Andy Plesser

Although some hits will emerge from the slew of new online entertainment programming from independent producers, for the most part these producers will comprise a "cottage industry" of small, "long tail" content creators, says Greg Baumann. Greg, who was the Los Angeles bureau chief of Bloomberg before taking over Television Week, the big industry trade […]

Click to play All Things D, the web site spun out from a successful conference business run by Wall Street Journal staffers Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, is undergoing a major redesign and will  debut in a month or so, Walt told me in Washington on Tuesday. We don’t know how the new site will […]

Click To Play The war in Iraq has been exceedingly dangerous for Reuters journalists. Six correspondents have been killed.  Others have been taken hostage by warring factions and several had been held by U.S. forces. On Tuesday at the Beet.TV executive summit in Washington, I sat down with Victor Antonie, longtime Reuters Television editor who […]

The FTC should stop Verizon from calling DSL "broadband," which Walt Mossberg calls "crap" and is not broadband by world standards. Moreover, Walt says that higher connection rates provide by cable companies,  6-8 mps, often deliver at less than half of the advertised speed and are over priced. At comments yesterday at the Beet.TV executive […]

The Web is becoming "a video delivery medium in a big way," said Walt Mossberg in his opening remarks at Beet.TV’s first executive summit which was held yesterday at the Embassy of Finland in Washington. Walt is technology columnist at the Wall Street Journal and is co Executive Editor of All Things Digital. Walt and […]

Click To Play There’s been a great deal of discussion about HD web video coming online.  Unfortunately, real HD quality, which you would find on a big screen television set, is not realistic for Web video given slow Internet connections in the United States and computers with limited processing power.  In his review recent review […]

Earlier this year, without much fanfare, Contentinople, a new blog about digital media and convergence was launched in the United States by London-based United Business Media, one of the world’s biggest business-to-business publishers. Not a scrappy start-up, this enterprise has five full-time editorial employees with the sales and back office support of the parent company. […]

Sarah Meyers, whose daily show Pop17, a joint production with Rocketboom, has been gaining attention recently.  It is really very good.  I particularly like this segment about Beet.TV!!! Like superstar blogger Robert Scoble who has both an edited and a live show on fastcompany.tv,  Sarah does two as well.  Here’s her live channel. Robert uses […]

BestTV, an Israeli-based company in the online video management space, has received $4 million in funding from Israeli investors since its founding in 2002.  I caught up with the Stanford-educated founder Oded Felled recently in Manhattan. Oded says the company is ready to enter the U.S. market and hopes to raise a second venture round.  […]

Forrester Research has just opened to the public a powerful application and database which analysts have used to gauge the interest of customers in participating in social networks.  The  database, which provides profiles of customers of many companies in 10 nations, went live last week.  It is free.  This was first reported last week by […]

Google News, which indexes thousands of text news sources and  images, will "ramp up" video  on the site, according Josh Cohen, business project manager at Google News in this interview with Beet.TV. The program was launched last year and is set to expand. It works as follows via YouTube:  A small group of video producers […]

I have come to think of H.264 as a kind of everyman’s HD video production and distribution  platform.  The encoding software, referred in the industry as a codec, was released by Adobe into the Flash ecosystem in December. It has greatly improved the quality of Beet.TV videos. Let me explain how this works: David edits […]

Congrats to Rafat Ali and the growing success of paidContent, the essential online publication about digital media.  Today, Rafat announced the "next phase" of his company with appointment of Nathan Richardson, former head of Dow Jones Online as the new CEO. Rafat announced other hires, the promotion of Staci Kramer and said the Santa Monica-based […]

Rocketboom, the pioneering video blog that led the way for episodic online video programming, has launched its first new show, Pop17 with Sarah Meyers. Although the new show launched in February, an event chronicled by TechCrunch and others, the association with Rocketboom and Andrew Baron has not been previously disclosed. I spoke with Andrew earlier […]

Jason Calacanis, the scrapping entrepreneur built Weblogs and sold it AOL for $25 million. He is hard at work with his latest start-up Mahalo. He has a direct, immersive approach to managing people.  In hiring process, he says he tries to "scare people."  I don’t think Jason is really scary.  This interview is quite informative […]

According to a new report on the valuation of the top 25 blogs, the eight month-old Silicon Alley Insider is worth $5.4 million.  Not bad work for founder/backer Kevin Ryan and editor/pundit/power blogger Henry Blodget. I’m not quite sold on the valuation equation and find it hard to believe that SAI is worth $2 million […]

Velocix, the Cambridge, England-based content delivery network (CDN) has announced the introduction of live video streaming distribution services. Surely live streaming will gain momentum this year with the introduction of Microsoft’s Silverlight and the Adobe Media Player.  These services will demand considerable bandwidth and P2P solutions will likely have an important role. For a perspective […]

Revision3, the fast growing producer of online tech programming, has signed an agreement with Blip.tv to syndicate the video for all its shows.  The news was first reported this morning by Michael Learmonth of the Silicon Alley Insider. Earlier this month, I was in San Francisco for a tour of the very cool Revision3 offices […]

The Washington Post, long an innovator in expanding its online presence, has created a popular application on Facebook with some 350,000 downloads, Jim Brady, Executive Editor of the washingtonpost.com tells Beet.TV The application (L) is a kind of political badge which members put on their Facebook pages, showing their political leanings from liberal to conservative. […]

Josh Bernoff, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, told me that some marketers are finding success by putting videos into social networks.  Not ads, but content of value to the members of the networks. He talks about successes of big and small marketers and explains the values of such interaction which is far greater […]