Andy Plesser

Just read Saul Hansell’s big piece in The New York Times about Verizon’s huge investment in bringing fiber optic television and Internet service to consumers around the country.  One analyst likens FiOS to a "Maserati for the price of a Volkswagen."

The campaign videos of presumptive Republican Presidential candidate Senator John McCain, are being hosted on Blip.tv, the small New York-based video publishing site, Beet.TV has confirmed.

As network television has largely abandoned live coverage of the national political conventions, the online media world is expanding coverage and resources.

Kara Swisher blogs about Beet.TV this morning and publishes a video interview with me.  I have been grateful for the support and feedback of so many accomplished and experienced journalists who admire our work.  Having Kara compliment our work and take the time and effort to publish a segment about us is incredibly gratifying.  — […]

The Web site of the campaign of Barack Obama had 3.3 million unique visitors in June, double the 1.6 million uniques for the John McCain site.  Time spent per visit on the Obama campaign was over 11 minutes vs. 5:30 minutes on the McCain site, Nielsen Online has told Beet.TV

CNET News.com, now part of CBS, and CBS News are collaborating on the coverage of the Democratic and Republican national conventions.  Three News.com staffers, Declan McCullagh, Stephanie Condon, and Kara Tsuboi, will be covering, writes News.com editor Dan Farber today.

MOUNTAINVIEW, CA — While the recently announced collaboration between Google, Yahoo! and Adobe to search and index Flash files (not Flash video) could yield better results, the project is in the very early stages.  For effective search optimization, Webmasters have to think text, says Adam Lasnik, Search Evanglist at Google.

On Thursday, August 7, Reuters correspondent Margarita Antidze was the first to report on the escalating fighting in the South Ossetian town of Megvrekisi. The news organization was quick to mobilize print and video reporters the region.  The first video segments appeared on the world’s television stations and online the next day.  

In what could be a watershed event for online video, Adobe Systems, the developer of the ubiquitous Flash video ecosystem, will introduce voice-to-text functionality into the workflow of Flash video production soon.  Jim Guerard, who heads all rich media at Adobe, says in this exclusive video clip, that we will see this functionality later this […]

CNN has has long been a trendsetter in video journalism newsgathering and distribution methods.  Yesterday, CNN announced that is would assign journalists to 10 cities across the United States to work in mini-bureaus with not much more than a camera, a laptop and an Internet connection.

Blinkx, the video search engine based on speech-to-text technology, offers both a white label solution for video publishers as well as a consumer destination. The destination has grown in popularity from under 500,000 to more than 3.5 million monthly uniques over the past 12 months, according to Compete.  The company has indexed many millions of […]

The office of Britain’s Prime Minister has launched a online video channel called Number 10 to provide speeches, media events and archives.  We’ve embedded a segment below.

For those of us who don’t like to see overlay ads pop up or stream while watching video, you won’t see any on the NBC Olympics coverage on MSN.  That’s a mandate from the International Olympic Committee, which keeps tight control of the way the Games are presented.

Salon has introduced its new section for community-generated blogs, called Open Salon. The site had been in beta since April. In something of a first for a media company, registered members of Open Salon will can pay fellow members with real money from Revolution Money.  Registered users will get $10 and will be able to […]

Despite the grumblings from some media critics and bloggers over the weekend about the selective delays by NBC around the distribution of online video coverage of the Summer Olympics, the depth and quality of the online video offering is astonishing.  There is quite a lot live and mostly everything else is up on demand.

With the audiences relatively small for original Web video, the opportunity for producers and distributors to make money will come from brand messages and product placements "baked" into the video, says Jigar Thakarar, Director, Web Original Content Strategy at CBS Interactive.  (You will find his comments 2:30 into this clip.)

Watching the ghastly war unfold this weekend in Georgia between Georgian and Russian troops over the breakaway region of Ossetia, we found Reuters reports to be widely used online including by the The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

The online coverage of the Olympic Games on MSN is spectacular.  The Olympics often provide  a showcase innovation, as Business Week’s cover story explains.  For this Olympics, in the digital media realm, a milestone innovation will surely be the entrance of Microsoft’s Silverlight. Earlier today at the Beet.TV studio, we spoke with Eric Schmidt, director […]

Andrew Baron, founder of the pioneering webisode Rocketboom came by the Beet.TV studios earlier today for a debrief about the just announced syndication deal with Sony and its implications for his company.

Google recently released a new set of webmaster tools which provide smaller sites the ability to optimize search and communicate with Google directly from the dashboard of a site’s hosting company.