Andy Plesser

Late yesterday, Google announced that it is putting text advertising onto Google Finance, the financial news and portfolio/stock tracking site. Google is putting considerable resources into the site and plans to expand it globally, according to an interview with Google’s R.J. Pittman we did in July.  R.J. indicated in the interview that Google will likely […]

Adobe has landed a two-year agreement with MLB.com to stream its 2,500-plus spring training, regular season and post-season games live to MLB.com’s 1.5 million subscribers.  Games were previously streamed on Microsoft Silverlight, an arrangement announced in August of 2007.  In the rich media platform game, Adobe has a home run here.  Details were released a […]

At the big Adobe developers conference in San Francisco today, Adobe will unveil the introduction of Flash video on mobile phones, just on Windows Mobile.  Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch has the story. In September on the MIT campus, I spoke with Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch about the future of Flash and the prospects for Flash […]

As AOL prepares close its user-generated site on Dec. 18, it is recommending that users switch their files to Motionbox, the small New York-based video sharing site.  This development was first reported yesterday by Michael Arrington at TechCrunch who published AOL’s FAQ’s on the service change. Chris O’Brien at Motionbox has built an impressive platform.  […]

Long one of the biggest shows on television, 60 Minutes will drive considerable traffic to CBSNews.com on Sunday evening with its exclusive post-election interview with Barack and Michelle Obama. Correspondent Steve Croft interviewed the Obamas earlier today in Chicago.  It will air on Sunday at 7:00 p.m. Beet.TV has learned that immediately following the broadcast […]

Election night night coverage at CBS News was streamed live on its site, on mobile devices and on CNET.com, the publisher recently acquired by CBS.  The live webcast was sponsored by Intel.  At the end of the Webcast, Katie gives a shout out to Intel. A sponsorship mention by an anchor would not be seen […]

Msnbc.com is claiming an election coverage victory “by a landslide” over arch online rival CNN.com.  According to internal numbers, the Microsoft/NBC Universal joint venture had an astounding 53 million unique visitors to the site during the week ending November 8.  This would be about 400 percent above normal traffic. Citing Nielsen Online numbers, visitors to […]

Veveo, the Boston-area start-up which has been a pioneer in bringing video search to mobile devices, has introduced a free application to search Wikipedia on the iPhone and the Google Android.  The company announced the launch of WikiTap, which can be downloaded here. The company says it is the first Wikipedia application developed for the […]

Charlie Rose, the reigning king of intellectual late-night conversation, today relaunched his web site.  Not just a redesign, it is the introduction of hundreds of new, short-form video clips edited from thousands of hours of on-air interviews. In cutting down the clips to around two minutes, Charlie has been edited out of many we’ve watched.  […]

With the IPO window effectively shut, the most viable exit scenario for venture-backed online video companies is a sale to an established media concern.  So what do acquirers want?  According to CNN.com general manager K.C. Estenson, while CNN has a huge audience, it needs verticals–audiences within particular categories.  He made his comments at the Beet.TV […]

MySpace just announced a program to allow users to pull premium content from Hulu and other 150 other licensed video sources onto their MySpace pages.  It’s called the Primetime Application. In June in Beverly Hills, I interviewed Jason Kirk who heads up MySpaceTV.  He spoke about the role of MySpace as "home" — a destination […]

With YouTube, MySpace and most other video sharing sites blocked on U.S. Military installations due to security concerns, the Department of Defense has launched TroopTube, a video sharing site created by Delve Networks, the Seattle-based video services company.  The company announced this today on its corporate blog. Troops can send videos to families at home […]

Blinkx, the San Francisco-based video search engine, whose shares are traded on the London Stock Exchange, today reported $6.4 million in revenue for the first six months of the fiscal year ending September 30.  Although revenue is up 115 percent, the company still has a sizable burn rate. Unlike most video search engines, which are […]

As video integration into newspaper and magazine Web sites accelerates, many wonder if in-stream advertising will prove to be profitable.  We know that many of the big newspaper publishers are expanding video offerings but most are not yet successful in selling ads in or around their clips. But are in-stream ads the total value proposition […]

The Washington Post, long a pioneer in the online media space, registered the biggest percentage jump of all major news sites on election day, Nielsen Online reported last night.  Although far from the newly crowned traffic leader, CNN.com with a record 12.8 million unique visitors, the Post jumped 113 percent to 2.3 million uniques. (Nielsen […]

To identify illegal video uploads, YouTube has implemented a software technology to "catch" content which infringes on the rights of copyrights holders.  NBC Universal’s general counsel Rick Cotton tells ZDNet’s Tom Steinert-Threlkeld that the software is identifying 75-80 percent of illegal uploads.  For Viacom, which is locked in a legal battle with Google over illegal […]

As the world watched the U.S. campaign coverage and the Obama victory speech on computers seven hours ago, demand for news content hit a historic record, according to data from Akamai, the Cambridge, Massachusetts provider of global web content distribution for CNN, NBC, the BBC, Reuters and many others others.

CNN anchor and special correspondent Soledad O’Brien spoke with me about reporting from the exit polls in an interview this afternoon. She discussed the process for analyzing the polls and gave her perspective on covering the technology space for nearly 12 years, as she was previously an anchor for ZDTV, the first technology news network. […]

NBC News and MSNBC have taken over the skating rink at Rockefeller center for a public viewing of election results. Earlier today I interviewed Robert Dembo, Executive Director of NBC News about the event. If you can’t make it there, you’ll see it as part of the coverage on both NBC and MSNBC news.

Tonight’s election results will be the first time election results will be widely consumed on both television sets and computers, says NBC VP of Digital Media Mark Lukasiewicz, who spoke with me earlier today outside of the NBC News/MSNBC studios at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Mark explains the range of information on both the big screen […]