MONACO -- Orange, formerly known as France Telecom, is expanding its global offering of IPTV and is using its ownership in Dailymotion to establish video markets where the Paris-based telco giant is not a service provider. Orange has a 49 percent stake in Dailymotion, the big Paris-based video portal. For an overview of the adoption of IPTV in France and around the [...]

MONACO - YouTube has 200,000 advertisers on the site per quarter and is hoping to have 6-7 million in the future, says Lucas Watson, VP for Global Sales, in this interview with Beet.TV. We spoke with him today at the Monaco Media Forum after his keynote address. In this interview, he talks about the new channel strategy around content creators on the [...]

MONACO -- Bahrainian blogger Esra’a Al Shafei, a key figure in the social media activity around the Arab Spring, has been awarded the Monaco Media Prize by Prince Albert II of Monaco. The award was presented by the Prince at a gala dinner here tonight. The ceremony was part of the three-day Monaco Media Forum. Al Shafei founded Mideast Youth in 2006 [...]

MONACO, Cote d'Azur -- Television broadcasting is slowly but inevitably moving to a unicast model, where consumers get the programming they want.  It is the "holy grail" for advertisers, says Tracey Scheppach, EVP & Innovations Director at VivaKi/Starcom MediaVest, in this interview for Beet.TV.  Scheppach is in Monaco where the Chicago-based executive is speaking on this topic at the Monaco Media Forum. While [...]

Fora.tv, the San Francisco company which began as a free portal for influential conference videos, has gained traction with a pay model, charging to watch high-level conferences by organizations and publishers, including The Economist, Wired and The New Yorker. For an update on the company's strategy, which also includes an ad model and a regular subscription, we spoke with Blaise Zerega, [...]

The industry's largest video advertising network has shifted its emphasis from a cost-per-view formula to cost-per-engagement and has found "dramatic" success around purchase intent, says Jason Krebs, Chief Media Officer of Tremor Video. We spoke with him last week at the company's Manhattan offices.   Krebs will be a panelist at the November 15 Beet.TV Leadership summit about online video advertising at the [...]

MONACO - We are here covering the show. We had hoped to pull off a live show tomorrow, Thursday, but due to some planning issues, we can't pull it off. The event is amazing and we will have many exclusive interviews to share with you as soon as tomorrow. So stay tuned. A few weeks ago we spoke with Spencer Reiss, the [...]

The New York Times has launched a program to bring documentary filmmakers, both famous and aspiring, to the digital pages of the paper in a new program called Op-Doc.  The documentaries are surfaced on the Opinion Page section of the paper.  Although the films are on the Op-Ed pages, they are not necessarily timely takes on topics in the news, but documentaries [...]

Umami, a New York-based stealth start-up with seed funding from top VC's NEA and Battery Ventures, will launch its iPad App, which is a synchronous companion to TV shows, tomorrow on November 8th. The App allows the iPad to "listen" to the audio of a television program and then serves up related content in real time to the viewer on the [...]

While video is becoming increasingly pervasive on news sites, what is it that makes visitors hit that play button?  According to the top video editors at the Wall Street Journal, CBS News and The New York Times, the motivation comes by providing a surprise, the unexpected scoop or a unique viewing opportunity. These were the comments of Shawn Bender, Editorial Director [...]

Gannett, the nation's largest newspaper group, is getting $40-50 per thousand video views on several of its smaller market newspapers, says Kate Walters, SVP for Video at Gannett Digital. This is many times higher than conventional industry rates for video on big web sites. In this segment from the Beet.TV leadership summit on online video news creation and discovery, Walters also speaks [...]

HealthiNation, a New York-based producer and syndicator of original health and medical videos for the Web, is the most widely viewed producer in its sector, having more than double the views of WebMD, according comScore's September Video Metrix. (comsSore finds that AOL's 5Min is by far the biggest provider of health video. However, 5Min is a syndicator of other publishers' [...]

  I am pleased to announce that Vivian Schiller, Chief Digital Officer of NBC News, will be among the keynote speakers at a two-day conference on the state of online video at the W Retreat and Spa in Vieques, a small island off the eastern shore of Puerto Rico. See the latest update on speakers for the conference.Each attendee will have the [...]

The next wave of spending and focus in online video will be on content and original production, said Matt Wasserlauf, Executive VP, Video Platform & Services, at Specific Media during an interview with Beet.TV at the recent OMMA Video conference. That's because of the focus the marketplace has placed in recent months on original content, evidenced by Netflix's push into content [...]

Historically, newspaper editors have been slow to embrace video, in part from a long-held print bias. Video editors have had to struggle for visibility on newspaper sites.  This beginning to change, notably with Gannett, which has prominently placed a big video player on the home page of many of its 80 papers and has interspersed video thumbnails on article pages. Speaking in this [...]

SAN FRANCISCO - Bolstered by its success in creating video gaming programming, Los Angeles-based Machinima is expanding into more narrative, live-action content, said Sanjay Sharma, Senior VP of Strategy & Business Development at Machinima, during a recent interview with Beet.TV at the OMMA Video conference. That includes horror, thriller, sci-fi and action programming that has the sensibility of the gamer generation, [...]

SAN FRANCISCO - As consumers watch video across devices such as a computer, mobile phone, or tablet, it's important for programmers to continue monetizing the content across those screens, said Dounia Turrill, SVP Client Insights at Nielsen, during a recent interview with Beet.TV at the OMMA Video conference. She also discussed Nielsen's latest research into cord-cutting and cord-swapping. She said some [...]

SAN FRANCISCO - As part of its continued expansion into the United Kingdom and Europe, video ad technology provider Adap.tv has hired ad veteran Brian Fitzpatrick to grow relationships with agencies, ad networks and publishers, Adap.tv Sean Crawford, VP of international business, told Beet.TV in an interview at OMMA Video last month. Crawford said that since Adap.tv opened its U.K. offices [...]

SAN FRANCISCO -- Digital media company Specific Media plans to rebuild the recently acquired MySpace into a home for music  aficionados, said Matt Wasserlauf, Executive VP of Video Platform & Services at Specific Media in an interview with Beet.TV at the recent OMMA Video conference. The site will relaunch in early 2012 and Specific will remake the site on [...]

NEW YORK/BELFAST (via Skype Video) -  For many in the news business, Mediagazer has become an essential destination for important stories about the media business and journalism.  The 18-month-old spin-off of uber tech news aggregator Techmeme, has just named a new editor in Lyra McKee, 21, who lives in Belfast and works from her home and from sometime from the Sinammon [...]