Andy Plesser

Click To Play The Economist is on fire:  Ad pages have passed Business Week in the U.S. and the business title was ranked fourth most successful by Advertising Age in the annual magazine "A List" published earlier this week. At the paidContent conference in New York earlier this week, I caught up with Susan Clark, […]

Click To Play Jupitermedia CEO Alan Meckler is one of the most intriguing and successful entrepreneurs in the new media space. His firm recently acquired Mediabistro the journalism blog, networking/jobs and training site, for $23 million. I sat down with him yesterday, after his panel at the paidContent conference, to have a wider ranging chat […]

Click To Play Rob Norman is the head of online advertising buying for the entire WPP network, a job of vast responsibility and influence. I interviewed him at the paidContent conference in Manhattan today where he was a panelist.  Rob has a lot to say about online video advertising and the range of environments for […]

Click To Play Last night I was at the opening night reception of the paidContent one-day conference about the future of business media.  The reception was at the Frank Gehry-designed IAC headquarters in the Manhattan. Rafat told me that the future of buisness video will involve more story telling and investigative pieces.  We agree. I […]

Click To Play Erick Shonfeld reports on TechCrunch that Fora.TV, the "thinking person’s YouTube," has raised additional seed money from original investor William Randolph Hearst III along with a new investor in Adobe.  And, the company is poised to raise $5 million in  series A venture round within 90 days, founder Brian Gruber tells Erick.  […]

Click To Play Executives from Microsoft are in Rwanda today for an an international meeting on fostering technology adoption in Africa.  There was report on these efforts this morning on NPR’s Marketplace. The effort from Microsoft is part of a global initiative to bring technology to students around the world.  The program is called "Unlimited […]

Click To Play Al Gore’s Current TV is creating some very good content, but its efforts to generated user generated video has faltered and monthly unique visitors are only 152,000 per month. Nonetheless, one investor in Current, Los Angeles magnate Ronald W. Bunkle, is quoted in today’s New York Times stating Current has a valuation […]

Click To Play The Akamai showcase site for HD online videos from several customers including the BBC, MTV, the NBA and others has just gone live.  The images that load to the home page are in very high quality Flash.  To see the HD videos, you need to select either 1280 X 720 or 1920 […]

Click To Play Revision3’s Diggnation has a large following.  Like most episodic Web video shows, most of the clips are consumed via downloads, mostly through iTunes.  Recently, the company has has introduced a Flash player with shareable embed code and it has done very well, Jim Louderback, CEO of Revision3 told me. Here’s my second […]

Click To Play October being Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we figured it would be a good plan to produce and stream videos about the disease including clips about screening, genetics and therapies.    These videos are beginning of a new medical channel dedicated to women’s health.  We’re still working out the format/branding, but we have […]

Click To Play Extend Media is the company that has implemented the backend technology for Fanfare, the music and video portal from SanDisk.  The site interfaces with a simple, inexpensive USB device that takes videos from the computer and allows them to be plugged into a TV set. Like iTunes and AppleTV, the new service […]

The wildfires in Southern California have generated an unprecedented amount of video and photo uploads to CNN, other news organizations and to the video sharing sites. One of the most interesting developments in "citizen journalism" around this disaster has been the widespread use of mobile phones as a reporting device.  Veeker, the San Francisco-based start-up […]

Click To Play A new era of high definition online video will begin on Monday when Akamai launches a showcase portal for videos from customers including the BBC, NBA, MTV and others.  The term HD has been bantered about quite a lot in the context of Web video.  But by our understanding, "true" high def […]

Blogginheads.tv, that little scrappy scrappy "Crossfire" of  a webcam start-up for political bloggers, has found a home on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times.  There will be three video excerpts a week featured on the The New York Times Opinion Page. Rachel Sklar, that eagle-eyed media columnist at The Huffington Post broke the […]

Click To Play The movers and shakers in the online video space will be at NewTeeVee’s one-day conference in San Francisco on November 14. Beet.TV will be on the scene, natch.  So, if you can’t be there, you can count on exclusive "behind the velvet rope" coverage by the purple channel! As you might have […]

Click To Play Nope, it’s not the corporate blogging software we’re talking about here, but the new permanent art installation in the lobby of the newspaper’s new Renzo Piano-designed headquarters building on Eighth Avenue and 41st Street. Artist Ben Rubin and UCLA professor/statistician Mark Hansen have created a multi-media installation of 560 small screens, mounted […]

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. The company is powering the backend of Fanfare, the new video and music Web download platform from SanDisk — which is producing the Sansa, […]

Click To Play The amount of user generated content from the California wildfires have set a record at CNN’s i-Report, a spokesperson told me a few moments ago.  The number of video have far surpassed citizen content surrounding the Minneapolis bridge collapse or the Virginia Tech shooting by more than fourfold. Surely the geographic extent […]

Click To Play Brian Stelter reports in The New York Times today that Google and Nielsen are launching  a new monitoring and analytics system to track television viewership. A few weeks back, I interviewed Scott Ross, who heads marketing at Nielsen Online. I’ve reposted my interview here.  Although the Google/Nielsen deal is not about online […]

Click To Play Internet visionary Joe Trippi is "on the rise" and having a big impact on the John Edwards campaign, according to a front page story in today’s Washington Post.  Trippi is a senior adviser to the campaign but the Post calls him the "de facto campaign manager and lead media consultant." I’ve posted […]