Andy Plesser

Joost, the new and much talked about P2P television platform, will use Level 3 as its content delivery network (CDN), both companies announced this morning.  Update/Correction:  Level 3 is providing colocation services and high-speed Internet connectivity, not CDN services. Seems to us a big win for Level 3, which has made big moves into the […]

Well, we’ve finally got around to creating a video podcast for Beet.TV and it’s great. We’ve been uploading our videos to Blip.TV, which provides a very nice quality Quicktime video for the iTunes player.  (Actually my summer intern, my daughter Becky, who will be a sophomore at Colgate, has been uploading our some 300 Beet.TV […]

Click To Play The escalating demands of bandwidth for online video is posing a challenge and an opportunity for companies that deliver this content.  Big content delivery companies who distribute the files over global networks of giant servers, companies like Akamai, Limewire and VeriSign, are incorprorating peer-to-peer protocol to distribute content more effectively.  Even Microsoft […]

Howard J. Rubenstein is the smartest and most powerful independent public relations practitioner.  But, he’s more than just a PR man, he’s the ultimate powerbroker.  I should know, I had the good fortune to work for him for eight years until I started my own PR firm back in 1992. No one has reported more […]

How cool is this:  YouTube is allowing users to create custom players with a selection of colors, layouts and names.  This is an important development for content creators large and small who want to create an identity on YouTube. Here’s Beet.TV, the "purple channel," in purple! Like my esteeemed colleague Duncan Riley wrote about this […]

Revver, an early pioneer in online video sharing, has implemented a big change as it has began inserting in-stream advertising into a few of its clips.  Up until know, Revver offered just a simple, post roll click-to-action advertisement.  Revver and content creators shared the revenue created by the clicks.  A Revver spokeswoman told me that […]

With new management in place, there’s a lot of action underway at Yahoo! these days. The clock is running on Jerry Yang’s new 100-day action plan. Not sure if corporate communications is part of the plan, but Yahoo! surely needs to improve its image and could be making some progress by landing Ruth Sarfaty as […]

We were saddened to hear that the accomplished media reporter and our good friend Dan Fost will be leaving the Chronicle next month.  We understand from sources at the paper that he has taken advantage of a generous buyout. San Francisco has always been a great, albeit small media town and Dan was always the […]

Click To Play Richard Morgan is back from the super high level media mogul retreat hosted by Allen & Company in Sun Valley where he was covering the annual event for The Deal, where he is a staff editor. Richard is a former editor of Adweek, advertising columnist for the New York Observer and author.  […]

Wow, congratulations to Laurel Touby at Mediabistro for the sale of her company to Jupitermedia for $23 million.  Hot damn! Beet.TV wonders if her husband, Business Week marketing columnist and rock ‘n roller Jon Fine will give up his day job? Hope to update you on this later today. Update 8 a.m. EDT:  Jon Fine […]

Click To Play In the video publishing realm, having good content is key, natch.  But having a robust content management system is essential, particularly for big broadcasters and publishers. Over the past months, we have covered some of the solution providers who power the big Web video publishers.  These have included Roo, the Feedroom and […]

NBC Universal yesterday announced the launch of myNBC, a social networking site created for fans of NBC programming.    As Louise Story reports in today’s New York Times, there are various takes on this by industry observers including Forrester analyst Charlene Li, Jack Myers and yours truly.  I told Louise that NBC should unlock the […]

Just got the numbers for online video sites for June from Nielsen/NetRatings and Veoh has registered the second fastest growth among major video sites, jumping 254 percent from the same month last year. The fastest growing of the major players is Yahoo! which is up over 400 percent. The New York Times story yesterday by […]

In an effort to bring more accurate third-party metrics to blog traffic, Nielsen Net/Ratings has begun to gather demographic data from visitors to Technorati in the form of a pop-up questionaire which takes about 10 minutes to fill out. Just this past Friday, I met with Nielsen’s Scott Ross who spoke about the need for […]

Click To Play Metrics and demographics for online video viewing is critical for the success of the industry.  Nielsen/NetRating has developed a system that provides this critical data to publishers and advertisers.  VideoCensus been deployed to various publishers including  NBC, CNN, VideoEgg and Brightcove.  The system is in advanced beta and will be released with […]

There have been more than a few raised eyebrows in the digital media world this week when Nielsen/NetRatings came out with a new metric to guage Web site popularity by adding in the factor of time spent on a page.  AOL came in first! Shocking! Well, we sat down in the Beet.TV studio this morning […]

Click To Play As the explosion of streaming video makes huge bandwidth demands, the business of content delivery networks (CDN’s) is booming and new players, large and small, are moving quickly. Just yesterday VeriSign, which is getting in the CDN business in a big way, announced a deal to distribute BBC video. Level 3, a […]

Click To Play Here’s Fred McIntyre who heads AOL video.  He outlines the fundamentals of search and the implementation of search technology at AOL.  It a really informative interview. Well, we all have to get our hands around effective video search.  It’s key.  So, I wanted to share my article from this week’s PR Week […]

S Steve Rosenbaum is a pioneer in consumer-generated content.  He was among the first television producers to provide inexpensive video cameras to the public to create video.  His show "MTV Unfiltered" demonstrated the promise and power of user-generated video before there was a Web. Steve gives us a little history lesson today. In the beginning […]

One of the hardest working journalist/blogger in the online video space is Steve Bryant.  He authors the Hollywood Reporter’s ReelPop, contributes regularly to NewTeeVee and writes Google Watch for e-Week. But, more than just keeping up with what’s happening and reporting it, he’s an insightful critic of video content.  I always enjoy reading his columns, […]