Andy Plesser

Click To Play Video on mobile handsets will take off with the upcoming initiatives from Adobe.  Called Adobe Flash Lite, Flash videos will be published and viewed on a number of mobile devices.  To further extend the reach of Flash viewing, phones will have chips that allow them show these files. On2 Technologies, whose encoding […]

Beet.TV’s star video producer David Kavanaugh is in Redmond this week to document what’s happening at Microsoft and what it all means to us.  Stay tuned for our video segments about Microsoft which will begin on Wednesday. I’m in Vieques, an island nine miles off the eastern coast of Puerto Rico.  Kathy and I have […]

Click To Play Richard Waters in the FT writes about the looming impact of the mortgage crisis on online advertising.  It’s not a pretty picture for online publishers who rely on mortgage companies for a good chunk of their revenue. Louise Story and Vikas Bajaj over at The New York Times writes how online marketers […]

The increasing participation in Facebook and other social networks by business people is part of an inevitable trend.  For marketing executives, it is essential.  Forrester’s Brian Haven wrote in his new report Marketing’s New Key Metric: Engagement (by purchase): "B2B marketers slow adoption of social technologies will be accelerated when when community sites emerge discussing […]

Click To Play NewTeeVee is a highly influential and successful spin-off of the GigaOM empire.  If you don’t already, you should subscribe to the feed.  I caught up with Liz Gannes, editor, on the Stanford campus earlier this month. We spoke the inevitable trend towards higher quality video on the PC and on the television. […]

Click To Play Timothy Tuttle, who is the founder of Truveo, now a unti of AOL, is one of the pioneers of video search.  He recieved his doctorate at MIT while working in the Artifical Intelligence Lab. Truveo picked a pretty nice review today in the Wall Street Journal in a column penned by Walt […]

Click To Play The sub-prime mortgage mess has many implications:  new barriers to getting a mortgage, the tumbling stock market, and yes, maybe trouble getting investment dollars for that cool start-up. In the digital economy, the  shake-out in the  mortgage industry could make a big hit on online advertising with troubled marketers in the home […]

Click To Play Adobe’s announcement today that it will encode video, not just to the Web video "standard" of Flash, but will also provide encoding to the conventional broadcast standard of H.264, means that video created by small and large content developers will look great on many devices, notably on television sets.  Here’s a report […]

Click To Play Robert Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, the standard for connecting computers in a network, says that the promise of video is to limit the need of physical meeting which means less travel and greater energy conservation.  He told me that this could be a "huge benefit to all mankind." I taped this […]

Click To Play The introduction of the much anticipated Adobe Media Player (AMP), the desktop application that allows users to download and save Flash files, will launch in Beta this year but won’t have a full introduction until next year.  A spokesperson from Adobe told Beet.TV late last week: "Adobe Media Player is planned to […]

Kara Swisher is having lots of fun these days with her video camera.  She just posted this interview with Valleywag’s new editor Owen Thomas.  Owen talks about the power of gossip in the Valley and what is "sexy."  Well, it’s money natch.  No surprise — but it’s an interesting interview with a guy who understands […]

Cable companies have invested billions in creating an effective video on demand (VOD) but studios are balking at making much content available, at least right now,  writes Randall Stross in today’s New York Times: According to Craig Moffett, vice president and senior analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, cable’s video-on-demand is well positioned, technically […]

Click To Play Beet.TV has learned from a high-level industry source that the deployment of Joost has been delayed in large part by issues related to firewalls that block access. The problem with firewalls is not new, it’s been discussed for sometime on Joost forums, but the roadblock highlights concerns about accessing P2P networks.  This […]

Click To Play Amazing but true, folks are watching advertising on their PC’s as a form of entertainment, according to today’s advertising column by Stuart Elliott.  Stuart’s article is about veryfunnyads.com and the emerging trend of consumer opting to watch ads and branded video on the web. Viewers will watch commercials for fun and their […]

Click To Play Topix has grown to be a top-twenty news site.  The platform facilitates interactivity in the form of comments, mostly around localized news.  You simply type in your zip code and comment on local news.  The company is generating content for its site and is a solution provider to number of newspapers in […]

Click To Play I was in San Francisco on Monday afternoon to meet with video search pioneer Timothy Tuttle to get a preview of a very impressive new video destination site from AOL’s Truveo unit.  It’s based on the search and categorization platform developed Truveo a company founded by Tim in 2004 and acquired by […]

Click To Play There’s been quite a lot of talk lately about the the emergence of overlay ads in the form of "bugs" and "tickers," types of online video advertising which are inserted for a period of time into the video stream — mostly at the bottom.    The Wall Street Journal had a terrific […]

Click To Play In today’s New York Times, Brad Stone writes about the recent announcement Google to place comments around news stories from media organizations on the Google site.    There’s been a lot of concern among major media that this constitutes a further cannibalization of original reporting by search engines and content aggregators. Brad […]

Click To Play Kontiki, the  P2P content distribution company was purchased by VeriSign last year.  Earlier this month I caught up with Jeff Richards, who runs the business as head of the digital distribution unit at VeriSign in Mountainview. Jeff says that his company’s "peer-assisted" technology can save content producers from 30 – 40 percent […]

Click To Play Live, quality online video is "taking off" and will become widespread in the months ahead, according to Adobe, the maker of Flash. I visited with Chris Hock, who heads the Adobe the Flash media group, which is based in San Francisco. Chris expects that live will pervade the Web from events, to […]