Andy Plesser

The Washington Post, long a pioneering publisher embracing online video, revamped its home page today to feature video in a very prominent way.  Despite producing acclaimed videos since 1999, there was never a regular spot for video on the home page.  This should solve the problem of visibility for the paper’s award-winning work.  Here’s the […]

Click To Play View a transcript of this interview Can old media becomes new media through smart investments?  Tough to say, but Hearst is involved with investments in several promising companies in the online and mobile video space. I visited Micheal Dunn, Vice President of Hearst Interactive Media.  Michael is involved with evaluating investments and […]

Beet.TV has learned that You Tube will introduce new functionality to its platform tonight which will allow users to organize clips around specific categories.  3/29, 2:00 p.m. EST: — Oops, hold the presses: I’ve been looking at YouTube and this aspect has not gone live.  Sorry for the false start on this. — Andy Update […]

Click To Play View a transcript of this interview Om Malik is a visionary business journalist who founded the influential tech blog GigaOm. He is one of the leading observers of broadband — he covered this and related beats as well as anyone during his years at Forbes, Red Herring and Business 2.0 Om is […]

From George Allen’s Macaca eposide to the mash-up of the Hillary 1984 video, to earnest campaign announcements from the candidates, online video is making for an unpredictable campaign season where traditional media strategies have been turned on their heads. Making the rounds on YouTube is a sentimental campaign video from Rudy Giuliani’s 1993 mayoral campaign […]

Smilebox is a company that provides consumers the tools to create personalized electronic greeting cards. It has aggreements with Hallmark and others and has become a major player in this industry. Just last month, the company announced plans to offer users the opportunity to integrate video into greeting cards, making them truly multimedia. Above is […]

Click To Play View a transcript of this interview Newspapers have a unique and present opportunity to create online video to build audience and adverting revenue. Dow Jones and its Wall Street Journal. Barron’s, MarketWatch units have been moving aggressively into video news and feature reporting.  As we reported on Beet.TV earlier this year, company […]

Online video advertising is hot because people are engaged and click on video ads at higher rates than standard advertising, a new report by eMarketer has found. Viewers of in-stream advertising, watch at a rate nearly double the rate of standard ads.  While click-through numbers might appear low, less that one percent, the study has […]

Click To Play View a transcript of this interview Not sure if the just announced YouTube video awards means more that some nice buzz, but the reality is that YouTube is changing. It is becoming a platform for serious content producers who have been leery of the site in the past. The new channel strategy, […]

From the Tsunami to last summer’s battle in Lebanon to the streets to Baghdad, citizen video journalists  are transforming how we experience conflict.  How these videos change public discourse and public policy is hard to say, but there is a great deal of compelling content filtering through the war zones.  In December, I interviewed Brian […]

Rudy Guiliani has a speech on YouTube which is nearly one hour, making it the longest campaign video, according to political video watcher, 21-year old Georgetown student James Kotecki.   Kotecki has some good advice for the former New York Mayor, hire a video editor and step in front of the lecturn. Kotecki’s views are part […]

Click To Play View a transcript of this interview Mainstream media is tipping its foot into videoblogging. The world’s largest news organization, the Associated Press, is exploring the new medium with a vlog by Ilana Arazie.  Ilana works on the business side of the AP and does the vlog "Real City Tales" as sort of […]

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch recently wrote about two start-ups who are building new businesses around user-generated cartoons. Aniboom is neck and neck with newcoming MyToons in the race to become the “YouTube of Cartoons.” Both sites are excellent, although MyToons is still in private beta. Well, MyToons.com just came out of beta.  The player  looks […]

Click To Play View a transcript of this interview Here is the second part of my interview with Alex Laats, head of Podzinger, the division of defense contractor BBN, a Massachusetts company which is utilizing anti-terrorism technology to "listen" to the audio tracks of millions of YouTube clips. My earlier post reports on how a […]

Click To Play View a transcript of this interview A major defense department contractor, BBN of Cambridge, Massachusetts, has applied a national security technology application, developed to fight terrorism, to "crawl" the audio tracks of public Internet videos through its PodZinger subsidiary.  PodZinger has analyzed, transcribed and organized some 1.5 million YouTube clips since December […]

Click To Play View a transcript of this interview Social media, online video and even virtual offices in Second Life have become mainstream elements of public relations over the past 12 months. The very practice of PR has changed as smart practitioners have created platforms of influence outside of the traditional media channels. And, some […]

Video sharing sites are providing a variety of monetization schemes for individual video uploaders. Revver, Blip, VideoEgg, Brightcove and others are splitting advertising revenue with content creators.  The most common share seems to be 50/50. Some sites, notably Metacafe and CurrentTV pay contributors based on the quality and viewership of their submissions. Neither YouTube or […]

Click To Play View a transcript of this interview The Associated Press, the world’s largest news organization, and Microsoft have developed an online video platform for thousands of U.S. newspapers, television and radio stations to upload, publish and monetize locally-created video. The new system is in beta tests with some 30 newspaper publishers and broadcasters […]

Click To Play View a transcript of this interview The success of YouTube has come largely from the site’s utility to "pass along" video clips to blogs and social networking sites, according to two of our most astute observers of the Internet media scene, Henry Jenkins of MIT and online video analyst Brian Haven of […]

The Wall Street Journal Online has banner advertising running on YouTube to promote subscriptions.  I found one of the first ads earlier today rotating through on the new Beet.TV channel on YouTube.  Here’s a screen shot. Our new channel has just been designed and we’ll be moving our 230 clips to the channel over the […]