat Map

Red = Highly Relevant
Yellow = Relevant
Green = Somewhat Relevant

Suggested search terms:

• America
• Constitution
• Iraq

At CES, Disney’s Anne Sweeney, revealed that ABC.com has delivered 500m episodes and 1 billion ads. She also mentioned that the company sold “tens of millions” of episodes via Apple’s iTunes. Not too long ago, companies like Disney were hesitant to make the leap online due to piracy concerns, a very valid concern. Now, they are delivering significant significant volumes of video across multiple platforms. Very impressive.

With the rash of broadband enabled TV announcements made at this year’s CES, I not only expect this trend to continue but to accelerate.

Alex Castro
CEO
Delve Networks