On Monday, the Los Angeles-based company plans to introduce a flexible bandwidth pricing model to the CDN business. Most CDN companies charge fixed bandwidth prices along with other services. These are annual contracts, and can cost many hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, and large media sites spend many, many millions, depending on the volume.

Segil says most CDNs today lump the cost of bandwidth with the cost of services. As a result, even though bandwidth prices decline at a steady rate, the CDN operators don’t pass the savings to the customers, and thus make higher profits.

In EdgeCast’s pricing model, the cost for bandwidth remains flexible, decreasing for customers as the bandwidth use increases. Customers save immediately when bandwidth costs drop. “We give the bandwidth to customers at cost and plan to make the profit on the services, such as reporting tools,” Segil says. “More important, we improve their performance, give them more features, offer dedicated edge space, and more – all while reducing their costs as much as 50 percent.”

Customers like IMAX Corp., one of a dozen businesses in entertainment and media, are not complaining and have signed up for EdgeCast to deliver streaming and downloadable video to their websites. Segil says he and partners pulled together enough private capital to launch the network globally, rather than regionally, “to compete better against Akamai and Limelight.”

The company has built out a network based on Cisco routers and Dell servers, and its caching sites are located in San Jose; Los Angeles; Ashburn, Va.; Chicago; Dallas; Atlanta; Seattle; London; Frankfurt; Hong Kong; Tokyo; and Sydney, near primary Internet exchange points that support the EdgeCast network.

The service leverages bandwidth from Level 3, Telia Senora, and others. Segil says positioning the servers near primary Internet exchange points eliminates the need to have thousands of small servers on the edge of the Internet.

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Brightcove, KickApps, Move Networks, and Maven Networks all get the clear picture. Individually, the companies, who provide video services to content owners, are working to develop standards that deliver high-quality internet TV with quality-of-service levels similar to those offered by the telecommunications industry for traditional broadcast networks.

But for now — as Lifegoggles demonstrated with its comparison of 44 different embeddable vidieo players a while back — ogling at internet television content leaves quality to the eyes of the beholder.

Nick Troiano, Maven senior vice president of sales and business development, says Maven has plans to set quality guideline similar to QoS standards. This week the company said it would add Keynote Systems’ streaming test and measurement application to its platform to let publishing companies test, track and monitor performance of streaming media. The technology will give content owners insight to troubleshoot problems to ensure they provide the same quality as broadcast television to consumers, a necessary requirement as traditional media companies build an industry that distributes professional content online.

The lack of quality of service is probably one of the major problems in the internet TV industry. There are so many different types of computer systems, and not everyone runs Flash 9, says David George, KickApps executive vice president of business development and client services. Just because people are developing the content based on standards that offer the best quality, it doesn’t mean people they have the functionality on their machines to support the service, so internet TV companies need to rely on the back-end infrastructure, servers and monitoring tools to provide the best support they can.

You and I, as the consumers, become the winner in the long run.

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And this business is going to get bigger. iSuppli, a market research firm, projects that professionally produced video will will bring in nearly $5.9 billion in revenues in 2011, up from $423 million in 2006.

At present 3- to 10-minute videos are popular because they can be downloaded quickly over today’s broadband networks, running at typically 3 megabits per second in the U.S., and 8 megabits in other parts of the world. As speeds soar past 20 megabits per second, longer form videos could be downloaded quickly. Longer videos would mean more advertising opportunities.

The professionally produced video business, including professionally produced and distributed advertising-supported news, sports and entertainment, will account for 79.3 billion streams worldwide by 2011 up from 3.7 billion streams in 2006, iSuppli projects.

Professionally produced Internet TV also has an opportunity to find distribution on new IPTV networks, especially the ones being built by telephone companies. Given the startup activity in the U.S., the report indicates that a substantial portion of Internet TV content will originate in North America and Western Europe

The online video boom is already igniting investment in the back-end and infrastructure companies, especially ones that lower the cost of distribution. Expect many more startups to emerge in the coming year, both on the production and distribution sides.

Nearly $1 billion in venture financing was invested in about 150 video-related started between 2002 and 2006, according to iSuppli. Of that more than $250 million came in the first half of 2006.

Ask Dow Jones VentureOne, which specializes in the finance sector, and they’ll paint a slightly different scenario. Web-video related startups between 2002 and 2006 raised $325 million in venture capital funding. Of that, $98 million, or 30 percent, came in during first half of 2006. And during the first six months in 2007, startups in the space have already raised $111.5 million more.

With help from Om Malik and Liz Gannes.

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The site features three-minute detailed videos from 30 car manufacturers like Acura, BMW, Ford, and Infiniti. And after viewing some of the videos for a few 2007 cars, such as the $18,000 Honda Accord and the $300,000 Rolls Royce Phantom, it’s easy to understand why Time.com named DriverTV one of 50 Best Websites of 2007

.

DriverTV also encourages you to download the car videos onto your Apple iPod or Sony PSP take them into the dealership to show the salesperson the exact car you want. The site launched in 2005 as a video-on-demand cable network and now airs in 23 million digital cable households and 500,000 hotel rooms in 46 of the top 50 markets through Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox, Charter, Insight and The Hotel Network.

Not to be outdone, DaimlerChrysler AG, Mercedes-Benz cars manufacturer, launched the Internet video channel Mercedes-Benz TV earlier this week. In high-definition video, the site highlights the latest products and technologies. Each of the five channels loop-through topics on safety, engines, history, and lifestyle.

For example, one video on Mercedes-Benz TV highlights the making of the C-Class, while others detail reasons for reducing CO2 admissions, and designing in the new belt safety system. For antique car buffs, Mercedes-Benz TV offers a ride down memory lane, featuring Mercedes automobiles manufactured between 1927 and 1957.

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New York-based WeShow aggregates content from more than 20 video hosting sites, relying on 45 of its 70 employees to scour major video sites to rate, filter, organize and place the best into one of 200 channels. Looking for uniqueness, quality of image and sound, the staff reviews thousands of videos everyday, analyzing content at niche sites and blogs to identify interesting themes for the site.

WeShow debuted in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Brazil with Marcos Wettreich at the helm as CEO. Financial backing comes from MTV’s founder Bob Pittman and Harvard Business School vice-dean and professor of entrepreneurship Bill Sahlman. The investment sum was not disclosed by the company, but TechCrunch reported between $5 million and $7 million.

Similar to the Daily Tube, which launched Monday with an editorial staff of about 25 people that search the Web for the best clips, WeShow wants to establish itself as an authority for video content. Besides the Daily Tube, curated video sites include Web TV Hub, Network2, the Daily Reel, and Tilzy.tv.

WeShow adds to the mix a monthly online video awards, and a daily TV-formatted program (embedded above) presented by VJs who call out the most relevant clips of the moment.

Read about other approaches in our “Where to Find Good Video” series: Divvio, Vidmeter, Megite and Tailrank, Digg, and StumbleVideo.

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Entrepreneur Hart Cunningham, 30, plans to do exactly that. The Claremont Colleges MBA self-funded his startup PerfSpot with $2 million earned from other ventures like computer tech-support service Juvio and marketing and online banner-ad firm Alansis, which supports companies like Bank of America and Wells Fargo.

Cunningham, who launched social networking site PerfSpot in March 2007, plans to add a video service by September that lets you see inside your favorite bars and nightclubs. Meanwhile, a new feature introduced Monday on PerfSpot allows members to upload home videos to the site. Privacy features control who can view the videos.

PerfSpot boasts 3 million users and averages 40,000 new signups daily. The online video service is an extension of PerfNights, a section of the site where a posse of 380 paparazzi candidly document nighttime sprees and upload still photos to the site for all to view. Currently, photographers snap pictures and hand the subject a card instructing where to view the photo online. About 400,000 cards are distributed in the U.S. monthly, the majority in New York; San Diego, Calif.; Scottsdale, Ariz.; and South Beach, Fla.

Uploading video to PerfNights gives prospective patrons a glimpse into the nightlife at clubs, and clubs a chance to attract more people. But streaming video in real-time from the location seems even better because it would give residents of Grand Forks, North Dakota, planning to take a vacation in sunny, San Diego, Calif., a chance to checkout some venues before making the trip. (But then again, I can think of at least three reasons why you wouldn’t want a video camera in a bar. Could you?)

Meeting the increase in demand for video on his site, Cunningham plans to contract another 4,620 photographers and videographers worldwide by the end of 2007 to grow the business internationally. It’s not clear whether the site will require paparazzi to stream videos live or have some amount of time to upload and post content to the site. “I’m still working out the details,” he said.

Maybe so, but there’s already buy-in from big-name brands looking to get their products in front of the 18-to-30-something crowd and on the back of the cards distributed each time a photographer takes a picture. Coca-Cola, Fox and Sony have webpages on PerfSpot to promote products. And Cunningham said discussions are underway with Bud Light, Corona, and Red Bull to possibly sponsor upcoming video events.

Not all Cunningham’s ventures are for profit. The entrepreneur also wrote a self-help book titled Maximizing Me: 30 lessons on the journey to self-empowerment, and donated 70,000 books to 400 homeless shelters across the county to help the homeless get back on their feet and into society.

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