Andy Plesser

Click To Play The Washington Post has been doing pioneering work in online video since 1999.  Recently, video has become more visible on the washingtonpost.com with a prominent video player on the home page — and video clips integrated onto many news pages. Tom Kennedy, managing editor multimedia has been leading the video effort at […]

Click To Play I had a nice chat with Rafat Ali, founder and CEO of PaidContent in Madison park, just two blocks from our studios. The former journalist has bootstrapped this fledgling media property that covers digital media as well anyone. Today, he is well on his way to building an influential media brand. With […]

Click To Play Here’s my interview with with Fox Television honcho Stefanie Henning. I asked her about how the emergence of web and mobile video has lead to new creative and technical issues and where Fox is going with all this. (The opening image is black, but hit play and the clip runs fine.) I […]

Congratulations to Bambi Francisco and the team at Vator.TV on their big launch tonight. I think this is a very cool idea.  It’s a unique video-centric environment for entrepreneurs to meet funders, strategic partners and vendors. Some skeptics might wonder if an open forum is really the way to get an idea funded.  Will ideas […]

Click To Play Yesterday, I was at the Washington Post where I spent time with Tom Kennedy, the visionary managing editor for multi-media.  We’ll be publishing excerpts of my interviews over the next week or so. Tom is a big believer in producing and distributing high quality video files. He has shifted the video production […]

RealNetworks unveiled last week a new downloadable player that allows users to save all major video formats to a PC.  As long as there is no copy protection, users can easily save QuickTime, WMV and Flash files.  Here’s our post and demonstration. There’s been a lot of buzz and anticipation surrounding this. Michael Arrington over […]

Click To Play BitTorrent has a new P2P service to distribute video, including Flash video, as a compliment to existing CDN services — or as a free standing distribution service.  It is currently testing the new service called DNA and is looking for video publishers to join the beta testing phase, Ashwin Navin, President and […]

Yesterday at the "D" conference, RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser unveiled a new video player that allows users to "rip" online videos in various formats.  At the demonstration, Glaser showed how easy it is to rip a Dow Jones video from a Brightcove player.  Jeremy Allaire, one of the key developers of Flash video and now […]

There’s been quite a hubub over the just-announced video player from RealNetworks that allows users to download the major online video file formats. We asked Microsoft what they thought of the plan and they were quite positive.  He’s what a Microsoft spokesperson told Beet.TV “Real Networks is a valued partner of Microsoft, and we’re pleased […]

Click To Play Just a few minutes ago at the "D" conference in Carlsbad, California, RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser made a bombshell announcement about a new product from RealNetworks. The company will soon provide a free downloadable video player that allows users to save and organize video files in all major formats including Flash, QuickTime, […]

Click To Play New tools for creating search tools and analytics have just been released by Truveo, the AOL unit. AOL bought the innovative online search technology firm last year. AOL is putting a great deal of focus and resources around search and is making Truveo a big player not just on the AOL properties, […]

Click To Play Here’s the problem: All video sharing sites are silos. For publishers wanting to publish video on multiple sites with proper metadata, the task is monumental.  I understand that Ford Models, which publishes on at least 6 platforms including a hugely successful YouTube channel, employs a team of 10 to just keep all […]

Click To Play A "stage streaming server" solution from Microsoft is nearly here. Publishers will only pay for the amount of content that is actually downloaded This will be made possible by the upcoming deployment of the new Microsoft server which is code-named "Longhorn." The costs of streaming high quality video through the Internet is […]

YouTube has just begun to test a user interface with new with thumbnail previews of related clips.  It also creates a destinct url for spot in a video.  So, you don’t need to watch a whole video to see the clip of dog singing to get the good part, you can just create a location […]

Great article today by Scott Kirsner in the San Jose Mercury News about how the availabilty of metrics to bloggers and can lead to obsessive behavior over traffic and Technorati rankings. Well, this isn’t shocking, of course. There are important tools to track our audiences which were only available to major publishers and broadcasters just […]

Click To Play AOL’s UnCut, the consumer generated service that has been in beta for a about a year, but little talked about, will launch next month, Fred McIntyre, chief online video executive at AOL told Beet.TV. The new service will be implemented on many of AOL’s platforms including AIM, AOL and it’s growing social […]

Click To Play Here’s my interview with Chris Hughes, one of the three co-founders of Facebook — and the only one to graduate Harvard. An Ivy League degree and a great business at 23. Not too shabby.  I interviewed him last summer on the Stanford campus.  This video was on my post on July 26.  […]

Click To Play Last week at the Streaming Media East conference, I caught up with Steve Safran, managing editor of the essential television industry blog Lost Remote. Steve gives his take on the value of YouTube and why it’s such a success. He also discusses the challenges of big media to succeed in this new […]

Click To Play At the Streaming Media East conference last week, I sat down with Forrester’s television industry analyst James McQuivey. James made some big waves last week when he issued a bleak report (for purchase) about the future of paid video downloads. He think the advertiser-supported is the future. In our chat we spoke […]

If you haven’t read the big page one story on today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription) about the poisoning of former Russian security agent Alexander Litvinenko in London, it’s fascinating and troubling.  The piece by Moscow-based Journal reporter Alan Cullison is sourced to a 1998 videotape done by Litvinenko and fellow security officers who said they […]