Andy Plesser

Click To Play View a transcript of this interview Here’s my second interview with John Caplan, President of Ford Modeling, the world largest and best known modeling agency. As we discussed in the first post, Ford is providing scores of models with camcorders and handling uploading to YouTube, Revver and other video sharing sites.  Ford’s […]

Click To Play View a transcript of this interview MIT’s Henry Jenkins says that the success of YouTube is from the creation of content around communities of interest. It’s not about individual voyeurism. It’s a social media phenomenon driven by the viewers organized around content that matters to them.  Henry says that social networks have […]

Click To Play View a transcript of this interview Louise Story of The New York Times has a story in today’s paper about a new form of video syndication from Google.  The company has expanded its Adsense program to include video from Google content partners including Dow Jones and CondeNet. It’s a new kind of […]

Blinkx, the video search technology that is featured in today’s New York Times in an article by Jason Pontin, has an agreement to search and index videos published by The New York Times. The company has agreements with a number of publishers and content developers to index video, including Dow Jones, the publisher of The […]

Click To Play View a transcript of this interview Online video will be an increasingly important platform in the presidential elections.  Candidates are making announcements and policy statements on their own video clips,  And, the public will be uploading all sort of videos.  We reported a few weeks back that the Barack Obama campaign is […]

Click To Play View a transcript of this interview The New York Times, which has been producing original videos for the past three years, has taken the bold step of inviting its readers to submit videos for publication on the paper’s site.   This will mark the first time The Times has published user-generated video. The […]

David Carr has been one of the pioneering print reporters who has taken to video reporting very successfully. We are big fans of his Carpetbagger blog which includes about one video segment a week. Media columnist Kurt Anderson raves about Carr in the new issue of New York magazine: Carr (whom I employed six years […]

View a transcript of this interview Here is the second part of our interview with award-winning magazine editor Mark Whitaker.  He had been editor in chief of Newsweek for eight years before recently being named to an executive position at the Washington Newsweek Interactive division, the unit that runs online operations for The Post, Newsweek […]

Click To Play View a transcript of this interview Beet.TV was launched in April.  Its Technorati Influence Rank is somewhere above 9,000 this morning, out of 55 million blogs.  In the Technorati game, rankings are based largely on incoming links.  If other bloggers think you are important and link to a post or the blog, […]

Click To Play View a transcript of this interview Beet.TV goes behind the scenes at Ford Models, the world’s largest modeling agency!  Ford has just launched an ambitious program to create and syndicate online video shot by dozens of models.  The company is providing its models with camcorders and is handling simple editing and file […]

The New York Times has created a unique and compelling 9-minute original video comprised of brief interviews with seven Oscar-nominated actors. Shot in low light on 16mm b&w film, the seemingly unrehearsed sessions are gritty, refreshingly honest and open.  The actors seem a little on edge.  We get a glimpse of superstars so often hidden […]

Click To Play View a transcript of this interview Podcasts are up tenfold in 2006 over 2005, according to a new research report from Forester Research’s Brian Haven.    The new report finds that 10 percent of individuals online in North American download a podcast at least once a month. That’s up from 1 percent […]

View a transcript of this interview The Flash video ecosystem has has become the most widely deployed platform for streaming video on the Web.  Video sharing sites, news organizations, governments, institutions and many others use the platform.  Most of Adobe’s installed base, some 80 percent, are using Flash 8 and/or 9.  Beginning this year, Flash […]

View a transcript of this interview Tony Perkins is a pioneering publisher from Silicon Valley who launched Upside, then Red Herring magazine.  I met Tony in 1999 when my firm handled PR for Red Herring.     We also handled his 1999 book about the looming dot-com collapse, "The Internet Bubble." You should read Tony’s column […]

View a transcript of this interview Both Senators Barack Obama and Sam Brownback announced their candidacies for President last month using a web video clip.  Both used a Flash video player that can be shared on different sites. This utility allows any Web site or blog to display the video. Views of the Obama clips, […]

Beet.TV has discovered that Dow Jones, the publishers of The Wall Street Journal, Marketwatch and Barron’s, has provided the public with the ability to take the embedded code from video clips on the Wall Street Journal site.  To view the videos, you don’t need to subscribe to the WSJ.  You can grab this code by […]

View a transcript of this interview Mark Whitaker is one of our most celebrated journalists. Having lead Newsweek as its award-winning editor in chief for eight years, he was recently tapped by the Washington Post Company (parent of Newsweek) to head new initiatives for the Washington Post/Newsweek Interactive.  The online division also includes Slate. I […]

Bud.TV, the $30 million online video channel produced by Anheuser Busch, launched today. Although the channel is not completely beer-focused, the company has implemented a rigorous registration process to keep visitors under 18 out of the site.  The system cross-references zip codes and driver license registrations.  Steve Bryant, 29, blogger of the Hollywood Reporter’s "RealPop" […]

Click To Play View a transcript of this interview Here the second interview with Dmitry Shapiro, the founder and CEO of Veoh, a popular video sharing site. The site provides both streaming Flash video and large downloadable files distributed via a peer-to-peer network. One major differentiator of Veoh is that it provides a downloadable application […]