After spending an entire week reading 6-8 hours a day, reviewing numerous CDN and media player options, I’m burnt out.  I feel like I deserve a treat, so tonight I’ll be going to Muchos (over in Manhattan Beach).

Now this might sound crazy, especially to people of California, but Muchos hands down has the best Mexican food I’ve ever had.  It’s “premium” Latin cuisine. I’m not even sure i’ve ever seen the same concept anywhere else.  Now for some people it’s hit or miss.  I’ve heard of a couple people getting food not so hot or whatever, but I’m a man of routine and thus my food is always great.  If you get the fajitas meal with southern mac/cheese and cream corn (YES, cream corn, even if you don’t think you’ll like it),  I guarantee you’ll be in heaven.
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I’ve spent the entire day reading about Content Delivery Networks (CDN) and I’m burnt out.  Every broadband video company needs a CDN solution; after all, that’s how the data is propagated through the internet.  We’ve been considering developing our own CDN solution, but there are a few issues with this approach.  It is the CDN that ensures video is delivered in a timely manner. It is also the CDN that is responsible for website analytics, but most importantly the CDN handles Digital Media Rights (DRM).   While I do believe that we could create a functional delivery mechanism to create our unique video experience, and we could utilize a 3^rd party service for analytics, it’s the DRM portion that concerns me.  To keep our content competitive and fresh, we’re going to need to form relationships with major network content distributors, and I bet money that they will be less than interested in an unproved DRM methodology.  If we can’t protect our partner’s content, then they won’t want to be a partner at all.  This is why I’ve decided it is best that we look for proven services to deliver our content.   As long as an outsourced CDN doesn’t interfere with website functionality as we envision it, I think it’s the best way to go.

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Over the past week, we met with a number of broadband video website teams, and what we learned was that there are a collection of streaming video solutions available on the market that many of today’s websites use.  At this point, I can say with confidence that our team has a complete understanding of what it’s going to take to develop the next level of online media.  We have devised a comprehensive set of wireframes and technology plots to guide our efforts, and all that’s left to do is research which services we are going to use with regards to video streaming, video storage, hosting etc.  While Motown Initiative doesn’t plan to use all “out-of-box solutions”, we do plan to minimize our development work load by searching out existing technologies that we can revise into custom solutions that work for our purposes.  Over the next week, the team will be looking near and far for the best services available for the broadband video application.

Ultimately, I believe we will have three partners, and each will address a different task. Advertisement support (Tremor Media), media player/delivery and hosting needs will all be done through partnerships.  By the end of August we plan to have secured the needed services to push the Initiative forward.  Stay tuned.