Andy Plesser

Matt Marshall, former staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal and venture capital beat reporter at the San Jose Mercury News, has landed $320K in seed funding from angel investors including early Google employee George Harik.  (Harik is investing in several new media ventures including a recent investment in Vator.tv.) Matt launched VentureBeat back in […]

Late last month at the AlwaysOn conference in Manhattan, I caught up with Vincent Schavione, the Philadelphia-based entrepreneur and angel who announced the launch of FountainHead, an online network of lifestyle shows. Some of the  shows have received mixed initial reviews from the web video digerati.  From my perspective, I wonder who is going to […]

This is inspiring. Gary Vaynerchuk, a 30-year-old wine merchant in New Jersey had the idea to launch a daily web video show where he would taste different wines each day. After two years, he has built a loyal following.  His site has twice the traffic of the Wine Spectator, the bible of wine rating and […]

Click To Play TurnHere, the Emeryville, California-based online video production and distribution company has secured $7.5 million in funding from Venrock and the Hearst Interactive Media. This is company’s first institutional round. The company was initially funded in 2006 with $1.1 million by founder Brad Inman, William Randolph Hearst III and Ron Conway. TurnHere has […]

Click To Play The Independent Comedy Network, a new online comedy show/community, launched today.  Last week at the AlwaysOn conference, I caught up with founder/comedian Marc Campbell.  For an in-depth look at the sector and how this might shake out, read Chris Albrecht’s take over at NewTeeVee and Kristin Nicole’s overview on Mashable. Grab the […]

Click To Play Late last year the Reuters news service began giving its journalists Nokia n82 phones to directly upload video reports to the news service’s  video pages.  The program is called "Mojo," standing for Reuters Mobile Journalism. Last month at the World Economic Forum, Reuters handed out the camera phones to a couple of […]

Click To Play CNN’s live streaming video of news events, previously kept behind a paid wall called CNN Pipeline, was ungated in July and traffic is surging.  We are told that CNN.com provided 5 million live streams in January.  Last Thursday’s debate in Los Angeles between Clinton and Obama generated 530,000 streams and the Republicans […]

Click To Play Keith Kocho is the founder of Extend Media, a company that manages online video assets for content owners.  Its closest competitor is the thePlatform, now owned by Comcast. Today, the company will announce that it will provide content management for NBC Direct, the new initiative which allows consumers to download NBC programs […]

Click To Play (REPUBLISHED FROM 2008) Late last month, we had a little wine tasting on the set of Beet.TV with Gary Vaynerchuk, the host of the very popular daily online video show Wine Library TV. Getting things started, Gary  unwired a well-chilled bottle of Iron Horse 2001 Blanc de Blancs as we readied our […]

Renzo Piano, the Italian architect who first attained international recognition in 1977 as co-creator of the Pompidou Center in Paris, designed the new 52-story New York Times headquarters on Eighth Avenue. Last fall, as the move was complete and the final touches were made, we toured the building and interviewed the architect and Michael Golden, […]

Click To Play Tammy Haddad, the veteran TV news producer who left MSNBC in November, where she was executive producer of Hardball with Chris Matthews to start her own consulting gig, has hit the campaign trail with her "TamCam," a $700 Sanyo camcorder.  She has been getting some great scoops including an exclusive interview with […]

Click To Play Dan Farber at ZDNet is reporting that Flickr, the hugely successful photo sharing site that is part of Yahoo! will soon launch with video contributions.  Here’s what Dan writes: "In this unstable atmosphere, Yahoo is getting ready to take on Google’s strongest property outside of search–YouTube–with a video version of Flickr. Yahoo […]

Click To Play The very shape of news is changing. Its becoming more collaborative, produced by experts as well as by a community of readers in a dynamic form, says Eric Hippeau, managing director of Softbank Capital and one of the principal investors in the Huffington Post.  Softbank is also an investor in Associated Content, […]

Click To Play Vator.tv, the online community of entrepreneurs who upload video pitches for venture capitalists to watch, founded by former Marketwatch columnist Bambi Francisco, has secured a second seed round of just over $1 million, sources tell Beet.TV Early investors Peter Thiel has doubled his stake and Richard Rosenblatt, Georges Harik are in the […]

Click To Play "This year at the biggest conference in syndication — where local affiliate stations fill their shopping carts with enough content to keep their schedules lively — the hottest topic was online syndication," writes New York Times reporter Brian Stelter from the NAPTE conference in Las Vegas. For some very cool video reports […]

Click To Play It’s not nearly as big as YouTube, but Blip.tv is growing four times faster in worldwide use, according to the latest comScore numbers.  Blip has the fastest growth among all the video sharing sites, the tracking company has found. The comScore numbers are published in a terrific round-up article on the state […]

Click To Play Jon Meacham, editor of Newsweek, will anchor a six-hour live webcast covering the Super Tuesday primaries on February 5.  The webcast will originate from the Washington Post Newsweek Interactive studios in Arlington, Virginia. The show will have a line-up of reporters and columnists from the Post and Newsweek including Jonathan Alter, Dan […]

The conventional thinking around monetizing video is through advertising. But paid subscription and pay-per-view will be viable, according to Saul Berman, who heads the global media and entertainment strategy practice for IBM.  He is based in Los Angeles. He told me that as much as half of U.S. consumers over 45 years of age are […]

Click To Play Tim Draper, one of the world’s most successful and influential venture capitalists who manages some $7 billion in VC funds, is bullish on content companies.  This is quite a shift for the big Sand Hill Road VC’s who have steered clear of content companies. He told my buddy AlwaysOn founder Tony Perkins […]

Click To Play Vuze, the P2P high resolution video platform has reached 4 million monthly registered users, of which half watch videos on the desktop application daily, Jim Diaz, head of strategy for the Palo Alto-based start-up told me today. I caught up with Jim at the AlwaysOn conference in Manhattan. I asked him how […]