Andy Plesser

CANNES – With Connect technology part of the new Xbox One device, which has many millions of users, Microsoft has presented a “real game changer” to the media world with many possibilities says Norm Johnston, chief digital office for Mindshare Worldwide, the big global media unit of WPP’s GroupM. We spoke with him on Thursday […]

CANNES – While the move to automated systems of buying and selling advertising inventory is inevitable, the ad agency trading desks and the holding companies need to do a much better job in creating technical and business standards around the emerging electronic marketplace, says Randall Rothenberg, CEO of the IAB, the digital publishing industry’s trade […]

CANNES –  With the success of the HuffPost Live,  a 12-hour live interactive video program, parent company AOL  be will doing more live shows around both day-part programs and special events on its home page, says Susan Lyne, CEO of the Brand Group, at AOL. The veteran television executive explains that a confluence of forces, […]

CANNES – Video will becoming increasingly delivered via a highly personalized “streams,” explains Erin McPherson who heads video at Yahoo, in this interview with Beet.TV.   She explains the importance of the Summly integration — along with the the streaming delivery of content. Scale is high on the agenda, with an eye on greater, more diverse […]

CANNES – Michael Kassan, CEO of the LA/NY-based  MediaLink, a highly influential media and technology consulting firm,  has emerged as one of the Cannes Lion’s most important players, hosting the the week’s most in-demand party and programming five days of sessions in the convention center, principally with the firm’s clients. We spoke with Kassan this week […]

CANNES – Mariane Pearl,  who is spearheading a global advocacy group for woman called Chime for Change, will launch a global news site about women with correspondents from locations around the globe, she says in this interview with Beet.TV.  She will serve as managing editor. She says that the organization is growing quickly and raised more […]

Cluj-Napoca, Romania —  From an office in this academic town, equidistant to Bucharest, Budapest and Belgrade, a team of developers has completely re-engineered Beet.TV, using the AOL video platform and a highly customized WordPress CMS. The project, supervised by AOL executives in New York,  involved the migration and proper contextualization of some 4,000 videos and […]

TubeMogul, the Emeryville, California video ad technology company, has raised $10 million additional C round of funding, lead by Singapore-based  SingTel Innov8, the corporate venture capital arm of the SingTel Group, the company announced today. Earlier this year we interviewed TubeMogul CEO and founder Brett Wilson about the company and its opportunities for growth around […]

AOL is seeking to syndicate video content, not just across  websites and portals – but into proprietary video players, the first of which is Brightcove.  The alliance allows Brightcove customers,  such as the Weather Company, to pull videos from hundreds of AOL publisher partners into their Brightcove players, explains Frank Besterio, VP and head of […]

Netflix, which dominates Internet traffic in the U.S. with as much as 30 percent of bandwidth at peak hours, is shifting from its distribution from content delivery networks (CDN’s), which stream from a central point, to a multitude of “cache” boxes which will be widely distributed to Internet providers who will store high quality video […]

Ustream, the widely popular live web streaming site, has been quietly moving into a full-services, video solution provider for small customers and  big enterprises and media companies, says David Gibbons, VP for product marketing, in this interview with Beet.TV Some customers for the Ustream video platform include Cisco, Dell and Sony, says Gibbons. We spoke […]

Tremor Video’s VideoHub unit has gotten industry certification from the Media Ratings Council (MRC) for its viewability measurement tool, which determines the  placement of videos on web pages, plus engagement and other metrics, the company announced today. We spoke with VideoHub general manager Anthony Risicato about the issue of viewability video players advertisers.  He also […]

BOSTON – Effective video search has been limited, largely because search engines don’t index images. But things are changing with the implementation of Schema, a technology which allows video producers to “wrap” a transcript as an “object” into a video. The Schema initiative is an industry collaboration of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex.  It was […]

BOSTON – mDialog, the Toront0-based video advertising technology company, has a new product to insert video advertising dynamically into live programming.  The product, launched in collaboration with Brightcove, was announced last month at NAB. Last week at the Brightcove global customer event, we spoke with CEO Greg Philpott about the live streaming solution and an overall […]

LONDON – With the same publishing platform used by its staff and its network of 1,000 contributors, Forbes.com is increasing branded content in the form of articles published on brands’ microsites.   The company is publishing about eight such articles a day and is expanding into branded video projects, says Mike Perlis, President and CEO of […]

MONACO (originally published 11/20/2012) – Tumblr, which has been a non-commerical blog platform, has announced an agency program for brands who want to share their messages in the form of “storytelling,” explains founder and CEO David Karp in this interview with Beet.TV

BOSTON – Taboola, the video recommendation platform widely deployed on many publisher news sites, is now on mobile devices, on the apps of Time.com and several Hearst U.K. publications, says Adam Singolda, CEO, in this interview with Beet.TV We spoke with him about the growth of Taboola and the company’s solution for mobile video recommendation. The […]

BOSTON – Joyus, the San Francisco-based video shopping site for women, which raised $11.5 million in a new venture round earlier this month from Time Warner and others, is finding extremely high conversion rates from video views to product sales, says co-founder Diana Williams in this interview with Beet.TV She says that the product videos […]

BOSTON – Launched on Roku in October, the Smithsonian Channel is ranked among the most popular apps, attracting 2 million video views a month, says Carlos Zambrano, senior producer at Smithsonian Networks, in this this interview with Beet.TV Also in this this interview, he talks about the channel’s popularity as an Apple iOS app. We […]

BOSTON – While the Xbox grows as a pervasive digital video platform, the number of video apps is quite limited, controlled by Microsoft, but that will likely expand says Brightcove CEO David Mendels.  He says that Brightcove is readying several implementations for the game console. We spoke with him earlier this week at the Brightcove […]