Andy Plesser

According to a new report on the valuation of the top 25 blogs, the eight month-old Silicon Alley Insider is worth $5.4 million.  Not bad work for founder/backer Kevin Ryan and editor/pundit/power blogger Henry Blodget. I’m not quite sold on the valuation equation and find it hard to believe that SAI is worth $2 million […]

Velocix, the Cambridge, England-based content delivery network (CDN) has announced the introduction of live video streaming distribution services. Surely live streaming will gain momentum this year with the introduction of Microsoft’s Silverlight and the Adobe Media Player.  These services will demand considerable bandwidth and P2P solutions will likely have an important role. For a perspective […]

Revision3, the fast growing producer of online tech programming, has signed an agreement with Blip.tv to syndicate the video for all its shows.  The news was first reported this morning by Michael Learmonth of the Silicon Alley Insider. Earlier this month, I was in San Francisco for a tour of the very cool Revision3 offices […]

The Washington Post, long an innovator in expanding its online presence, has created a popular application on Facebook with some 350,000 downloads, Jim Brady, Executive Editor of the washingtonpost.com tells Beet.TV The application (L) is a kind of political badge which members put on their Facebook pages, showing their political leanings from liberal to conservative. […]

Josh Bernoff, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, told me that some marketers are finding success by putting videos into social networks.  Not ads, but content of value to the members of the networks. He talks about successes of big and small marketers and explains the values of such interaction which is far greater […]

Co-founders Jason Liebman and Daniel Blackman, along with other Google alumni, have raised $8 million and launched HowCast a  new  company that produces and distributes "how to videos" on a range of topics.  Recently, Beet.TV visited Jason and Daniel for a tour of their Manhattan offices and to talk about the sector and progress at […]

Google News, the aggregation platform for news from thousands of news sources, has a short shelf life. After news stories are posted, they expire after 30 days. However, all these stories, plus millions of older articles never posted, reside on Google News Archives.  Last summer, Google announced plans to archive major news sources.  It recently […]

"Don’t be concerned with a host, narration or music, just get close to what’s going on," saysAlbert Maysles a giant in the world of documentary filmmaking. His career has spanned 50 years.  Some know him for his documentary of the Rolling Stones "Gimme Shelter" and others for his "Salesman."  His work has had an immense […]

Flash, the ubiquitous Web plug-in that has driven the success of YouTube and the vast majority of online video has one big limitation: its files are not protected from being saved, mashed or republished.  Apple’s QuickTime and Microsoft’s Windows Media Player have robust security protocols. Since Flash has been mostly streamed and not downloaded — […]

Finally wrapping up our extensive coverage of SXSW.  Here’s our interview with Felicia Day, producer of "The Guild" the successful online video series.  It grabbed top honors for new video series at SXSW. My colleague Daisy Whitney interviewed the actress at the show. Here is our interview, a joint production of TV Week and Beet.TV. […]

There’s been quite a lot of buzz over the last day over the licensing of Adobe’s Flash Lite 3 to competitor Microsoft for use in mobile handsets running the new Silverlight multimedia platform. While the Adobe software enables viewing of Flash video players on phones, the immediate value of Flash Lite to Silverlight is its […]

We read with interest ZDNet’s Larry Dignan’s take on the unlikely announcement that Microsoft’s Silverlight will run on Adobe’s new mobile Flash platform called Flash Light 3.  From our standpoint, Adobe’s new Flash player for the phone is pretty awesome.  We got this demo earlier this month with Rhett Woods at the Adobe offices in […]

The collapse of Bear Stearns, one of the world’s largest financial institutions is shocking. We don’t yet know the ramifications.  Last June, I interviewed John Vogel, real estate industry expert and a professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.  Vogel  explains the  roots of this mess and explains the  role of Bear Stearns. […]

Click to play I had a chance to catch up with Jon Fine, media columnist for Business Week earlier this week at the McGraw Hill Media Summit.  I asked Jon about his takeaway from the conference.  He says that the success of digital media remains elusive.  He points to the relatively modest revenue of Gawker […]

Kevin Ryan, former CEO of DoubleClick, has been busy these days creating a number of businesses including one of our favorite blogs, the Silicon Alley Insider. Much more under the radar screen is a content delivery network (CDN) called Panther Express.  Kevin stopped by the Beet.TV studios recently to share a little update.  He told […]

Kent Nichols, co-creator of the web video sensation "Ask a Ninja," has just been tapped to co-write the remake of the schlock classic Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. My colleague Daisy Whitney of TV Week spoke with Kent about the project earlier this week at SXSW in Austin. It’s very exciting to see how online […]

Here’s a quick clip of ABC News president David Westin, a panelist at the McGraw Hill Media Summit.  He was on a panel which explored the value of broadcast journalism in the new media landscape.  Yes, he agrees a certain amount of news has become a "commodity."  But Westin addresses the value of enterprise reporting […]

Last night at the McGraw Hill Media Summit, I attended a private dinner where I had the good fortune to catch up with John Byrne, Business Week’s Executive Editor. I asked John about his intrepid technology columnist Sarah Lacy, who created a quite firestorm among the digerati in Austin on Sunday at SXSW with her […]

Long providing an opportunity for viewers to send in videos, text messages, camera phone videos, comments and photos through an area called iReport, CNN.com has launched a true consumer generated news portal.  It has its own url as ireport.com This is completely different from what iReport had been, which had solicited contributed content, then edited […]

With the acquisition of Club Penquin last year, the Walt Disney Company is making a significant entrance into social media.  This morning at the opening session of the McGraw Hill Media Summit, Robert Iger, President and CEO of Disney spoke of Penguin Club and his igloo, a location he has staked out in the virtual […]