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CondeNet, the online division of the magazine company Conde Nast, is making a big push in creating video on its several themed portals.  It has doubled the amount of video clips produces this year over last, and the pace is going to pick-up with an ambitious program to build out travel videos of world destinations […]

Click To Play Nicholas Butterworth has launched a pioneering special-interest broadband programming and distribution company in Diversion Media and its Tavelisitic and SnowVision channels.  He’s broken quite a lot of ground in his former job as head of MTV’s interactive operations.  Nicholas shares his views on how independent content companies can succeed with advertising and […]

One of the major "roots" of the media revolution lies somewhere between San Jose and San Francisco.  New next week, we’re going to in California, digging deep. I’m packing up and heading to San Francisco tomorrow morning.  It’s going to be quite a week with visits to Fora.TV, AdPerk.com, Adobe, Google, VeriSign, HP and Yahoo!!!! […]

Microsoft has just released an advanced Beta of Silverlight, the new multi-media authoring, encoding and user platform.  The technology competes directly with Adobe’s ubiquitous Flash ecosystem. Like Flash, users of Silverlight need to download a thin Web-based application. Here’s a good explanation from PC World.  The big public introduction of Silverlight will be its use […]

Click To Play The New York Times has just introduced long-form sponsored videos which appear on the paper’s main video page.  The new program launched yesterday with videos produced by FedEx.  The short vignettes are about five FedEx employees from around the globe.  I like this one of a delivery guy driving around the English […]

There’s has been a lot of buzz about a Washington Post video of an accomplished violinist performing in the capital city’s subways.  Donald Graham, chairman of The Washington Post Company, showed the clip at an annual shareholder meeting, writes Fortune’s Marc Gunther about the clip and its implications.  This is the kind of thing that […]

Click To Play In May we covered the launch of Adap.tv, a new company that has developed a technology to insert overly ads onto streaming video clips.  It’s akin to the banners you see running at the bottom of a news or sports TV program — although the ads don’t stay in place throughout the […]

Joost, the new and much talked about P2P television platform, will use Level 3 as its content delivery network (CDN), both companies announced this morning.  Update/Correction:  Level 3 is providing colocation services and high-speed Internet connectivity, not CDN services. Seems to us a big win for Level 3, which has made big moves into the […]

Well, we’ve finally got around to creating a video podcast for Beet.TV and it’s great. We’ve been uploading our videos to Blip.TV, which provides a very nice quality Quicktime video for the iTunes player.  (Actually my summer intern, my daughter Becky, who will be a sophomore at Colgate, has been uploading our some 300 Beet.TV […]

Click To Play The escalating demands of bandwidth for online video is posing a challenge and an opportunity for companies that deliver this content.  Big content delivery companies who distribute the files over global networks of giant servers, companies like Akamai, Limewire and VeriSign, are incorprorating peer-to-peer protocol to distribute content more effectively.  Even Microsoft […]

Howard J. Rubenstein is the smartest and most powerful independent public relations practitioner.  But, he’s more than just a PR man, he’s the ultimate powerbroker.  I should know, I had the good fortune to work for him for eight years until I started my own PR firm back in 1992. No one has reported more […]

How cool is this:  YouTube is allowing users to create custom players with a selection of colors, layouts and names.  This is an important development for content creators large and small who want to create an identity on YouTube. Here’s Beet.TV, the "purple channel," in purple! Like my esteeemed colleague Duncan Riley wrote about this […]

Revver, an early pioneer in online video sharing, has implemented a big change as it has began inserting in-stream advertising into a few of its clips.  Up until know, Revver offered just a simple, post roll click-to-action advertisement.  Revver and content creators shared the revenue created by the clicks.  A Revver spokeswoman told me that […]

With new management in place, there’s a lot of action underway at Yahoo! these days. The clock is running on Jerry Yang’s new 100-day action plan. Not sure if corporate communications is part of the plan, but Yahoo! surely needs to improve its image and could be making some progress by landing Ruth Sarfaty as […]

We were saddened to hear that the accomplished media reporter and our good friend Dan Fost will be leaving the Chronicle next month.  We understand from sources at the paper that he has taken advantage of a generous buyout. San Francisco has always been a great, albeit small media town and Dan was always the […]

Click To Play Richard Morgan is back from the super high level media mogul retreat hosted by Allen & Company in Sun Valley where he was covering the annual event for The Deal, where he is a staff editor. Richard is a former editor of Adweek, advertising columnist for the New York Observer and author.  […]

Wow, congratulations to Laurel Touby at Mediabistro for the sale of her company to Jupitermedia for $23 million.  Hot damn! Beet.TV wonders if her husband, Business Week marketing columnist and rock ‘n roller Jon Fine will give up his day job? Hope to update you on this later today. Update 8 a.m. EDT:  Jon Fine […]

Click To Play In the video publishing realm, having good content is key, natch.  But having a robust content management system is essential, particularly for big broadcasters and publishers. Over the past months, we have covered some of the solution providers who power the big Web video publishers.  These have included Roo, the Feedroom and […]

NBC Universal yesterday announced the launch of myNBC, a social networking site created for fans of NBC programming.    As Louise Story reports in today’s New York Times, there are various takes on this by industry observers including Forrester analyst Charlene Li, Jack Myers and yours truly.  I told Louise that NBC should unlock the […]

Just got the numbers for online video sites for June from Nielsen/NetRatings and Veoh has registered the second fastest growth among major video sites, jumping 254 percent from the same month last year. The fastest growing of the major players is Yahoo! which is up over 400 percent. The New York Times story yesterday by […]