Andy Plesser

Boxee, a software program which allows users to connect Web video to a television set, created a lot of buzz last week when the company announced it was providing a consumer electronics device,  the Boxee “Box.” 

SAN FRANCISCO — The much blogged about introduction of a higher quality playback experience at  YouTube, using a 1080p shoebox sized player, was done in part to accommodate the emergence of pre-roll video advertising on the giant site.

CNET has a sit-down video interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt on social search, Android, and plans for the Chome OS , which will be initially targeted to for netbooks.  Also, he provides an explanation of Google Wave.

Earlier this month, Peter Kafka at MediaMemo reported that Apple has a new initiative to sell broadcast and cable programming via iTunes for a monthly fee of $30.

While search and display are far bigger categories than online video advertising, the digital advertising sector that is hot right now is online video advertising around premium news content.

Forrester has published a comparative study of six online video platform service providers. We reported on the study on Friday.

In report released today, Forrester analyst Bobby Tulsiani writes that Brightcove and Ooyala provide the best end-to-end online video platform. 

Despite the commanding position of YouTube, with 40 percent of video streams in the U.S., the quality of the environment for advertisers is not always acceptable, according to leading digital advertising executives.

msnbc.com, which had the first embeddable video player among the major video producers in the United States, will soon launch a player which provides embed codes for specific segments.

NBC Universal's ten regional web sites, which are affiliated with local owned and operated television stations, has reached an audience of 12 million monthly unique viewers, according to internal numbers.

NBC Sports will announce plans today  to use Microsoft Silverlight as the software for Web viewing the Winter Olympics Games in the United States.

The big challenge facing mainstream media with online video is scale; a lack of inventory of content and viewers, according Vivek Shah, head of digital news at Time Inc.

Although pre-roll advertising, the 15-30 second ads seen before a video begins, is the dominate media form, the promise of online video advertising is much greater.

"TV Everywhere," the emerging strategy of cable giants Comcast and Time Warner to allow web users to log onto cable offerings online, has broad implications for the content industry.

Transpera, the largest mobile video delivery and ad network in North America, has lined up many of the industry's leading publishers including msnbc.com, CBS.com, Showtime, Disney, and MTV.

By most accounts, the Internet was born back on October 29, 1969 by two computer scientists, Vint Cerf  and Robert Kahn.  Cerf is now Google's Chief Internet Evangelist.

While many video publishers seek the widest possible distribution of their videos through an embeddable player and Media RSS, some, like HealthiNation and Virgin Media, are using a syndicated player which is placed on specific sites.

Gary Vaynerchuk, the Internet video/social media phenomenon, is having his book "Crush It" published as a "vook," a digital version with video and text. 

We were encouraged to read today's Wall Street Journal report about the projected uptick in technology advertising for 2010. 

Richards Rosenblatt, the former CEO of MySpace who launched his network of Web properties titled under Demand Media, has a big hit with eHow, a video site providing "how-to" instructional videos.