Andy Plesser

Click To Play The sub-prime mortgage mess has many implications:  new barriers to getting a mortgage, the tumbling stock market, and yes, maybe trouble getting investment dollars for that cool start-up. In the digital economy, the  shake-out in the  mortgage industry could make a big hit on online advertising with troubled marketers in the home […]

Click To Play Adobe’s announcement today that it will encode video, not just to the Web video "standard" of Flash, but will also provide encoding to the conventional broadcast standard of H.264, means that video created by small and large content developers will look great on many devices, notably on television sets.  Here’s a report […]

Click To Play Robert Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, the standard for connecting computers in a network, says that the promise of video is to limit the need of physical meeting which means less travel and greater energy conservation.  He told me that this could be a "huge benefit to all mankind." I taped this […]

Click To Play The introduction of the much anticipated Adobe Media Player (AMP), the desktop application that allows users to download and save Flash files, will launch in Beta this year but won’t have a full introduction until next year.  A spokesperson from Adobe told Beet.TV late last week: "Adobe Media Player is planned to […]

Kara Swisher is having lots of fun these days with her video camera.  She just posted this interview with Valleywag’s new editor Owen Thomas.  Owen talks about the power of gossip in the Valley and what is "sexy."  Well, it’s money natch.  No surprise — but it’s an interesting interview with a guy who understands […]

Cable companies have invested billions in creating an effective video on demand (VOD) but studios are balking at making much content available, at least right now,  writes Randall Stross in today’s New York Times: According to Craig Moffett, vice president and senior analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, cable’s video-on-demand is well positioned, technically […]

Click To Play Beet.TV has learned from a high-level industry source that the deployment of Joost has been delayed in large part by issues related to firewalls that block access. The problem with firewalls is not new, it’s been discussed for sometime on Joost forums, but the roadblock highlights concerns about accessing P2P networks.  This […]

Click To Play Amazing but true, folks are watching advertising on their PC’s as a form of entertainment, according to today’s advertising column by Stuart Elliott.  Stuart’s article is about veryfunnyads.com and the emerging trend of consumer opting to watch ads and branded video on the web. Viewers will watch commercials for fun and their […]

Click To Play Topix has grown to be a top-twenty news site.  The platform facilitates interactivity in the form of comments, mostly around localized news.  You simply type in your zip code and comment on local news.  The company is generating content for its site and is a solution provider to number of newspapers in […]

Click To Play I was in San Francisco on Monday afternoon to meet with video search pioneer Timothy Tuttle to get a preview of a very impressive new video destination site from AOL’s Truveo unit.  It’s based on the search and categorization platform developed Truveo a company founded by Tim in 2004 and acquired by […]

Click To Play There’s been quite a lot of talk lately about the the emergence of overlay ads in the form of "bugs" and "tickers," types of online video advertising which are inserted for a period of time into the video stream — mostly at the bottom.    The Wall Street Journal had a terrific […]

Click To Play In today’s New York Times, Brad Stone writes about the recent announcement Google to place comments around news stories from media organizations on the Google site.    There’s been a lot of concern among major media that this constitutes a further cannibalization of original reporting by search engines and content aggregators. Brad […]

Click To Play Kontiki, the  P2P content distribution company was purchased by VeriSign last year.  Earlier this month I caught up with Jeff Richards, who runs the business as head of the digital distribution unit at VeriSign in Mountainview. Jeff says that his company’s "peer-assisted" technology can save content producers from 30 – 40 percent […]

Click To Play Live, quality online video is "taking off" and will become widespread in the months ahead, according to Adobe, the maker of Flash. I visited with Chris Hock, who heads the Adobe the Flash media group, which is based in San Francisco. Chris expects that live will pervade the Web from events, to […]

Click To Play Irving Wladawsky-Berger has just retired as IBM’s chief strategist.  He is now a visiting professor at MIT.  I caught up with him last week at the AlwaysOn conference at Stanford were he was on a panel about virtual worlds.  Here’s a free webcast of the session. He is believes the virtual world […]

Click To Play Associated Content, a company that has set up a network for independent content producers to submit and monetize their work, will expand the opportunities for video makers.  Started in 2005 by Luke Beatty, Associated Content has been funded by some of the most highly regarded investors in the digital media space, including […]

Click To Play The NewsMarket is a quickly-growing video portal where news broadcasters and Web producers download video files provided by a range of corporations, governmental organizations and non-profits.  These organizations pay the NewsMarket to host and distribute company-created content. Downloads had been limited to "credentialed" media organizations.  Now the company is providing video to […]

Kara Swisher, who has been writing about technology for the Wall Street Journal for 10 years, weighed in today in favor of eliminating the subscription charges for the Journal.  There has been quite a lot of speculation that Rupert Murdoch will convert the Journal to free, ad-supported.  We shall see. Swisher is Cool Video Blogger […]

There’s been a lot of anticipation about the launch of Silverlight, the new streaming video platform.  Today, the first implementation went live, on the MLB.com. Here’s my post about Silverlight and a demo from Microsoft’s Sean Alexander.  This was originally published in May. Here’s some perspective from Ryan Stewart, blogger at ZDNet who thinks the […]

Click To Play There’s been a great deal of anticipation about the launch of the BBC iPlayer, a desktop application that allows registered users in the U.K. to download and view a range of programming in high quality. Mark Thompson, director general of the BBC, hailed the player as a development as significant as the […]