Andy Plesser

Click To Play View a transcript of this interview Newspapers have a unique and present opportunity to create online video to build audience and adverting revenue. Dow Jones and its Wall Street Journal. Barron’s, MarketWatch units have been moving aggressively into video news and feature reporting.  As we reported on Beet.TV earlier this year, company […]

Online video advertising is hot because people are engaged and click on video ads at higher rates than standard advertising, a new report by eMarketer has found. Viewers of in-stream advertising, watch at a rate nearly double the rate of standard ads.  While click-through numbers might appear low, less that one percent, the study has […]

Click To Play View a transcript of this interview Not sure if the just announced YouTube video awards means more that some nice buzz, but the reality is that YouTube is changing. It is becoming a platform for serious content producers who have been leery of the site in the past. The new channel strategy, […]

From the Tsunami to last summer’s battle in Lebanon to the streets to Baghdad, citizen video journalists  are transforming how we experience conflict.  How these videos change public discourse and public policy is hard to say, but there is a great deal of compelling content filtering through the war zones.  In December, I interviewed Brian […]

Rudy Guiliani has a speech on YouTube which is nearly one hour, making it the longest campaign video, according to political video watcher, 21-year old Georgetown student James Kotecki.   Kotecki has some good advice for the former New York Mayor, hire a video editor and step in front of the lecturn. Kotecki’s views are part […]

Click To Play View a transcript of this interview Mainstream media is tipping its foot into videoblogging. The world’s largest news organization, the Associated Press, is exploring the new medium with a vlog by Ilana Arazie.  Ilana works on the business side of the AP and does the vlog "Real City Tales" as sort of […]

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch recently wrote about two start-ups who are building new businesses around user-generated cartoons. Aniboom is neck and neck with newcoming MyToons in the race to become the “YouTube of Cartoons.” Both sites are excellent, although MyToons is still in private beta. Well, MyToons.com just came out of beta.  The player  looks […]

Click To Play View a transcript of this interview Here is the second part of my interview with Alex Laats, head of Podzinger, the division of defense contractor BBN, a Massachusetts company which is utilizing anti-terrorism technology to "listen" to the audio tracks of millions of YouTube clips. My earlier post reports on how a […]

Click To Play View a transcript of this interview A major defense department contractor, BBN of Cambridge, Massachusetts, has applied a national security technology application, developed to fight terrorism, to "crawl" the audio tracks of public Internet videos through its PodZinger subsidiary.  PodZinger has analyzed, transcribed and organized some 1.5 million YouTube clips since December […]

Click To Play View a transcript of this interview Social media, online video and even virtual offices in Second Life have become mainstream elements of public relations over the past 12 months. The very practice of PR has changed as smart practitioners have created platforms of influence outside of the traditional media channels. And, some […]

Video sharing sites are providing a variety of monetization schemes for individual video uploaders. Revver, Blip, VideoEgg, Brightcove and others are splitting advertising revenue with content creators.  The most common share seems to be 50/50. Some sites, notably Metacafe and CurrentTV pay contributors based on the quality and viewership of their submissions. Neither YouTube or […]

Click To Play View a transcript of this interview The Associated Press, the world’s largest news organization, and Microsoft have developed an online video platform for thousands of U.S. newspapers, television and radio stations to upload, publish and monetize locally-created video. The new system is in beta tests with some 30 newspaper publishers and broadcasters […]

Click To Play View a transcript of this interview The success of YouTube has come largely from the site’s utility to "pass along" video clips to blogs and social networking sites, according to two of our most astute observers of the Internet media scene, Henry Jenkins of MIT and online video analyst Brian Haven of […]

The Wall Street Journal Online has banner advertising running on YouTube to promote subscriptions.  I found one of the first ads earlier today rotating through on the new Beet.TV channel on YouTube.  Here’s a screen shot. Our new channel has just been designed and we’ll be moving our 230 clips to the channel over the […]

Click To Play View a transcript of this interview Here’s my second interview with John Caplan, President of Ford Modeling, the world largest and best known modeling agency. As we discussed in the first post, Ford is providing scores of models with camcorders and handling uploading to YouTube, Revver and other video sharing sites.  Ford’s […]

Click To Play View a transcript of this interview MIT’s Henry Jenkins says that the success of YouTube is from the creation of content around communities of interest. It’s not about individual voyeurism. It’s a social media phenomenon driven by the viewers organized around content that matters to them.  Henry says that social networks have […]

Click To Play View a transcript of this interview Louise Story of The New York Times has a story in today’s paper about a new form of video syndication from Google.  The company has expanded its Adsense program to include video from Google content partners including Dow Jones and CondeNet. It’s a new kind of […]

Blinkx, the video search technology that is featured in today’s New York Times in an article by Jason Pontin, has an agreement to search and index videos published by The New York Times. The company has agreements with a number of publishers and content developers to index video, including Dow Jones, the publisher of The […]

Click To Play View a transcript of this interview Online video will be an increasingly important platform in the presidential elections.  Candidates are making announcements and policy statements on their own video clips,  And, the public will be uploading all sort of videos.  We reported a few weeks back that the Barack Obama campaign is […]

Click To Play View a transcript of this interview The New York Times, which has been producing original videos for the past three years, has taken the bold step of inviting its readers to submit videos for publication on the paper’s site.   This will mark the first time The Times has published user-generated video. The […]