Beet TV

The New York Times announced today that it has launched a new widescreen video player, a redesigned video library and a “most viewed” feature. Brightcove 3, the new Brightcove technology, powers the player.

People-powered news site Newsvine has seen enormous growth since its acquisition by msnbc.com last year, receiving 963 percent more registrations and 269 percent more unique visitors, msnbc.com has told Beet.TV. I interviewed CEO Mike Davidson about the Seattle-based social news platform at the Omma Global conference last month.

Alice Schroeder’s biography "The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life," released September 29, became an immediate bestseller. PR firm CJP Communications recently launched the first two segments of an eight-part online documentary series it produced, "Shaping ‘The Snowball’: Alice Schroeder on the Oracle of Omaha", to give a behind-the-scenes look at the making […]

The comedy video website Funny or Die, humor site 23/6 and The Huffington Post have teamed up to create Huff or Die, accessible at funnyordie.com/huffordie, to showcase their best political humor videos and blog posts. Funny or Die made the announcement last week.

People-powered news site Newsvine I interviewed CEO Mike Davidson at the Omma Global conference last month, where he spoke on a panel

San Mateo-based BlackArrow, a video-ad management system that can insert ads into broadband, video-on-demand and DVR playout, has announced $20 million in new funding, Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch reports. Andy interviewed BlackArrow Senior Vice President Chris Hock early this summer about how their system works.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass — Adobe AIR runtime environment has been installed on 35 million PCs and will reach 100 million by the end of the year, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch told Andy in this interview.  He caught up with Lynch at the EmTech08 conference last week.

Thomson Reuters announced commercial options for its sophisticated metadata generation service Open Calais at the EmTech08 conference last week. Andy interviewed Tom Tague, Vice President of Solutions for Thomson Reuters, about the service and its implications for the semantic web. 

Scott Kirsner, Editor of CinemaTech and contributor to Variety, will be one of the hosts of a conference called “The Conversation” taking place October 17-18 in Berkeley. The focus will be on the interaction of cinema, online video, and games. Andy interviewed Kirsner last week at the EmTech08 conference at MIT.

Software billionaire Charles Simonyi, the former chief architect of Microsoft who helped develop Excel and Word, is headed back to space. Space Adventures, a space tourism company based in Virginia, says Simonyi will travel to space next year on a Russian rocket–making him the first private traveler to make two trips.

Gigya, the largest widget network, has raised $11 million in Series C funding, bringing its fundraising total since its 2006 launch to $23.5 million, Mark Hendrickson at TechCrunch reports.

Open-source social media center Boxee released a patch yesterday that essentially jailbreaks AppleTV, Brian Chen at Wired’s Gadget Lab reports. The patch makes it possible for users to play any DRM-free multimedia file on AppleTV.

The new interactive video platform Ved.io, which allows users to annotate video with links, pictures, and commentary, opened to the public yesterday. Ved.io’s coverage of Friday’s debate brings information from the web–like voting records, news, analysis, and quotes–to a screen adjacent to the streaming video.

An Adobe official has confirmed that Adobe is working on Flash technology for the iPhone, and that the player will be available in a very short time if Apple gives it the OK, according to a report by iPhone Atlas. Adobe already has Flash running on an iPhone emulator.

Msnbc.com’s interactive debate video player, launched on Friday at politics.msnbc.com in time for the first presidential contest, allows viewers to watch or re-watch the debate footage and jump ahead to specific topics by clicking on one of twenty keywords.

RealDVD, a legal program that allows consumers to burn an unlimited number of DVDs on up to five PCs, will go on sale today at www.realdvd.com for $29.95. I interviewed RealNetworks VP of Video Product and Development Jeff Chasen in the Beet offices earlier this month, where he gave me a demonstration of the program.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Content distribution network Akamai Technologies launched Openvideoplayer.com in an effort to unite the video publishing industry around an standardized video player. The base source code Akamai contributed to the Open Video Player has already been used by customers including Hulu and The NBA.

Leading third-party measurement firm Visible Measures announced today that it will provide online video metrics for MTV Networks 340-plus video destination sites.

Digital media company ON Networks will begin distributing outside content through its AllScreen Syndication Network, a decision that will open up its market, co-founder Jennifer Grogono says. ON Networks produces and distributes its own content to syndication platforms including iTunes, Adobe Media Player, Verizon, and TiVo.

Global television network Current TV has teamed up with Twitter for “Hack the Debate,” a live broadcast of the debates this evening that will display real-time Twitter comments from its audience on the screen. The broadcast visualization and online streaming will be powered by Adobe Flash, and the list of cable and satellite channels that […]