While audiences for the networks news nightly newscasts have vastly shrunk and cable news nets have maintained which might called a niche audience,  the emergence of the Web, social media and mobile as video-rich environments has powered video news consumption in extraordinary ways. The Associated Press has registered some 645 million video views just on its YouTube channel since its launch [...]

KIT Digital, the publicly-traded, Prague-based online video services provider, with extensive operations globally, has announced the acquisition of two big U.S. companies:  San Francisco-based Kyte Digital and New York-based KickApps. Also part of the acquisition is Paris-based Kewego. With the acquisitions of KickApps and Kyte, KIT will get two well established U.S. players with prestige clients including Turner, NBC Universal and many [...]

PARIS/LONDON -- Paris-based Dailymotion, the world's second biggest online video site, has integrated with London-based live news portal  Livestation to provide a number of live streaming television news networks including Al Jezeera, Bloomberg, the BBC,  France 24 and sources from other nations as well as from oganizations including the United Nations and NASA. Livestation went live on Dailymotion on Friday (1.28.) Over [...]

WASHINGTON, DC -- "The Fast Fix" a daily, 60-second daily video update on Beltway news featuring the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza has exceeded online viewership of 1 million on some days, a Yahoo! spokesperson tells Beet.TV. The program is co-produced and co-branded by The Washington Post and Yahoo! It was launched in late September of 2010.  Cillizza is managing editor of [...]

Powered by a "billion" cameras, coupled with new devices for viewing, more consumers are watching video news than ever before, says Mark Lukasiewicz, NBC News VP for Specials and Digital. In this interview with Beet.TV, Lukasiewicz explains how NBC is soliciting and vetting consumer generated content and creating new forms of "story telling" with the NBC News staff.  The use of user [...]

The Financial Times is expanding its efforts around online video with a new television studio in its London headquarters, new video staffers in its New York and Hong Kong bureaus, and by providing simple video cameras to its print reporters in the field. While much of the FT articles are behind a subscription wall, videos remain free. For an overview on the [...]

In her response to the State of the Union address, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann looked into her Webcast camera but away from a second camera in the room, the "pool" camera, which supplied her presentation to the television networks and other global media. The results were awkward for television viewers who watched the speaker looking off camera. Earlier today in an interview at [...]

SAN FRANCISC0 - FORA.tv, a video publisher which aggregates academic, think tank and other sorts of thought leadership conferences, has recently expanded its business model with pay-per-view and subscription offerings, says CEO Blaise Zerega in this interview with Beet.TV. The company has offered PPV for a number of high profile events including The New Yorker Festival, DEMO and the Wired Business [...]

PARIS -- France Telecom's Orange has bought 49 percent of Dailymotion for about $80 million, the world's second biggest video sharing site after YouTube, The Wall Street Journal reports. Here is an overview piece on the "real story" of the investment  by the Business Insider's Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry. In September, your correspondent traveled to Paris to interview company executives for Beet.TV  Today, we [...]

  While less than one-third of Web publishers offered real-time bidding on their ad inventory last year, about 44% of publishers will offer it this year, according to a recent report from eMarketer. The report underscores the growth in this sector of the digital ad business that started to take off last year, bolstered by venture investments in real-time platforms like AdMeld as well [...]

The average speed of broadband connections in the United States has reached 5 Mbps in Q3 of 2010, up 8.6% over the previous quarter, making it the biggest percentage gainer among the world's 12 fastest connected nation's, Akamai reported today. While far behind South Korea, the fastest nation, 14 Mbps,  U.S. ranks number 12, up from its position of 18 in [...]

LAS VEGAS -- Verizon FiOS allows subscribers to access a selection of television programs and download them to a variety of digital devices.  The service called, "Flex View," was introduced in November. The company sees a big opportunity in the sales and rental of newly released films and television programming.  At CES we spoke with Verizon's Joe Ambeault, Director of Product Manager, [...]

Norway's Opera claims 140 million worldwide users, most of whom are on smart phones using Opera Mini.   In an interview at CES, Opera's Jeremy Forrester tells Beet.TV that the popularity of the browser on iPhone has come from its speed which is "four-to-five times faster than the native" (Mobile Safari) browser on Edge and 3-G networks. Opera as Emerging Standard for [...]

Bloomberg, which had long offered a small amount of the company's deep proprietary content online, keeping most content on its professional trading terminal, is now a popular business and finance site, surpassing AOL Money, MSN Money, CNN Money, Forbes, Reuters and CNBC, to be in the third*, most popular behind Yahoo Finance and Dow Jones in monthly unique visitors, according [...]

SecondMarket, a New York-based company which provides an exchange, for some 35,000 qualified investors, to buy and sell shares in private companies, has seen demand double in the fourth quarter of 2010, Erick Schonfeld reports this morning at TechCrunch. In May, we interviewed Jeremy Smith, the company's chief strategy officer, about the company and its busines model. Separately, Bloomberg News reports that [...]

The Discovery Networks connects with 23 million fans on Facebook, says Kelly Day, who heads the network's digital operations, in this interview with Beet.TV We spoke with her earlier this month at at CES. A spokeswoman for Discovery told you correspondent this afternoon that the network of programs is adding 500,000 new fans a week. Day told Beet.TV that the company will launch [...]

Bloomberg News is the only news organization to provide a free, live version of its linear television programming in the U.S. online. It will soon expand its live streaming via Apps on iOS devices, according to Kevin Krim, Global Head of Web Properties for Bloomberg News, in this interview with Beet.TV. Krim says that Bloomberg is "not restricted in its business [...]

CBS has been rapidly expanding its online efforts in several major U.S. markets by integrated its local owned and affiliated television and radio stations into 15 regional portals, says Ezra Kucharz, President of Local Digital Media. We spoke with him at CES earlier this month. He explains how mobile devices, tablets, check-in services and other developments are creating a robust local digital [...]

The location-based ad market is poised to grow from $213 million last year to $2 billion in 2014, according to the latest figures from local market research firm The Kelsey Group. That's why TV networks are now jumping into the fray. Networks from NBC to HBO to OWN have paired up with a host of new social TV check-in services such [...]

Vook, the Emeryville-based digital publisher has raised a series A venture round of $5.25 million, the company announced today. The company creates mixed media treatments of books with text, video and graphics and makes them available to a variety of mobile devices. Last January, we sat down with founder and CEO Brad Inman for a chat about the company's technology and strategy. Vook [...]