Andy Plesser

One of the biggest events of 2008 was the Summer Olympics in Beijing.  The most significant development in online video distribution has been the entrance of Microsoft Silverlight, the new competitor to Adobe’s ubiquitous Flash.  The new rich media Web plug-in had its big debut as the online video platform for NBC Sports coverage of […]

Kaltura, the company which provides an open source video platform that allows the public to edit video in a "Wiki-like" environment, just announced its first, prominent media company implementation with Public Television’s flagship Station, WNET/Thirteen New York.  The Kaltura player is being used first on Worldfocus, the show about international events. It is featured on […]

Not all gloom and doom in the online video world, at least according to one prominent industry analyst firm.  A new report out by  eMarketer’s David Hallerman predicts that online video ad spending will increase 45 percent in 2009.  Kelsey interviewed David at the Beet.TV Online Video Roundtable at MSNBC in October.  He talks about […]

Young Woong Ha, aka "Hero," a three-year old Korean who speaks no English, has become an Internet sensation by singing Beatles songs.  His rendition of "Hey Jude," sung in his diapers while clutching an acoustic guitar, is the number one viral video hit on on MySpace, Beet.TV has learned.  The clip has garnered 5.7 million […]

How will the hugely popular micro-blogging platform Twitter make money?  Caroline McCarthy, the lead social media reporter for CNET News.com, says that while speculation is rampant about various monetization strategies for Twitter, she expects the sale of analytics and non-public data is the most likely scenario. This is the second of two interviews with Caroline […]

It was a big week in social  media with news that Facebook and MySpace will allow their platforms to be integrated into other web sites. While there is excitement about spreading social media outside of their destination sites, there is growing evidence that major advertisers are not comfortable with placing ads on these networks.  Caroline […]

It’s a technique long used by cable programmers, including MTV: keep videos in rotation in an ongoing, 24-hour telecast.  The cable programmers knew that new viewers tune in at different times and are likely to find programming by chance.  The same concept should be applied to web videos, says Max Haot, co-founder and CEO of […]

October was a record breaking month for video views on CNN.com and other sites.  CNN had 134 million videos streamed by 8.3 million unique visitors, according to the latest numbers released by Nielsen Online.  Yahoo! registered the most uniques with 9.9 million, but had only 61 million views.  msnbc.com beat CNN in uniques with 9.5 […]

Advertising Age’s B2B Media Business has just published the winners of the industry’s best business video sites. We were pleased to read that that The Deal has won the Regular Program, Small B2B category.  We are mighty proud because Beet provides production services for The Deal and has produced many of the segments in the […]

neoSaej, a small Boston area start-up co-founded by Ray Stata and Mukesh Chatter, have quietly raised $10 million in venture funding and have launched a live auction platform–one different from eBay and Priceline.  Stata is best known as co-founder of Analog Devices and whose name graces the Frank Gehry/MIT building; Chatter is founder of Nexabit, […]

Hey, sorry we can’t be in Paris to attend the Le Web conference now getting underway.  But thanks to Ustream, we can watch and interact.  Cest bonne!  Lots of coverage of the conference on TechCrunch.  Also reporting from Paris is AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher.

Brightcove, the Cambridge-based video publishing platform innovator, has moved to a leadership position among Web video distributors with the creation of a network of companies using its API’s as part of their distribution platforms.  This includes, AOL, Yahoo!, Slide, Veoh, Meebo, Metacafe and others.  Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch reports on the announcement of the industry […]

Here at Beet.TV, we have a keen interest in the business opportunity for small online video producers to create large numbers of quality of videos, at low cost — and make a profit.  That’s a business model we at the purple channel aspire to. Seems that some of our colleagues are making substantial progress. According […]

Bloggrunner, a mostly automatic news aggregator owned by The New York Times Company, has been surfacing up related stories from many blogs and news sources (including Beet.TV) to its technology and other pages since last November. In a big step forward in the integration with The Times, links organized by Bloggrunner are now on a […]

Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera today announced the introduction of human editors to the automated news aggregator.  Gabe lays out his reasons on the site today.  TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington wonders if it will spoil the system;  TechCrunch is the single most popular news source on Techmeme, so I can see why Michael might have some concerns. […]

Video search works, particularly around professionally-produced content.  Suranga Chandratillake, CEO of  Blinkx, the London/San Francisco-based video search engine, told TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld in this segment from the Beet.TV Online Video Roundtable that his company is serving ads on 80-90 percent of professionally produced content and on 10-20 percent on user-generated content.  The ads are both […]

ExtendMedia has raised an additional venture round of $10 million, Liz Gannes of NewTeeVee confirms tonight. News of the funding was first reported by peHUB. In October of 2007, I interviewed CEO Keith Kocho. He speaks about the ScanDisk project, which has since been canceled.   I’ve republished the interview here. — Andy Plesser, Executive Producer

The Huffington Post has raised an additional $25 million in venture funding, according to a report this morning by Kara Swisher of AllThingsD.  In a subsequent post, she reports that the Huff Post has formally announced the news. In January, I interviewed Huff Post investor and board member Eric Hippeau of SoftBank about the value […]

CNN’s live streaming channel has had continuous coverage of the attacks in Mumbai since the events first broke on Wednesday at just after 1 p.m. EST.  CNN’s live coverage has gotten 1.4 million views as of 11:30 a.m. EST, a CNN spokeswoman told me. We have seen how live streaming of events has taken hold […]

As the world has tuned into to live coverage of breaking news on network news channels, others found videos on demand on most of the major news sites and on YouTube, which has uploads of coverage of Indian broadcasters.  I’ve posted the video below.  We haven’t seen much in the way of user-generated video yet, […]