On the heals of Limelight Network’s acquisition of Delve Network which I wrote about last week, Brightcove, one of the leading Online Video Platforms (OVP) in the world, today announced that it is ditching Limelight in favor of Akamai, the world’s largest Content Delivery Network (CDN). The agreement between the companies is presented as a wide-ranging alliance to drive quality, performance, and innovation in the online video industry and represents an end-to-end offer that makes high-quality video publishing and distribution easily available for businesses and organizations of all sizes. The two companies have a combined customer base that includes the leading media, e-commerce, and enterprise companies, as well as small businesses around the globe.  The integrated solution is designed to give customers a fast, seamless path to leverage the proven advantages of Akamai's HD Network and Brightcove's feature-rich online video platform to deliver high quality, adaptive bit rate video across Flash and iOS devices. Going forward, Brightcove will provide the Akamai HD Network as a bundled component of the Brightcove online video platform service. The deal is sure to be a blow to Limelight but hardly a surprising one after its acquisition of Delve Networks last week. Meanwhile, the deal represents a great win for Akamai as Brightcove brings with it a bunch of media customers as well as small and medium sized enterprise customers from around the world. As this deal brings together a leading OVP with a leading CDN it represents the highest profile deal to date in our opinion and give further impetus to the convergence trend between the CDN industry and the OVP industry that we have been predicting for some time. Martin Olausson Client reading: Online Video Platforms: Battling for Supremacy in a Fiercely Competitive Market

Or at least, boxes that are provided, ie "managed" by traditional TV companies like cable, satellite and IPTV service providers. The rumours are rife that Google is planning an Android for the TV space, and should be no surprise since Vincent Dureau joined the company a couple of years ago, having been CTO at OpenTV, the interactive TV market leader. He isn't there to improve search, that's for sure... What commentators such as Techcrunch are missing is the critical distinction between a TV service delivered, managed and controlled by a set-top box as part of a vertical platform, and TV that is available through open systems. I'm sure Google can come up with plenty of cool interactive TV apps, but that is neither here nor there if the vertical service provider doesn't see them as a profit generator for themselves, not Google. Google's models, for the moment, depend on open technology frameworks, not getting into bed with vertical service providers. So the company should focus its TV efforts on pairing up with emerging web TV players like Akamai and Move Networks, which are forging a path towards Round the Back delivery of HDTV over the internet. It should also work with manufacturers of "Digital media devices" as its route the end user, ie TV plug-ins that get the web video straight to the big screen where people want to see it. What web TV lacks right now is a sound business model, and that may be where Google's advertising savvy comes in rather handy. Client Reading: Digital Disruption: Imminent and Long Term Threats to the Audiovisual Industry Online HD: Disney's ABC Throws Down Gauntlet To Competitors, and Access Providers

as we reported some time ago... Akamai of course is referring to its own approach of managed edge delivery networks. We, on the other hand, have seen "good enough" HD over the open web. The key question, so far unanswered, for all the different approaches is if they can scale to supporting potentially millions of simultaneous users. Over The Top or Round The Back? Exploring The Emerging Multi-Billion Web Video Landscape, Revenue Outlook and Adoption Scenarios Attend Strategy Analytics' Analyst Forum at IBC. Registration is Free.