Robert Andrews

Online video technology provider Kaltura sees a growing business line in the growing movement to revolutionize education. The firm, which began by offering open-source software, has been offering its services to colleges for some time. But CEO and co-founder Ron Yekutiel reckons there is further promise in the “flipped classroom” movement, in which students would […]

AMSTERDAM — Delivering adaptive-bitrate video streaming efficiently to smartphones could soon get much easier, with mobile chip maker Qualcomm pledging to use the MPEG-DASH video standard in a broader range of devices. “We believe it is the right direction for the video industry,” Qualcomm senior product manager Aytec Biber tells Beet.TV in this video interview […]

AMSTERDAM — At the International Broadcasting Convention, a video standard that enables high-quality live streaming from conventional HTTP servers took a step forward to satisfy content rightsholders. Microsoft announced the next version of its forthcoming PlayReady digital rights management standard would support the so-called MPEG-DASH standard in Windows 8.1 and Internet Explorer 11. “You can […]

AMSTERDAM — When US TV operator HBO launched a VOD service in to the Nordic countries 13 months ago, HBO Nordic, it was as a joint project with local digital video tech firm, Parsifal. Now the latter says it wants to pull off similar tricks elsewhere around the world. “We’re looking in a lot of […]

AMSTERDAM — In a world of competing technology standards, vying for lock-in, it can be tempting to back a favorite candidate. But one video tech firm is supporting multiple digital rights management standards, so as to not isolate any clients or potential customers. We take an agnostic perspective on rights,” says Irdeto Americas sales VP […]

Six months after H.265, branded “High Efficiency Video Encoding (HEVC)”, was ratified as the successor to the widely-used H.264 video compression standard, there is lingering suspicion that adoption will be as rapid as its forebear. But video tech firm Rovi has given the new standard one shot in the arm by unveiling the latest version […]

SAN FRANCISCO — Publishers’ behind-the-scenes ground-laying is bubbling up to make this winter a blow-out season in advertisers’ embrace of automated video ad buying, says one founder at the epicenter of the trend. “We’ve seen a lot of big publishers preparing for what they expect to be a very, very large Q4,” Mark Trefgarne, CEO […]

AMSTERDAM — The next-generation video compression codec to succeed the popular H.264 standard promises up to 50 percent smaller video sizes for cheaper online transmission – if the industry can ignite both consumer demand and producer inertia. To jump-start adoption of the so-called “High-Effiency Video Compression” (HEVC) – or H.265 – codec, video tech firm […]

SAN FRANCISCO — YouTube rival Dailymotion may commonly be thought of as a French video site – but that hasn’t stopped it hiring a Silicon Valley development team to build its recently-launched Vine competitor. “Mobile’s been a huge focus for us,” north America GM Roland Hamilton tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “We just expanded […]

SAN FRANCISCO — Live TV news rebroadcaster Livestation has spent the last few years building up its portfolio of 49 partner channels. Now it is trying to strike a balance between those conventional linear news sources and a new line-up of ad formats. “We have pre-roll advertising, we also have display advertising,” CEO Lippe Oosterhof […]

SAN FRANCISCO — It’s exactly two years since Nielsen attempted to bring TV-style audience measurement to online video for advertisers, through its Online Campaign Ratings (OCR) metric. Twenty-four months on, the metric is “Well under way to being the standard,” says Nielsen’s global media products EVP Amit Seth in this interview. “This last upfront season, […]

SAN FRANCISCO –  Hold on to your hats. The decades-old way advertising has been bought and sold could start to collapse in 24 months. “A lot of media companies have been good money with the old model,” IPG Mediabrands’ Magna Global north America president Kristi Argyilan tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “Our hypothesis is […]

Irreverent publisher BuzzFeed’s eclectic approach to web content may be paying off. In a staff memo published on LinkedIn (via TechCrunch), founder Jonah Peretti says the outfit “booked record profit in August”. And Peretti opens up on BuzzFeed’s video strategy, too, saying: “Ze Frank has recruited a talented team of video producers who have created 570 videos, with […]

When Beet.TV filmed this video interview with Bloomberg’s video development head Chris Berend in April, he gave an insight in to how the financial news publisher was producing a whopping 200 online clips a day. Now Berend’s strategy seems to be paying off. DigiDay reports Bloomberg surpassed rival Dow Jones for global unique visitors and streams […]

NEW YORK — AOL On operations VP Michael O’Connor used Beet.TV’s Video Ad Effectiveness Summit to call on analytics firms to give advertizers more insight about likely wasted spend. O’Connor said: “Sticker shock is driven by waste … metrics are still inefficient because they only measure a campaign after the campaign’s launched … the publishers hate […]

NEW YORK — One common thread to emerge at Beet.TV’s Video Ad Effectiveness Summit was how the new reality of online video consumption today is calling producers and measurers alike to reinvent their in-house toolsets. “Research used to be figuring out what worked and what didn’t work after something ended,” Nielsen client services SVP Andrew Feigenson told […]

France Télévisions is the latest publicly-funded broadcaster to cut its big staff bill following Europe’s cloudy recent economic climate. Having already shed 500, the broadcaster announced it will cut 600 jobs in the next few months following a €40 million reduction in its €2.5 billion ($3.3 billion) budget, bringing its headcount down to 9,750, reports […]

Re-using 30-second TV ads as online video pre-rolls is a great way to keep costs down versus shooting new creative. But re-purposing such ads rather than producing online-native ones risks driving down engagement. Consumer research conducted by Millward Brown suggests this can be solved by bolting on interactive online elements over re-purposed TV spots. “Just […]

New research by Dynamic Logic, a unit of Millward Brown, for video ad tech vendor YuMe has shed a light on the relative performance of different approaches. According to the viewer survey, original video ads shot specifically for the web outperform ads repurposed from TV three times for aided brand awareness, with similar uplifts for […]

Innovid CEO Zvika Netter has spent the last six years trying to help agencies make video ads interactive. Now he claims most video ads in that category pass through Innovid‘s systems – but the next challenge is looming. “Eighty percent of the interactive video being served … is run through our servers… used by our […]