ABC and Move Networks released their May streaming numbers today, reporting 37 million videos served during the month, a total of 815 million minutes. 400 million streame have been served since ABC launched their full episode player in 2006.

Meanwhile, a commenter over on Lost Remote claiming to be from an ABC affiliate makes it clear that local stations are less than thrilled with ABC’s portal strategy:

Dear ABC.com staff,

Affiliates love the video player. It’s a great opportunity for us to be contractually obligated to place hard-coded links on our homepage to drive traffic to your video player. Everyone knows that the homepage is the only way people enter a website because bookmarking a specific section within a site or grabbing content from a site via RSS is so 2006, right?

Could you please be a little bit more Johnny-on-the-Spot with hard data on traffic numbers for the player in our markets so we can make money off those numbers through interstitials and such? Telling us “that information isn’t available to affiliates” and then maybe changing that tune and parceling out a nugget of data after each ratings period doesn’t really help us sell the player year ’round.

We like how you’ll be able to embed and share content in blogs and stuff. Any chance you’ll give some of that eyeball opportunity to the affiliates?

Sincerely,

Rob

Back in 2006 ABC signed a deal whereby affiliates could stream and sell ads on full episodes delivered directly on their sites but in early 2007 a number of affiliates turned to WorldNow to facilitate local ad-serving.

Apparently despite the strong overall numbers from ABC and the ability of Move Networks and BlackArrow to do local geotargeting and ad serving not all affiliates feel they are getting the local service and data they need.

Sad but true. Tonight is the season finale for Lost, and what a season it has been. But that’s not important right now. What is important is what ABC is doing to make their online viewing experience as good as - maybe even better than - TV.

Last week, ABC announced their new video player for the fall, powered by Move Networks, as is their current version. While we’re eager to get a crack at the beta player (hint hint, ABC.com PR folks), their current player is currently the king of the hill.

So before you sit back tonight for the two-hour finale, catch up on anything you’ve missed (minus the pop-up-video-style Cliff’s Notes on the repeats on TV) on the ABC.com site. They’re leveraging a powerful combination of Move Networks content delivery with on2 Technology’s VP7 codec.

At the Streaming Media East conference last week, I had the chance to spend some time with Eero Kaikkonen, CMO of on2. on2 acquired Hantro Products, a video compression software and solutions company, in May of last year. Eero and I spoke at length about codecs and the user experience, where convergence is headed, and the features and functionality that mobile devices will need before they hit their true tipping point. Phones, digital cameras and digital media devices (read: iPods and Zunes) will all need high quality audio and video capture capabilities, plus built in hardware encoding and decoding, so you can plug your iPhone into a 50″ TV and enjoy a high quality, lean-back experience. According to Eero, we’re still a good 2-3 years away before we start to see that technology make its way into consumers’ hands.

So while you wait, plug in your laptop or media center PC to your TV, fire up the ABC.com player, and enjoy the highest quality streaming video available right now. And remember, those few pre-rolls and mid-rolls make it all possible. So don’t forget to thank those advertisers. There’s probably only one for the whole show, so we’re not asking for much.