Andy Plesser

LOS ANGELES — Here at Digital Hollywood yesterday, HP announced that YouTube clips would be made available on the soon-to-be-released MediaSmart Connect digital media receiver.  The box acts as a connection between multiple PC’s and Macs around the house to television sets.  HP is squarely taking on Apple TV with the new device which will […]

FORA.tv, referred by TechCrunch as the "C-SPAN of the Web," has closed a Series A round of venture funding with $4 million from William Randolph Hearst III, Adobe Ventures and other investors.  Hearst and Adobe were investors in the original $2 million seed round.  The San Francisco start-up organizes videos of symposiums and conferences from […]

Kontiki, one of the first peer-to-peer distribution companies, has been sold by parent VeriSign as part of a broad and anticipated corporate divestiture. Yesterday in Hollywood I caught up with Bill Wishon who heads marketing for Kontiki.  He spoke about the new investor and the opportunities ahead. He says that traditional content delivery networks (CDN’s) […]

How cool is this: Beet.TV has established a global video news gathering operation, with hundreds of videographers, in over 50 nations, through a new association with TurnHere.TurnHere is the Emeryville, California-based video production and distribution company that produces thousands of short Web videos for corporate customers including Williams Sonoma, Simon & Schuster and Conde Nast.  […]

Here in Hollywood last night, I caught up with several of the creative leaders in independent online video.  I interviewed  Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried, producers of lonelygirl15, Tim Street of French Maid TV and Hayden Black of Good Night Burbank.  As each of these producers seek a growing audience, they are monetizing their content […]

In a move that has been highly anticipated by content creators, online publishers and advertising agencies, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), the industry trade organization of online publishers, will announce today that the standardization of online video advertising has been finalized. Many of the standards, including specifics for companion ads and pre-roll ads have been […]

Click To Play In the span of just six months, peer-to-peer (P2P) companies have gone from being the bane of Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) to emerging as a practical solution for managing network traffic and maximizing profits for the ISP’s and content creators. A great deal of collaboration is underway including the efforts of Comcast […]

Late last month, CNET Networks quietly released a superb new Flash video player.  The player is beginning to propagate CNET’s news videos.  It was developed in house.  Here’s what I think is notable: *The player has a pop-up window for a text description along with hyperlinks to related stories. This is extremely valuable as videos […]

The newly launched MySpace page for political coverage with content from MSNBC is an interesting experiment in brand building in the social media world.  Videos from msnbc.com appear on the MySpace video player.  Not just a marketing outpost, NBC News talent and executives are busy "friending" and sharing.  Nightly News anchor Brian Williams has been […]

The utilization of Flash on mobile devices may well expand with the news that Adobe will provide Flash for free for certain mobile phone applications.  The initiative is called Open Screen.  The BBC published the news earlier today. Earlier this year, I was at Adobe’s San Francisco office for this cool demo of how Flash […]

Acclaimed for his work as employee #1 at MTV where he was creative director and later as president of MTV Online, president of Hanna Barbara and the force behind the revitalization of Nickelodeon, Fred Seibert has been on the forefront of several chapters in the (r)evolution of television. These days he’s building a diversified network […]

Dwight Merriman and Kevin Ryan are co-founders of DoubleClick, the giant ad serving technology platform sold to a private equity firm in 2005 for $1.1 billion and later to Google. The two have been building new businesses including a content delivery network (CDN) called Panther Express.   Earlier this year, Kevin told  Beet.TV that Panther is […]

EdgeCast is another of the scrappy upcoming content delivery networks (CDN) which is vying for a piece of the market for the distribution of big video files around the globe.  The Los Angeles company has raised $10 million, with most from Disney’s venture fund. In just 9 months, the company has landed over 100 customers.  […]

Click To Play Larry Kramer, the former newspaper editor who started MarketWatch, is one of the most accomplished innovators in online video journalism. He says that the value of presenting video online is the ability to present "unfiltered" information directly to the consumer.    He explains that video is not the medium of all news […]

Adify, the San Bruno-based ad network which raised $27 million in venture funding, has been sold to Cox Communications for "about $300," according to reports on paidContent and the Silicon Alley Insider.    I interviewed Adify chairman Larry Braitman 18 months ago in San Jose, I’ve reposted my interview tonight.  Good overview on the business […]

In a neighboring Chelsea art gallery last week, Samsung had a little show for some of its newest digital devices.  David took our non-HD Panasonic over for this report. He got a demonstration of the not yet released Samsung HMX20, a small and powerful camcorder with an 8GB internal Flash memory drive and a slot […]

Whether or not the new Adobe Media Player (AMP) enjoys widespread adoption, the technology solves the critical issue of tracking the viewership of downloaded files, says Mike Hudack, CEO and co-founder of Blip.tv. While most downloaded video files come through iTunes, publishers like the Washington Post and advertisers have difficulty knowing if the files are […]

VodPod, the San Francisco-based start-up that creates widgets of multiple video players, has doubled the number of video sites from which users pull clips to 3500 over the past six months.   VodPod users have organized some 1 million videos into widgets. Mark Hall, CEO of VodPod, told me on Sunday that most of this increase […]

Pioneering videobloggers Robert Scoble, Jeff Jarvis, Steve Garfield and Pop17’s Sarah Meyers are using a Nokia mobile device to stream live video to the Web.  Most upload to a Web sharing platform such as QIK and Flixwagon.  Some journalists are using the phones for news gathering. Camera phones are great, but live video streaming only […]

Click To Play Half of Internet traffic is carried on peer-to-peer networks.  For Internet Service Providers handling this traffic, new network management technologies are being explored and implemented. After the highly publicized "throttling" of P2P traffic by Comcast and a subsequent FCC inquiry and Congressional uproar, Comcast and BitTorrent have entered into a pact to to […]