AOL has launched men's lifestyle destination site called Mandatory in partnership with LA-based Web studio shop BermanBraun.   Yesterday we spoke with AOL General Manager Chris Grasso about the new site, AOL's plans to quickly scale a new vertical in a competive space and the opportunity for sponsors on the site.   Gillette is the launch sponsor of the site. AOL's launch comes at time [...]

The growth in online video consumption in the United States is currently being driven by increased viewing of long-form programming, such as TV shows and movies, says Eli Goodman, comScore Media Evangelist, in this session from the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques, Puerto Rico. Goodman provided a comprehensive overview of the state of the online video marketplace and consumer viewing habits [...]

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. The new industry-wide program is called the Digital Content NewFronts.  Founding partners include [...]

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. Instead of being "platform agnostic," they need to be "platform committed," says Jason Pontin, Editor-in-Chief of MIT's Technology Review, in summarizing one of the major themes explored at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat [...]

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. He says the events of the Arab spring generated nearly 4 million monthly views for [...]

The Washington Post has launched a branded StumbleUpon page, a powerful crowd-sourced recommendation engine, the paper announced last night. In an unrelated development, the paper has been using Google Hangouts to drive traffic to its videos, says Andrew Pergam, Director of Video, in this interview conducted in the Post's newsroom earlier this month. For more about StumbleUpon and how the company is [...]

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.  For text-free video, however, this is a challenge, but it has achieved by MSNBC.com through the creation and syndication of precise captions and other data surrounding news videos, explains Stokes Young, Executive Producer of MSNBC.com in this [...]

YouTube's brand channels are increasingly in the spotlight, but often what marketers want to know most is how to build and feed a YouTube channel. There are many ways to boost the video in a brand channel without producing it all in house, said YouTube Executive Eric Meyerson at the recent OMMA Global Conference. He explained that brands can draw from [...]

VIEQUES, PR -- A critical component for the success of online video is effective search and discovery, but it doesn't yet exist says Joy Marcus, venture partner at DFJ Gotham Venture in this video. She says that her firm is seeing interesting start-ups with new audio and video recognition technology -- several from out of Israel, she noted. She discusses these topics [...]

Radio is "the most durable" form of media, says Vivian Schiller, Chief Digital Officer of NBC News and former NPR CEO in this video.  And, its value will increase with advent of Internet-connected cars, she adds. Earlier this month, NBC News anounced a major program to syndicate news to hundreds of radio stations in the United States.  In this video, she [...]

Will Richmond, the authoritative editor and publisher of VideoNuze, will be back in New York with a one-day industry summit on June 19 exploring the state of online video advertising. Will stop by our offices last week to talk about the conference and some of the topics which will be explored at the summit. Beet.TV is pleased to be a media sponsor [...]

HealthiNation, the big, New York-based  producer and distributor of online medical videos for consumers, has been expanding its content range to include nutrition and healthy lifestyle, has announced an agreement with parenting site TheBump.com for videos for first-time parents. We spoke last week with HeatlhiNation CEO Raj Amin last week about the new alliance and the growith of the company. Andy Plesser  

VIEQUES, PR --  When properly used, online video analytic tools can help advertisers find and reach audiences for their products they might not have known about before. That was one of the key insights shared by Anthony Risicato, GM of Tremor Video's VideoHub unit, in this session from the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques. Risicato spoke with Paul Kontonis, VP [...]

VIEQUES, PR - Video news created exclusively for the Web gets about twice as many streams per clip as videos from broadcast programming, says Stokes Young, Executive Producer of MSNBC.com in this interview with Beet.TV Web original news account for about 10 percent of videos surfaced on MSNBC.com, the joint venture of NBC Universal and Microsoft.   The site surfaces television news [...]

VIEQUES, PR -- The dearth in quality inventory for online video ads could be solved by YouTube's partner program and more attention paid to "Web TV" shows. That was the suggestion of Paul Kontonis, VP and Group Director for Brand Content at Digitas, who addressed the issues of video inventory raised by Joy Marcus, partner at venture capital firm Draper Fisher [...]

VIEQUES, PR -- Getting just one dollar of public funding makes a news organization "fair game" for attacks and NPR should be weaned off public funding eventually says Vivian Schiller the former CEO of NPR whose tenure was ended over a political controversy. Another flash point for NPR is the money raised by member stations during pledge drives which empowers many [...]

VIEQUES, PR -- Online video faces a challenge in scarcity of quality inventory for ads, but that can be turned into an advantage by borrowing a page from TV's playbook. That's the insight of Anthony Risicato, GM of Tremor Video's VideoHub unit, who was a speaker at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat in Vieques last weekend. While the video inventory for quality, premium [...]

LONDON - With the invasion of Iraq some 10 years ago, the BBC began to solicit listener comments around big news stories via text and email contributions in a effort called "World Have Your Say." Now contributions by BBC World Service listeners and viewers contribute largely via Twitter, Facebook and on a limited basis on Google+, says Ros Atkins host of [...]

VIEQUES, PR -- As online video consumption has exploded with over 45 billion videos viewed per month in the United States, the amount of advertising viewed is quite limited; there are in-stream ads around just one percent of video views in the United, says Eli Goodman, comsScore's Media Evangelist in this interview taped at the Beet.TV Executive Retreat. While the the [...]

VIEQUES, PR - -The upside for Pinterest, what Fortune calls an "insanely addictive" media tool, is its appeal to women users, says Joy Marcus, venture partner with the global powerhouse Draper Fisher Jurvetson in this segment from the Beet.TV Executive Retreat. Fortune magazine ponders if Pinterest could be the "next Facebook" in an article penned by staffer Jesse Hempel. Marcus was interviewed [...]