I was at Streaming Media East today, moderating a session (“Broadband Video: What’s the Formula for Content Success?). First off, kudos to Dan Rayburn and the SM team – there was a ton of energy at the conference, lots of exhibitors and great sessions.

I got a chance to sit in on Martin Niesenholtz’s keynote. As many of you know, Martin’s the longtime SVP, Digital Operations, for the New York Times Company.

• 5M streams/month – up 3x from a year ago
• 20 people dedicated to video
• 100 new video pieces created/month

Martin shared a back-of-the-envelope analysis he’s done to back into how many streams the Times needs to provide to generate $30M in annual revenue from video. His calculation: 60M streams per month, or 12X today’s rate. I didn’t agree with all of his assumptions (for example he assumed $60 CPMs, which is too high, yet only a 1:1 ratio of ads:streams, which I think is too low given the opportunity to surround an in-line video player with display ads), but I did think he was in the ballpark.