Times just got tougher for the small web sites that don’t have their own servers and players for their video content. Brightcove used to be one of the best free solutions for s small site that wanted to deliver their oen video. Just agree to allow Brightcove to show your content with ads and you could used their player as your content streamed from their servers. It was a great system with few headaches….until now.

Brightcove announced Monday that they are dropping their free service in little over a month. It just is not the cash cow that they were hoping for. After all, only 1% of their revenues came from the ads while the rest comes from their white label arrangements with major publishers like the Discovery Channel.

A web site can convert from the free service to the professional service for four figures a year, but I doubt that many will. It will be interesting to see what small sites do next.

Hollywood is very nervous about letting its content out on the Net because they are not sure where the money is going to come from. But the users want the content when they want it where they want it. Hulu has just released some great numbers showing that their services has expanded from 1.7 million streams a month to 142 million streams a month. It is nowhere near YouTube yet, but Hulu proves that free high quality content can be successfully mixed with ads to the benefit of everyone.

It is always great to get numbers from the big players on how their Internet video deployments are going. And one of the biggest was undoubtably NBC’s Internet Olympic portal.

After paying $900 million for the exclusive rights, they claim to have sold $1 billion in advertising. Not bad considering no one was even sure that people would watch the Olympics on the Internet.

But watch they did. Over 6.5 million unique visitors to be exact. Which translates into 36 million page views, 826K mobile video views and 300k text or multimedia alerts over 17 days.

That translates into $153 per person and $27 per page view, assuming all the advertising was just on the Internet pages. Silly assumption, of course. But if this test of the viability of the Internet could be profitable, just wait until the next one.

Just when you think that there is no hope for the economy, much less mobile Internet advertising. AdMob publishes some really wonderful numbers. It seems that mobile ad requests and ad inventory is almost even. For example, in the U.S., the total ads requested by mobile web sites were 1.99 billion, and 1.79 billion were served. According to the report, part of the reason that the number of ads served is that AdMob is starting to not serve ads to low traffic sites.

The sad part of the report is a breakdown of the capabilities of the phones used in the U.S. vs. the rest of the world. In places like India and Indonesia, approximately 80% of phones accessing AdMob ads can handle streaming video. Meanwhile, the U.S. with its highly desired advertising market, only has 27% of phones that can handle streaming video.

The FCC has ruled against Comcast on their breaking some of their users web traffic, especially to heavy traffic sites like BitTorrent. I had hoped that the FCC would come down hard on Comcast and force Comcast to rethink its treatment of customers. But sadly, there was no real punishment, not even a fine. And Comcast still feels justified in their treatment of their customers.

Such traffic shaping is frustrating to web site owners because it appears that our sites are not operating properly when it really has to do with the pipe between the user and the server.

If Comcast is having problems now, I don’t look forward to the next few years as streaming video becomes even more popular.