Andy Plesser

Charlie Rose, the reigning king of intellectual late-night conversation, today relaunched his web site.  Not just a redesign, it is the introduction of hundreds of new, short-form video clips edited from thousands of hours of on-air interviews. In cutting down the clips to around two minutes, Charlie has been edited out of many we’ve watched.  […]

With the IPO window effectively shut, the most viable exit scenario for venture-backed online video companies is a sale to an established media concern.  So what do acquirers want?  According to CNN.com general manager K.C. Estenson, while CNN has a huge audience, it needs verticals–audiences within particular categories.  He made his comments at the Beet.TV […]

MySpace just announced a program to allow users to pull premium content from Hulu and other 150 other licensed video sources onto their MySpace pages.  It’s called the Primetime Application. In June in Beverly Hills, I interviewed Jason Kirk who heads up MySpaceTV.  He spoke about the role of MySpace as "home" — a destination […]

With YouTube, MySpace and most other video sharing sites blocked on U.S. Military installations due to security concerns, the Department of Defense has launched TroopTube, a video sharing site created by Delve Networks, the Seattle-based video services company.  The company announced this today on its corporate blog. Troops can send videos to families at home […]

Blinkx, the San Francisco-based video search engine, whose shares are traded on the London Stock Exchange, today reported $6.4 million in revenue for the first six months of the fiscal year ending September 30.  Although revenue is up 115 percent, the company still has a sizable burn rate. Unlike most video search engines, which are […]

As video integration into newspaper and magazine Web sites accelerates, many wonder if in-stream advertising will prove to be profitable.  We know that many of the big newspaper publishers are expanding video offerings but most are not yet successful in selling ads in or around their clips. But are in-stream ads the total value proposition […]

The Washington Post, long a pioneer in the online media space, registered the biggest percentage jump of all major news sites on election day, Nielsen Online reported last night.  Although far from the newly crowned traffic leader, CNN.com with a record 12.8 million unique visitors, the Post jumped 113 percent to 2.3 million uniques. (Nielsen […]

To identify illegal video uploads, YouTube has implemented a software technology to "catch" content which infringes on the rights of copyrights holders.  NBC Universal’s general counsel Rick Cotton tells ZDNet’s Tom Steinert-Threlkeld that the software is identifying 75-80 percent of illegal uploads.  For Viacom, which is locked in a legal battle with Google over illegal […]

As the world watched the U.S. campaign coverage and the Obama victory speech on computers seven hours ago, demand for news content hit a historic record, according to data from Akamai, the Cambridge, Massachusetts provider of global web content distribution for CNN, NBC, the BBC, Reuters and many others others.

CNN anchor and special correspondent Soledad O’Brien spoke with me about reporting from the exit polls in an interview this afternoon. She discussed the process for analyzing the polls and gave her perspective on covering the technology space for nearly 12 years, as she was previously an anchor for ZDTV, the first technology news network. […]

NBC News and MSNBC have taken over the skating rink at Rockefeller center for a public viewing of election results. Earlier today I interviewed Robert Dembo, Executive Director of NBC News about the event. If you can’t make it there, you’ll see it as part of the coverage on both NBC and MSNBC news.

Tonight’s election results will be the first time election results will be widely consumed on both television sets and computers, says NBC VP of Digital Media Mark Lukasiewicz, who spoke with me earlier today outside of the NBC News/MSNBC studios at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Mark explains the range of information on both the big screen […]

**We will be updating this post throughout the day. Keep reading for news on our upcoming interviews and round-ups of the hottest political tech coverage on the web! *** So it’s Election Day and Kelsey and I will be reporting on the extraordinary day for digital news and online video.  We’re off to NBC News, […]

Sure the IPO market has been shut for some time and the prospects don’t look good, but it’s still a bit of jolt to read that one of the industry’s most respected venture capitalist tells The Deal’s TechConfidential that he is not planning for IPO exits for his 24 companies.  Here’s what he says: "We […]

While Google, Yahoo! and AOL are focused on advertising-based business models around online video, Microsoft is advancing into the area it knows the best; software and services. Seeking a big piece of the emerging field for video streaming and the demand for HD video, Microsoft is expanding the ecosystem for Silverlight, the new rich-media Web […]

Video streams on Yahoo! dramatically increased in September to 265 million, up 56 percent from August’s 169 million.  The new traffic puts Yahoo! ahead of *Fox Interactive, which had been number two to YouTube.  Monthly video streams on YouTube have broken the astounding five billion mark with 5.3 billion streams, up 12 percent, according to […]

What a fantastic group of media and technology leaders who came together at the msnbc.com digital cafe at 30 Rock on Tuesday for our online video roundtable and live streaming "show." YouTube, MySpace, AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo!, CBS Interactive, CNN, MSNBC, CondeNet, Dow Jones,  Ogilvy, The New York Times Company, eMarketer, along with key emerging new […]

It was great to have Saul Hansell of The New York Times at the Beet.TV Online Video Roundtable on Tuesday.  He distills quite a lot in his post this morning on Bits.

At MySpaceTV, some two thirds of videos are consumed on user profile pages, according to Cristian Cussen, speaking yesterday at the Beet.TV online Video Roundtable.  Fellow panelist Laura Lee from YouTube said that social referrel is a big driver along with search on Google and YouTube. 

msnbc.com has plans for interactive coverage of voting results on a hyperlocal level, Charlie Tillinghast, president and publisher told Kelsey earlier today in this interview. Visitors to the site’s national map will be able to see results for both states and individual counties on election night.  Not just the data for political insiders, understanding how […]