All TV (except sports) is moving to on-demand, right? You can’t successfully have hundreds of thousands of people accessing the same online video at the same time, right? You can’t hold an interactive video event online that’s open to the public, right?

Oprah says otherwise. That’s right, Oprah.

Very quietly Oprah’s been hosting an online, interactive class called A New Earth on Oprah.com for the last three weeks. What makes the initiative remarkable is that she’s using Skype video to do it. Not only can online visitors watch Oprah talk with guest/co-host Eckhart Tolle every Monday at 9:00 ET, they can also ask questions in a video split screen. (see above) Limelight is the content delivery network (CDN) partner for the series and Move Networks is handling the video player and encoding. The scale of the experiment is unprecedented.

Here are a few stats, including some otherwise-unpublished figures (that’s right, exclusive from ZNF…):

• More than 180k viewers have tuned in for the full 90 minutes of the Oprah series for three weeks running
• 500k people logged in the first week… and the system crashed. But this was a coding error only, remedied since, not a bandwidth or infrastructure problem. The 500k number breaks the previous Live Earth record of roughly 240k simultaneous streams.
• The Oprah folks are aiming for a million simultaneous streams. Just wait till they really turn on the Oprah marketing machine.

It’s probably under the radar for most folks, but analyst Cynthia Brumfield is hosting a conference in DC today called the Internet Video Policy Symposium. It’s closed to press and filled with academics, government advisers, economists and former FCC officials. Check out the conference agenda. One of my favorite panels listed: Video is a Bandwidth Hog: Should Broadband Policies Pursue More Capacity?

I’ll be in sessions at the symposium all day, so if you happen to be attending, drop over and say hi.

If you’re away from the TV (say, at work) and still jonesing for a little March Madness, you can get highlights from the tournament teams over at Sports Illustrated’s FilmRoom (Duke, above). Once again the app is powered by Gotuit, and it offers a convenient interface for selecting just the teams you want to see - by team name, seeding, conference, or status in the tournament (to be updated throughout the games). You can also embed clips in your own site.

Unfortunately the March Madness version of FilmRoom doesn’t show off some of Gotuit’s best functionality… Last year’s NFL Draft version of FilmRoom, for example, let users access individual player highlight reels and search within videos for specific plays. I’d like to be able to find blocks, dunks, steals and game-winning shots. Also, at least for now, there isn’t video on every March Madness team. American tops the team list alphabetically, but there’s no video available yet. My brother stormed the court at AU’s Patriot Conference tournament win. Where’s SI’s AU love? Hopefully there will be video up soon.

The stars have clearly aligned for me with Slacker. Yesterday I spoke with Jonathan Sasse at the company for an update on Slacker happenings. During which conversation I discovered that Slacker is actually now available on my Squeezebox now. And finally, today my Slacker portable player arrived in the mail. Hooray!

I’ll save some of the details from my conversation with Jonathan for another post, except to say that Slacker will start shipping its hardware to retail chains in the next couple of weeks. No word yet on which stores or exact timing, but it sounds like we could see players on shelves by summer.

As for my own Slacker player, I’ll work on a full review for ZNF as soon as possible. I unboxed today and will start playing tonight.

In the meantime, I’m thoroughly enjoying Slacker on my Squeezebox. I signed in to my Slacker account on the SqueezeNetwork and my custom stations were instantly available on my living-room stereo. CNET’s John Falcone also commented on the ease of managing Internet radio accounts via the Squeezebox in his glowing review of the Squeezebox Duet. While he doesn’t go into detail on each of the radio services, I can attest to the fact that managing both Slacker and Pandora is remarkably straightforward.

One other note: My living-room stereo for the moment consists of a SurroundXi portable speaker system plugged into the Squeezebox. The SurroundXi is a review unit designed to work primarily with iPods, but I’m finding it quite suitable for my needs. It’s also the perfect size right now given that we’ve moved all of our furniture to prepare for the wood flooring we’re having installed tomorrow. I can carry my entire stereo system (Squeezebox plus SurroundXi) in one trip up to the bedroom when the contractors arrive.

Ericsson is predicting the end of Wi-Fi hotspots in favor of mobile broadband. Sounds great. I love it. But are Ericsson and the tech elite unaware of how expensive mobile broadband is for the average Joe? I’m dying for always-on mobile connectivity, but until service plans drop below $60 per month (or until we get rid of service plans all together) I’ll stick with my free local hot spot at the Bear Rock Cafe.

We have multiple iPods in my house (like Dave) and have registered those iPods to multiple computers over time. So when I got my iPod Shuffle last year, I thought I’d make life easy by setting up a folder in iTunes on our one desktop computer acting as a home media server. I can add and remove songs from that one folder, sync my Shuffle, and voila! I have a brand new workout mix.

Unfortunately yesterday I couldn’t find my Shuffle before my run on the treadmill, so I grabbed my old iPod Mini. The Mini still works great, but it had none of my new favorite workout tunes. I knew I could sync the Mini to the folder I’d dedicated to the Shuffle to grab my newer stuff, but that would mean erasing all of the existing music on the Mini. Worse, the computer that was originally registered to the Mini - holding all of my purchased iTunes music and uploaded CDs - is long gone. Essentially my Mini has been carrying music with no back-up.

In the end, I decided most of my purchased iTunes music had likely been added to our household music library on the dedicated media server computer. There was a decent chance that some of my uploaded CDs weren’t in the library, but if necessary, I still had those CDs packed away somewhere and could find and re-upload them. (Not that that will ever happen…)

Bottom line: I gave up worrying about losing the music on my Mini and synced it to the music I had set aside for my Shuffle. (more…)

AT&T’s John Stankey presented to investors earlier this week - among the things he talked about are upgrades coming this year to the U-verse IPTV service. New features seem to roughly track with what Dave reported last June. Whole-home DVR is scheduled for the second half of 2008, though Stankey mentioned “mid-year” so the guess is it’ll roll out in Q3. Looks like additional streams are coming too - two HD and two SD. And apparently AT&T will be introducing pair bonding before the end of the year. Pair bonding should extend the reach of the operator’s DSL network and increase speeds for households within the 3,000-foot range of AT&T’s copper loop.