Andy Plesser

WASHINGTON — As a follow-up to the State of the Union address, President Barack Obama sat down with YouTube for a live half hour conversation on Thursday (1.27) to take viewer questions from the public and speak with Steve Grove, head of news at Google’s video site.

As an indication of the growing value of mobile video advertising, New York-based Tremor Media, the big online video ad networks has will San Francisco-based Transpara, a leading mobile ad network, according to a report in TechCrunch.

WASHINGTON, DC — Driven by intense interest in the crisis in Egypt, daily video views on CNN.com reached 6.3 million in the U.S. on Wednesday (2.2), up 97 percent over the prior four week daily average, a spokesperson has told Beet.TV

WASHINGTON, DC — Seeing an opportunity with government agencies for the distribution of Web video, Boston-based Brightcove has launched a "federal government initiative" with Carahsoft, a big government IT consulting firm.

WASHINGTON, DC — The New York Times will provide reporters with the Apple iPhone 4 to record and upload videos via an Aspera App to the paper's server.  The first staffer to use the device was Andrew Ross Sorkin who used it for his Davos coverage.

While audiences for the networks news nightly newscasts have vastly shrunk and cable news nets have maintained which might called a niche audience,  the emergence of the Web, social media and mobile as video-rich environments has powered video news consumption in extraordinary ways.

KIT Digital, the publicly-traded, Prague-based online video services provider, with extensive operations globally, has announced the acquisition of two big U.S. companies:  San Francisco-based Kyte Digital and New York-based KickApps.

PARIS/LONDON — Paris-based Dailymotion, the world's second biggest online video site, has integrated with London-based live news portal  Livestation to provide a number of live streaming television news networks including Al Jezeera, Bloomberg, the BBC,  France 24 and sources from other nations as well as from oganizations including the United Nations and NASA.

WASHINGTON, DC — "The Fast Fix" a daily, 60-second daily video update on Beltway news featuring the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza has exceeded online viewership of 1 million on some days, a Yahoo! spokesperson tells Beet.TV.

Powered by a "billion" cameras, coupled with new devices for viewing, more consumers are watching video news than ever before, says Mark Lukasiewicz, NBC News VP for Specials and Digital.

The Financial Times is expanding its efforts around online video with a new television studio in its London headquarters, new video staffers in its New York and Hong Kong bureaus, and by providing simple video cameras to its print reporters in the field.

In her response to the State of the Union address, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann looked into her Webcast camera but away from a second camera in the room, the “pool” camera, which supplied her presentation to the television networks and other global media.

SAN FRANCISC0 – FORA.tv, a video publisher which aggregates academic, think tank and other sorts of thought leadership conferences, has recently expanded its business model with pay-per-view and subscription offerings, says CEO Blaise Zerega in this interview with Beet.TV.

PARIS — France Telecom's Orange has bought 49 percent of Dailymotion for about $80 million, the world's second biggest video sharing site after YouTube, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The average speed of broadband connections in the United States has reached 5 Mbps in Q3 of 2010, up 8.6% over the previous quarter, making it the biggest percentage gainer among the world's 12 fastest connected nation's, Akamai reported today.

LAS VEGAS — Verizon FiOS allows subscribers to access a selection of television programs and download them to a variety of digital devices.  The service called, "Flex View," was introduced in November.

Norway's Opera claims 140 million worldwide users, most of whom are on smart phones using Opera Mini.   In an interview at CES, Opera's Jeremy Forrester tells Beet.TV that the popularity of the browser on iPhone has come from its speed which is "four-to-five times faster than the native" (Mobile Safari) browser on Edge and 3-G […]

Bloomberg, which had long offered a small amount of the company’s deep proprietary content online, keeping most content on its professional trading terminal, is now a popular business and finance site, surpassing AOL Money, MSN Money, CNN Money, Forbes, Reuters and CNBC, to be in the third*, most popular behind Yahoo Finance and Dow Jones […]

SecondMarket, a New York-based company which provides an exchange, for some 35,000 qualified investors, to buy and sell shares in private companies, has seen demand double in the fourth quarter of 2010, Erick Schonfeld reports this morning at TechCrunch.

The Discovery Networks connects with 23 million fans on Facebook, says Kelly Day, who heads the network's digital operations, in this interview with Beet.TV