NBC's ratings for the London 2012 Olympics has passed the 2008 Beijing Games and the broadcaster is finding a surge in last minute advertising at high rates, reports The New York Times. Analyst Ashley Swartz says that social media has driven marketers' enthusiasm for the Games. She says that NBC's move to profitability is also being helped by the digital distributon of [...]

LONDON - Cait O'Riordan, Head of Product for Sport and 2012 at the BBC, released the digital consumption numbers for the first week of the Olympics.   The BBC, which streams just in the United Kingdom, had some 17 million people watch some of the Olympics on their digital device for at least 15 minutes, she says in a blog post. In [...]

For Verizon FiOS TV subscribers with Internet-connected televisions, an interactive widget with up-to-the-minute Olympics information, has been "extremely popular," with some 1.7 million launches, says Maitreyi Krishnaswamy, Verizon Director, FiOSTV in this interview with Beet.TV She says the use of the widget is greater than the company's weather widget which had been the most popular. 3-D Olympics is Popular Krishnaswamy, says that the [...]

Verizon FiOS, a leading  provider of broadband and cable TV services to consumers in the U.S., is giving customers access to over five thousand hours of live streaming video from the London 2012 Olympics, via NBC Sports, on various digital devices. Consumption of the digital offering is "huge," says Maitreyi Krishnaswamy, Verizon Director, FiOSTV, in this video inteview.  She says that [...]

Targeted TV ads are gaining speed thanks to efforts by media agencies like Starcom and GroupM, as well as Microsoft's Xbox, says Forrester analyst Michael Glantz in this interview with Beet.TV Addressable TV has been held out as a carrot for the TV ad buying market for many years, but now Glantz tells us he is optimistic about partnerships such as the ones [...]

SAN BRUNO, CA - YouTube has an Internet-connect bus in India, streaming the London 2012 Olympics to many small villages who lack television or Internet access. It is rolling through the country until August 13. The bus is equipped with several monitors where visitors can select which of 10 Olympic streams to watch. It's part of a big marketing effort by [...]

LONDON - Apple is preparing a "sneak attack," a profound change to television consumption with the introduction of a "dual app" scenario. These new apps, on the iPad or iPhone, will run the entire television experience, says Jeff Whatcott, Chief Marketing Officer of Brightcove, the big, Boston-based video services company. Whatcott made his comments during our video journalism summit at the [...]

PLAINVIEW, NY -- NeuLion, a U.S.-based digital video services company, has won the contract with China Central Television (CCTV) to provide video streaming services for the 2014 Winter and 2116 Summer Olympics in China, the company says. Late last week, the International Olympics Committee announced that it had awarded the rights for the upcoming games to the Chinese broadcaster for $160 [...]

SAN BRUNO, CA -- YouTube is streaming 3500 hours of 10 separate live channels of the London 2012 Olympics in the United States, via NBCOlympics.com, and to 64 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, including Ghana, Kenya, India, Malaysia and Singapore. The huge effort by the Google unit, which ingests the feeds from the International Olympic Committee and encodes them for [...]

Whie Digital and TV ads are bought and sold differently, strides are being made to bring the two mediums closer together, says Forrester analyst Michael Glantz in this interview with Beet.TV Citing efforts like NBC's partnership with Twitter and Facebook for the Olympics as well as comScore's push towards viewable impressions, Glantz sees efforts materializing for effective cross-platform buying and measurement. But, [...]

LONDON -- The optimal strategy for a premium content paywall varies greatly depending on the content, says Sean Knapp, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at online video technology firm Ooyala, during the recent Beet.TV Global Video Summit at the BBC Worldwide. "We encourage our publishers to spend their time with pay walls," Knapp says in this panel session, explaining that industry standards of [...]

LONDON - Open data around video news is essential to the growth of the digital news business, says Peter Bale, General Manager of CNN International Digital, in this segment from the recent Beet.TV video journalism summit in London held at the offices of the Financial Times. While open as becoming more widespread around text,notably with The Guardian, it is essential for [...]

While Neflix has nearly 24 million digital subscribers in the U.S., more than the number of those who pay for Comcast, the nation's biggest MSO, Netflix faces challenges including a lack of premium content for its streaming service, looming competition and sizable streaming costs, says Ashley Swartz, principal of the New York digital consultancy Furious Minds, and former head of [...]

The Financial Times, the global newspaper unit of Pearson, has more digital subscribers than print, and now derives half of its revenue from its digital products, Pearson announced today. Earlier this year we spoke with Rob Grimshaw, Managing Director of the FT.com about digital consumption and the opportunity for his paper  with a custom-made app which does not run on the [...]

The recent news that MSNBC.com has become NBCNews.com is much more than a name change, it means that all the digital resources of NBC News, its cable networks and owned televison are unified online as a new, "multi-platform news organization," explains Vivian Schiller, Chief Digital Officer of NBC News in this interview with Beet.TV That new capability will be on display [...]

SAN FRANCISCO - (Via Skype Video) Adobe will power live streaming and on-demand delivery to digital devices of the London 2012 Olympics for the BBC, says Ashley Still, Director of Video Solutions at Adobe Systems in this interview with Beet.TV. The BBC will use Adobe's Project Primetime video technology platform to reach viewers in the United Kingdom via computers, smartphones, tablets [...]

LONDON - Sky News, a unit of the highly profitable satellite channel in Great Britain, has introduced the functionality for viewers to timeshift live programming via its iPad app, says Rob Owers, Producer/Team Leader for the iPad at Sky, in this segment from our recent video journalism summit at the offices of the Financial Times. Viewers can review and share video [...]

LONDON - "This is the biggest thing the BBC has ever done," say Chris Dobson, GM/EVP Global Sales, BBC Worldwide, referring to the role of network as the host broadcaster for the London Olympics. Thousands of hours of programming will be viewable across multiple screens in the U.K.  Making this work is a piece of software which will automatically resize of [...]

Online video ad technology provider FreeWheel will be powering ad delivery on digital devices for NBC for the Olympics Games kicking off this Friday. The Olympics ad efforts are part of a multi-year deal that FreeWheel recently signed with NBC Universal. Beet.TV talked to FreeWheel's Frans Vermeulen, Senior VP of Revenue and Strategy, about the Olympics efforts as well as TV [...]

USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham, veteran tech reporter and the host/producer of the Talking Tech and Talking Your Tech video shows, has a new book out about the video production process, aimed at both professional journalists and newbies who want to improve their iPhone videos and DSLR footage techniques. Video Nation: A DIY Guide to Planning, Shooting and Sharing Great Video is [...]