The first Open Video Conference—put on by Kaltura, Yale Internet Society Project, and Participatory Culture Foundation in partership with Mozilla, Red Hat, Creative Commons, Level 3, and Akamai—is going on now and through the weekend in New York. Some great speakers and, in addition to addressing technology and business models, some great insights on the social, cultural, and political implications of video and social media.

Check out the video here.

Today the Broadband Forum announced its latest broadband and IPTV statistics, with data prepared by Point Topic. No real surprises—global broadband grew by 16.6 million subscribers in 1Q 2009, while IPTV subscription worldwide is now nearing 24 million, with most of the growth in Eastern Europe and North America. The IPTV growth in Eastern Europe is down to significant pushes in Poland, Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Russia. Clearly, while OTT video is giving IPTV a run for its money, it’s still a very competitive space

Here’s the data:

Regional broadband growth chart

Top 10 broadband countries

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According to this Reuters story, German public broadcaster ZDF will “drastically reduce” online programming because commercial television channels and newspapers are accusing them of “unfair competition.” The twisted logic being that, since public broadcasters don’t have to worry about cannibalizing profits by putting television content online, they can, um, put more television content online.

ZDF director Markus Schachter told Reuters that the broadcaster will cut back its online programming by a whopping 70%, and reduce the time that catch-up programming is streamed  on both the ZDF site and sister channel ARD site. Video reports on Bundesliga games, for instance, will only be available for one day. The sites also plan to cut back on their text offerings.

In the same story, though, Schachter says the sites will increase their video offerings, but didn’t say how they’d do that while at the same time reducing catch-up programming. Should be interesting to watch; what’s going to be even more interesting will be whether or not ZDF/ARD’s moves make any difference in Germany’s dwindling newspaper revenues.

All of the videos from last month’s Streaming Media East and Content Delivery Summit event are now online. Of particular note is Dan Rayburn’s presentation, “CDN Market Size and Pricing Trends.” Most analysts and research reports that cover the CDN space don’t share their research methods, nor do they really share detailed numbers and pricing information. In the video below, Rayburn does, and it’s worth watching.

Our thanks to Quality Tech’s media services division who captured, edited and encoded all of the videos and to Brightcove for making their video platform available to StreamingMedia.com.