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NEW YORK — The bubble of excessive funding of of digital media companies is over, according to paidContent founder and editor Rafat Ali.  Beet.TV caught up with him at his company’s packed mixer last night at the IAC headquarters.  The second half of the year does not look very good as many venture backed companies […]

Our intrepid producer David Kavanaugh headed to Brooklyn last night to attend the diggnation event.  David said the place was packed and the light was low but he managed to get some stage shots and quick interview with Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback who explains the Kevin Rose frenzy.    Caroline McCarthy from CNET was on […]

Last night at the paidContent mixer in Manhattan, I caught up with Eric Hadley, CMO of the Heavy.com, the successful New York-based online video site for guys 18-35.  Hadley is a longtime senior Microsoft executive who joined the company last year. Yesterday the company announced plans to build out its video services division called Husky […]

Here at Advertising 2.0 in New York, just spoke with Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried the founders of EQAL, the producers of lonelygirl15. The ground-breaking show will go into production soon in Italy, in an Italian language version, they told me. Liz Gannes at NewTeeVee reported the development earlier today. – Andy Plesser

Word just came out from CBS and Yahoo! that the broadcaster will greatly expand its program offering to Yahoo! Here is a statement from Karin Gilford from Yahoo! "As the #1 online TV site, Yahoo! TV is committed to offering our users the most comprehensive television experience on the Internet," said Karin Gilford, Vice President […]

Jason Glickman, founder of New York-based Tremor Media, a video ad network, has his sites on European expansion where he says the business for online video advertising may be greater. As we reported yesterday, advertising rates for online video advertising could be as high as $35 per thousand views. Tremor has positioned itself for expansion […]

Larry Kramer, founder of Marketwatch and now working in venture capital and consulting, was on hand at the paidContent conference in Manhattan today.  Larry is on the board of ContentNext, the corporate parent of paidContent. Here’s an interview with Mary Kathleen Flynn of TechConfidential.  Interesting take by Larry on how advertising networks work and which […]

I caught up with the CEO of Paris-based Hi-Media Cyril Zimmerman today at the paidContent conference in Manhattan where he was a panelist.  Cyril heads one of Europe’s largest ad networks and one of the world’s most unique. The company is expanding its ad network and acquiring content companies.  Last year, it bought Fotolog for […]

On Friday, msnbc.com quietly launched a mini-site dedicated to "Countdown with Keith Olbermann."  The company will make an announcement shortly, but Beet has been checking it out. Mighty convenient to find Keith’s show and related clips like world’s "worst" and "best" persons and one of our favorites, Oddball.   Here’s what a spokeswoman told Beet.TV: The […]

Today in New York, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, the IAB, the consortium of online publishers, will address the complex issues surrounding advertising and user generated content in an industry event for members and the pubic. Beet won’t be able to attend and we understand the event is sold out.  But surely, there will be some […]

Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch reported last night that Tariq Krim the founder and CEO of Netvibes is stepping down from his post. Here’s the perspective on the move by Caroline McCarthy at CNET. In September on the MIT campus, I spoke with Tariq about the new video widget for CBS programming created by Netvibes. — […]

Perhaps the most significant live Internet programming development to date is the streaming of all the Major League Baseball games.  The games are made available on a subscription basis in very quality level watched in the Silverlight Web plug-in. Minneapolis-based Swarmcast is providing the MLB with the solution to scale the quality streaming using http […]

Sometime this Saturday, the uploaded consumer videos to VideoEgg will no longer be accessible.  This is a long expected development and part of a strategic plan for VideoEgg to shift from being a video sharing site to an ad network. This morning the company sent out a blast to all the users of the consumer […]

Great interview of Mike Marquez who heads mergers and acquisitions and business development for CBS Interactive by Bambi Francisco of Vator.tv Marquez talks about the CNET acquisitons and the range of  companies CBS might want to buy. — Andy Plesser

Current TV has growing online video audience, but numbers are still modest.  The cable/satellite network launched a separate online presence in October. According to the latest Nielsen Online data, the site had 513,000 unique visitors in April and 166,000 video streams viewed. The video streams were up from 99,000 in March.  The low traffic may […]

At Streaming Media East last week, Adobe gave some valuable booth real estate to Panache, an Encino-based software company that is providing a solution to publishers to integrate in-stream video advertising into the new Adobe Media Player. The company’s software works with both Flash and Silverlight video players. Unlike companies which provide in-stream services and […]

I caught up with Lisa Guillaume, VP at Level3 last week at Streaming Media East.  She told me the company has vastly expanded its offering in the CDN space since it entered the industry last year.  She she told me in its first year, the company has increased capacity of its products by a factor […]

One of the most exciting areas of online video is live streaming.  It is on the rise with free platforms including uStream, Justin.tv and Mogulus.  It will become more pervasive once Yahoo!  comes online with its live service. The question is how is this content monetized  The insertion of advertising into live programming has not […]

Mefeedia is one of the first to index and organize video podcasts.  Today, the Burbank-based company is building a business by aggregated videos onto various special interest video channels which it is seeking to monetize with advertising. Mefeedia doesn’t host videos, it uses an algorithm to organize the feeds and pulls the various players to […]

I caught up with Jim Louderback earlier this week at Streaming Media East.  Always good good  to find out what’s up with Revision3, the fast-growing network of technology-focused episodic online video programs. Revision3 makes most of its revenue now from sponsors whose messages are often "baked" into the segments.  I asked Jim how that advertising […]