Andy Plesser

LAS VEGAS, Microsoft has taken the wraps off its Media Plaform which is now hosted on Windows Azure, here at the NAB Show.

LAS VEGAS — Some 50 of the industry’s leading video services companies are rallying around a unified live video streaming protocol known as DASH, says Akamai’s Will Law, Principal Architect, Media Division, in this interview with Beet.TV

The notion of addressable TV, a scenario in which broadcasters and marketers "narrowcast" content on a one-to-one basis to a viewer, is still very much in the early stages, but it can become a reality if marketers use consumer data to reach specific individuals.

Video is enjoying a huge surge in demand says Ari Bluman, President, North America, of Real Media Group, a unit of WPP. 

The "feckless infatuation" of magazine publishers in creating closed-garden Apps to replicate their publications has proven to be a disappointment, says Jason Pontin, editor-in-chief of MIT's Technology Review in this 10-minute video.

Ooyala, the big online video services company, has unveiled a recommendation engine which serves up related videos at the end of clips based on the interest and anyomous profile of the individual viewer.

24/7 Media has endorsed DG’s MediaMind technology as its preferred platform to third party online video advertising serving, the two companies announced today.

BrightRoll, the big San Francisco-based provider of video advertising services, announced today the introduction of tools including an inventory planning solution.

Yahoo! has an agreement with Ford to produce a reality show for the Web — a 10-part series about cross-country adventures in the Ford Focus Electric. It is called "Plugged In."

Unlike news on teleivison which fully occupies its own screen, video for the Web must share real estate with text which is generally adequate to report the news. To win mindshare on the Web, video has to be visual and unique, says Charlie Tillinghast, President and Publisher of MSNBC.com in this interview with Beet.TV

The Metropolitan Opera, which has been streaming performances on demand on the Web since 2008, recently released an iPad App featuring the institution's nearly 400 full-length operas and hundreds of audio recordings.

LONDON (via SkypeVideo) Bambuser, the fast growing Swedish start-up that allows users to stream live video over mobile devices, has entered into an agreement with the Associated Press.  The pact provides the Bambuser platform to AP staffers and provides "citizen" journalists to provide unique live video to the wire service.

Paul Slavin, the veteran news producer and executive at ABC News who left the network last year, joined the big health destination site Everyday Health where he is creating an ambitious slate of video for the Web and television.

An early stage Tel Aviv-based start-up called Wibbitz, says that it can take the RSS feed of a text publisher and create a distinct video segment incorporating voice, images, photos and video.  

AOL has launched men's lifestyle destination site called Mandatory in partnership with LA-based Web studio shop BermanBraun.  

The one-day marketplace for Web original videos in New York, called the Digitas NewFront, an annual event over the past five years, has greatly expanded this year to become a two-week program with the participation of the major video portals along with top Web studio creators and syndicators.

VIEQUES, PR — For media companies to succeed, they need to operate on the platforms they know best, not distribute content on places which are not their core businesses.

With very limited cable distribution, Al Jazeera turned to London's Livestation, a portal for dozens of global broadcasters, to take its satellite signal and stream it on the Web, explains Livestation CEO Lippe Oosterhof in this segment from the Beet.TV Executive Summit in Vieques, Puerto Rico.

The Washington Post has launched a branded StumbleUpon page, a powerful crowd-sourced recommendation engine, the paper announced last night.

The notion of the “semantic Web,” championed by the Web’s inventor Tim Berners-Lee and his W3C organization, involves the deep interconnection of text data.