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Click To Play It’s been flying under the radar and it’s still in beta, but NBC Universal has been building up a powerful online video distribution and advertising platform for a widerange of content — far beyond the NBC programming.  (This is separate from MSNBC.)  The new company nbbc or National Broadband Company, is majority […]

Click To Play John Battelle is one of the truly great media visionaries.  He was co-founder of Wired and founded The Industry Standard. He’s a highly influential blogger. And his wildly successful Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco next month is perhaps the industry’s hottest.  (Even Robert Scoble can’t get a ticket!) John’s next big […]

Click To Play I met ad man David Rittenhouse at MIT last month where we were attending the Emerging Technologies Conference.  David is one of the industry’s savviest observers of new media.  As part of the agency’s "neo" division, he devises edgy media plans for Ogilvy clients including IBM.  I sat down with him in […]

Click To Play Suranga Chandratillake, the Cambridge University-trained computer scientist and founder of Blinkx, dropped by the Beet.TV studios a few days ago to talk about his company and its solution for effective search of video.  Unlike most video search which most commonly finds clips by the words or "metadata" surrounding video clips, Blinkx has […]

The Wall Street Journal (subscription) just (4:25 PM EDT) issued an alert stating that Google has acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion.  To understand the market dynamics of why this makes a lot of sense, get the download from Forrester’s Charlene Li.  She thinks YouTube has gotten it right in many ways, specifically as an advertising […]

Click To Play I think there are some smart entrepreneurs out there who are going to disintermediate traditional media with online video tools.  Chris and Jennifer McBride will really shake up the city guide business with Savory Cities, their new start-up that creates little video guides to restaurants.    They’ve been tirelessly taping over 100 […]

Here at Beet.TV, we’ve been working away on a video blog about legal education for Fordham Law School.  LawClinic.TV  is about the school’s department that teaches aspiring lawyers in real experiences with clients. To our understanding it’s the first video blog to chronicle the academic world. The project got a terrific write-up in The New […]

The Wall Street Journal just issued a news alert (noon EDT) about a possible purchase of YouTube by Google for $1.6 billion.  The Journal (subscription) attributes Techcrunch for first reporting the "rumors".  Last night, Techcrunch’s Michael Harrington called the rumors "completely unsubstantiated."   Today, the Journal’s intrepid Google-beat-reporter Kevin Delaney cites a "a person familiar with […]

Click To Play Forrester Research has just released a comprehensive study examining online video consumption and the effectiveness of online video advertising.  For those of us trying to figure out how online video advertising will work, this is a very valuable report. Senior Analyst Brian Haven speaks with Beet.TV from his Cambridge, Massachusetts office. His […]

Click To Play Motorola is working to create cool new features for mobile devices, including one that allow mobile phone users to be video bloggers.  The company conducted a beta test with MIT students earlier this week using the new specially programmed Krazr phone.  The phone allows users to capture videos on the phone and […]

Click To Play Superstar venture capitalist Roger McNamee was on the campus of MIT for the Emerging Technologies Conference where he gave an extraordinary keynote address on the importance of media and entertainment as a dynamic area for innovation and for investment. His presentation was followed by a question and answer session with Jason Pontin, […]

I caught up with Joshua Schachter at MIT’s Emerging Technologies Conference in Cambridge today.  Joshua has a lot to celebrate — membership in del.icio.us has just hit one million. Seems like the acquisition by Yahoo! has gone very well indeed. Tonight he is being honored by Technology Review, organizer of the event, as the Innovator […]

Click To Play Video sharing is going mobile with sites like Q121, which allows users to download music videos, movie trailers and video clips to their cell phones and share them with their friends. The site combines mobile video, user generated content and social networking by allowing users to sign up and create profiles, and […]

Click To Play Dabble provides individuals with the ability to create and share preferred "playlists" of all sorts of videos from many sources.  The Berkeley-based company doesn’t host or publish video clips, it just indexes them according to the interest of viewers.  These "favorites" can then be shared with others.  I think it’s a cool […]

Click To Play Alex Blum was the top broadband strategist at AOL for eight years.  He now heads JumpTV, a new company that streams live broadcasts from far flung nations to subscriber’s computers. Programming is consumed by many immigrant groups. Alex says true streaming media is here — that live linear broadcasting over the public […]

Click To Play The Wall Street Journal says today that Facebook is in serious negotiations to sell to Yahoo! for somewhere around $1 billion.  The paper reports (subscription) that the start-up has been in talks with Microsoft and Viacom but talks with Yahoo! are the most substantial. The Wall Street Journal says today that Facebook […]

I made a film in 1969 in my home town of Great Neck, Long Island about teenage sex, drugs, rock ‘n roll, alienation and despair.  It was my life!  A film scholar told me recently it reminded her of John Cassavetes’ "Faces" . Wow, that was my inspiration.  I kid you not, I saw that […]

Click To Play We spoke with Steven Levy today at the offices of Newsweek to get his take on Microsoft’s announcement of Zune, the digital music player that goes on sale this holiday season.  Far from a "me too" iPod, Steven sees profound implications in this new technology – he  says Zune is a strategic […]

You should check out Motionbox. It’s a new site for video uploads and sharing. The clips are an interesting mix of content – some cool independent filmmakers and lots of funky videos uploaded from mobile devices. What is unique about the site is that it allows uploaded video to be catalogued by scene. For example, […]

Click To Play MTV is breaking some important ground by empowering individuals to create personalized video blogs within the MTV Network. It’s called "The Pod, Broadcast Yourself." The video upload is processed through VideoEgg and the content management system used by MTV is from iUpload, an 8-year old content management systems business in Toronto. We […]