We here in the .tv group at VeriSign have been lucky enough to work with consultant Jeff Barco recently. He has lots of experience in the online media space having spent many years at Apple, Microsoft, Terayon and more recently running his own consulting group. He’s been helping us explore some new ideas for .tv. He recently attended the Streaming Media West Conference and I asked him to jot down some thoughts for our blog readers. Here are some things that caught his eye.

There was a good buzz at Streaming Media West this year. With the surge of activity in/around web video, web-enabled television, video sharing on social network, etc., I think Stream Media represented some of the best up & coming hot companies in this space.

Here’s the short list of companies that I believe are gaining traction in the market.

Adap.tv: Watch the market trends around video monetization in 2010, because Adap.TV is well positioned to capture a big chunk of the momentum. IAB just provided their online ad measurement certification in November to OneSource (their platform)–and they claim, they are the first to receive this certification. Adap.tv has a robust offering, is integrated, and a growing base of publishers (over 350) using their platform. Impressive small team.

Kaltura: Open source, self hosted video platform — and appears they are building momentum, claiming over 35,000 publishers using their platform. In terms of breadth of offering, they’re up there among Brightcove/Ooyala. They’ve demonstrated their ability to scale, manage premium/ugc video, and provide  a host of tools, including analytics/monetization. Appears to be a strong leadership team–good rep in the industry.

Kick Apps: According to VP Biz Dev, KickApps had a very strong year this year — and are accelerating. I like this company a lot, and have been tracking them for a year. A social networking/widget “house”, these guys have their act together, and are really making a difference providing tools/services for a huge number of content companies–over 90K. Another cool feature is providing access to info-about who is using these widgets–allowing key info for brand/ad/and site marketing strategies.

Kyte: I spent 30 minutes at the Kyte booth exploring what these guys have developed, and its much more than I originally understood. Kyte’s focus is about Live video content, more mobile consumption—and the creation of community building, e.g, social web, analytics, monetization, etc. For publishers, you make a decision based on how much content you plan to publish–basically, scale-based fee model. They also have a quite an impressive cast of investors, including strong European representation.

LiveStream: LiveStream, is an web-enabled video platform company that provides clients dedicated video channels for their live video capture and distribution. For entities, organizations, and/or producers serious about getting their video message out with a professional look & feel of a quality produced production (tools for real-time image manipulation, text and graphic overlays, etc.), LiveStream is a company you want to be working with. With over 700,000 channels launched — they understand the needs of producers–better than most in this business. Free (ad supported) and premium-based fee structures.