Our partner Imavex is working closely this week with The Spirit International to stream live coverage of the biennial amateur golf tournament. What’s new this year? The live stream is available to viewers not just on computers and mobile devices, but also on the living room screen with a connected Roku box. Limelight powers the delivery, so we thought we’d ask Imavex a few questions about this week’s event.

Q&A
What is the Spirit golf event and what kind of audience does it attract?
The Spirit International Amateur Golf Championship is a world class golf event. It features the world’s best amateur men and amateur women golfers as they represent their respective country in team and individual competitions. The 80 participants enjoy an Olympic like experience from the Opening/Closing Ceremonies, international village and competing for gold medals.The Spirit International Golf Association and Texas Golf Association invite 20 countries from six continents to participate. Established in 2001, The Spirit is a biennial event that alternates tournament years with the World Amateur Team Championships.

The Spirit International attracts a golf audience as well as an International Audience. With over 20 countries represented in the event, it’s a worldwide event. It also attracts individuals that enjoy watching competitive golf, whether it’s professional, amateur, International or National.

When did Spirit start streaming the annual tournament live on the Internet, and how is this year different from previous ones?
The Spirit International began streaming the live event in 2009. The differences in 2011 and 2009 are multiple. The first difference is the marketing efforts around the Live Event. The Spirit International is doing an online SEM (pay-per-click marketing) campaign, display ads that are running on www.pga.com & www.pgatour.com, and a full social media campaign with a live blog, Facebook and Twitter updates. With regards to delivering the webcast, there are more platforms being used this year than in the past. The LIVE stream is being pushed to mobile devices, notebooks, and Roku.

Offering the event via a Roku channel is a pretty big deal. What added challenges does that bring?
Educating the end user that it’s available. Roku is a phenomenal product and covers a large audience, but educating our market is a big piece and why we think Limelight Networks and Social Media can assist us in growing the brand of The Spirit International.

Are you starting to see more interest from your customers in reaching audiences over connected TVs and streaming devices like the Roku?
Yes! It gives us the ability to deliver the webcast, interviews, highlights and so much more to our target market in their living rooms. We have not been able to offer that in the past, which in turn grows the audience of The Spirit International. Especially with an International audience, it gives us more opportunity to grow our market outside of the United States of America.

What about video in general? Do you see companies using online video more in their marketing efforts?
Video is more engaging to the end user than any other type of content product available to us. It’s the only way for our audience to truly engage with our event and continue to grow our event. The Spirit International goes to great links to increase our video traffic and continually find new ways to deliver our product. One way that we’ve been able to use video this year is through the players. Leading up to the event, we sent every player a flip video camera and asked them to make some videos about their golf accomplishments, information about them, and anything they feel entertaining. The response was great and has given us the ability to showcase these players as they are in real life. Essentially, it gives more personality to the players and gives us more content to push through the social media channels leading up to the event to assist in driving traffic to the tournament and LIVE webcast. The video program was a success and we are anticipating a significant increase in LIVE stream traffic from 2009.

All eyes are on Apple today with expectations of a new iPhone announcement. But perhaps nowhere was the shiny gadget maker’s reach and impact felt more palpably than it was last month with Adobe’s launch of Flash Media Server 4.5. You only have to read the second line of the Adobe press release: “With Flash Media Server 4.5, media publishers can extend their already broad mobile reach via Flash-enabled devices, with the new ability to deliver video content to Apple’s iPad and iPhone devices…”

Flash isn’t going away, particularly given today’s limitations around HTML5, but it is being adapted for iOS audiences. With another iPhone on the way, it’s a good to have options.

You know those times when closed captioning comes in handy? It’s essential for hearing-impaired audiences, good for foreign language translation, and useful in environments where notching the volume up high just isn’t the most practical or polite course of action. For all of these situations, we’ve added a new closed captioning feature to the Limelight Video Platform. LVP users can upload a caption file, and captions will automatically be added to the associated video along with a list of language options. Controls in the Player Builder menu let video publishers adjust default settings or change the appearance or location of captions for viewers.

You can find details on creating caption files and troubleshooting tips over on the LVP blog. For further help, check out caption file services from 3PlayMedia, SubPLY, and dotSub.

MediaPost is reporting today on a new study by Omnicom suggesting that video streaming has become exceedingly common in the US. According to the study, more than half of Americans now regularly stream video, and the same can be said for more than 80 percent of US Internet users. It’s not clear how Omnicom defines “regularly,” but the study is still telling. It presents another data point in the clear trend of online video’s growth.

What’s also interesting about the Omnicom report is that it found nearly three quarters of respondents watch live video on the web. Twenty seven percent watch time-shifted video, but the bulk of viewers are apparently catching video “outside of regularly scheduled programming times.” Among the most popular content types are weather and news.

It’s easy to forget how quickly the Internet world changes. Take a look at this interactive graphic based on data from the Pew Research Center in 2006. A few notable data points:

# of adults who paid to access or download digital content online – 24 million
# of adults who downloaded video files – 28 million
# of adults who used an online social or professional networking site – 23 million

Limelight Networks announced today that the Middle East Broadcasting Company is using our integrated solutions for online video publishing, site acceleration and online media delivery. MBC is the largest broadcasting group in the Middle East, and its two websites, Shahid.net and AlArabiya.net, provide on-demand content and live streaming video from the network’s satellite TV station to online viewers around the world.

While it’s always good to announce a new customer, we’re also showcasing MBC because of the returns the media conglomerate is seeing from the integrated use of our video services. Specifically, by deploying the Limelight Video Platform combined with our media delivery technology, MBC is benefiting from faster video ingest and large file transfers. More importantly, MBC is able to deliver a better viewing experience to its online customers through our ability to make near-real-time adjustments during the video delivery process. Even as network conditions change from moment to moment, we are helping MBC navigate the web so users get the best possible video playback from the company’s live and on-demand streams.

From the press release, here is MBC’s list of requirements that Limelight Networks had to meet for video publishing and content delivery:

• Guaranteed high quality video
• Video Storage and content delivery facilities for various websites
• Scalability for future requirements, including specific demands such as SmartPhones, STB or Connected TV sets support
• Pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll advertising
• Syndication to YouTube
• Video Analytics
• Ease of video publishing workflow
• Extensive APIs for content management

Most video streams delivered by the Apple HLS streaming protocol are accessed via high-speed Internet connections – not over lower-speed broadband networks. What does that mean? In short, consumers appear to be using Wi-Fi most often to get their video fix on Apple iPads, iPhones, and iPods.

We’ve tracked and analyzed billions of media requests from iOS devices over the last twelve months, and we’ve discovered that the majority of HLS stream requests are being made at the two highest available bit rates. That seems to match up with another data point heralded today by IDG analyst Bob O’Donnell. According to O’Donnell’s report to Computerworld, sales of 3G tablets have been very slow, with consumers preferring their Wi-Fi brethren. Of course, Internet video is also a much more enjoyable experience when you can watch it over a high-speed connection, so 3G tablets aside, it’s perhaps not surprising that consumers are saving up their video watching for those times when Wi-Fi is available.

If you look at the numbers (above), you can also see a significant jump in HLS requests overall in March of this year – right after the launch of the Verizon iPhone, and about the time Apple brought the iPad 2 to market.

Our own Jonathan Cobb, CTO for the Limelight Mobility and Monetization group, recently participated in an interview with John Ebbert over at AdExchanger.com. He discussed the new REACH Interactive product, challenges that publishers face in the mobile video space, and the growing publisher ecosystem. What also surfaced in the interview were three specific trends in mobile video advertising. Here’s what Jonathan sees happening in the industry today, and what’s just over the horizon.

1. Publishers are looking for more control.

Initially, online video publishers were content to let ad networks do most of the monetization work. Now, however, they’re looking to control more of the action. Increasingly publishers are taking a hybrid approach, combining ad network relationships with direct ad sales that let them capture premium rates on their most valuable inventory.

2. There will soon be a glut of mobile video inventory.

As consumers get used to the idea of watching video on their mobile phones, publishers will increase their mobile distribution, and that will raise the amount of available ad inventory. However, even though there will soon be an oversupply, most of the new inventory will not be associated with premium content. Premium mobile video content will still be relatively limited and will command higher rates.

3. Standardization in metrics

Mobile ad measurement is evolving, and there’s an increasing push to standardize metrics. The more advertisers come to rely on the mobile channel, the faster we’ll start to see consensus around how to define and measure mobile audiences.

Netflix already reportedly accounts for more than 20% of Internet traffic during peak times in the US. And if it starts to acquire significant film rights in the pay-TV window, the streaming giant could add to that number at an unexpectedly rapid rate. Yesterday, Netflix announced a deal with the new production company Open Road Films for early streaming rights to its first flick, Killer Elite. Open Road may be new, but it was born as a joint effort by veterans of the movie industry, Regal Entertainment Group and AMC Entertainment. And Killer Elite? It stars Robert DeNiro and Clive Owen, among others. Netflix will be able to stream the film during the window when it would usually only be open to VOD and DVD release. Instead of your On Demand screen, you’ll have to fire up the Roku to see DeNiro in action.

Between gaining access to early release windows like this one, and efforts to go after original content, Netflix is pitching some serious fast balls at traditional video distribution models. Good thing it’s got the network muscle to make those fast balls possible.

Today we are introducing Limelight REACH Interactive, a new service for in-app advertising that takes the best of our mobile video solutions and combines it with our award-winning interactive advertising technology. REACH Interactive lets publishers insert in-stream video ads into their mobile applications in a way that engages consumers, but doesn’t take away from the primary app experience. It does this by making pre-roll and post-roll ads “tappable,” allowing users to open new microsite landing pages, all without ever leaving the app. In other words, consumers can learn more about the ads they’re viewing (a benefit to advertisers), while at the same time publishers stay connected to their audiences within the app domain.

Other benefits of REACH Interactive include:

• Easy integration with iOS and Android devices
• Enhanced analytics, including data on video start and end times, playback duration, user interactions, buffering events, and more
• The ability to pause video playback for ad interaction
• The ability to make ads unskippable

You can see a demo of REACH Interactive here. The new product launch also comes with a re-branding of our entire line-up of Limelight Networks mobile solutions. All mobile solutions now fall under the REACH umbrella, which includes REACH Video (formerly REACH), REACH Ads (formerly ADS), and the new REACH Interactive.