Next New Networks, the New York-based company which produces and distributes original, entertainment for the Web, will double its network of independent producers in 2011. The growth is partly a result of new original, exclusive programming for AOL, as well as growing traction for the company's offering, says Tim Shey, co-founder. The company produces Web series in-house and through a network of [...]

Vevo, the online music video site hit 55 million unique visitors in the U.S. in October, according comScore. We caught up with David Kohl, Vevo Executive Vice President about the site's growth, syndication strategy and its marketing solutions. Andy Plesser

In a significant development for smaller Web video producers, who have had to rely largely on word of mouth to get their videos seen, clips are now being surfaced daily on the giant home page of AOL. The page  attracts 15 million visitors per day. A daily series, called The One, produced by Next New Networks, debuts this week.  A daily, [...]

Tremor Media has announced the acquisition of ScanScout, another large online video advertising network. Earlier this year, Tremor raised $40 million in additional funding, evidently a nice war chest.  In May I caught up with Tremor CEO Jason Glickman to talk about the growth of his company, which he said was reaching the scale of a "major cable network." We have republished [...]

LOS ANGELES -- The talk of platform wars between Flash and HTML5 has apparently ended, at least publicly from Adobe's side. Adobe's Kevin Towes tells Beet.TV that "the Web is ready for HTML5" and Adobe is supporting its development through its popular authoring tool Dreamweaver. We spoke with him last week at the Streaming Media West conference.  Our correspondent Jamison Tilsner caught [...]

Many of us know Daisy Whitney as one of the sharpest observers of the online video scene, having written for many years for Television Week, and now contributing to VideoNuze and Beet.TV and others.  She also consults, does TV appearances and programs high profile events like last week's ad:tech in New York. If that isn't enough, she  is now a published author, [...]

NEW YORK -- Patch, a network of over 300 local news sites, saw its traffic surge by 300 percent on November 2 as visitors sought local results of the mid-term elections. According to Warren Webster, president of Patch, a unit of AOL, Tuesday was the network's biggest traffic day. One of the newest sites, Santa Cruz Patch, [...]

Ran Harnevo on AOL's 5MIN Acquisition Beet.TV is live on 5MIN, the fast-growing video syndication and portal which was acquired by AOL last month.  Our archive of 1800 videos are now in the 5MIN system and several went up yesterday.   Our new association with 5MIN will expand the reach of the Beet.TV brand, connecting us with more publishers, viewers and advertisers around the [...]

LOS ANGELES -- While the television industry is abuzz in anticipation over Google TV, the big story in the convergence of television and the Web could be the Xbox, says Forrester's James McQuivey, a top industry analyst. With 30 million units installed in the U.S. and 42 million worldwide, the Xbox could become the "dominant player in the television business overnight," [...]

With the death this of longtime John F. Kennedy adviser Theordore C. Sorensen, the New York Times published a long obituary accompanies by a 27-minute video documentary on Sunday. Times reporter Tim Weiner interviewed Sorensen in 2007.  His voice can be heard off camera. The obit is part of a series of segments with prominent individuals called "Last Word."  We have embedded [...]

Participatory media platform Bunchball is being used by  a number of cable networks to drive the participation of fans in online game and contests. In her New Media Minute, Daisy Whitney reports how Bravos' Real Housewives of Atlanta is using Bunchball to engage its audience. Others using the solution include NBC, Hearst and Comcast. Andy Plesser Editor's Note:  Daisy's New Media Minute is produced [...]

Will Frank Rich beat Keith Olbermann in tonight's ratings around the election returns?  Probably not, but in a first, The New York Times is going live from its newsroom with reports and commentary on the mid-term election. The livestreaming will consist of 5 minute video segments every 30 minutes at 15 and 45 minutes past the hour.  The live player will [...]

Last week, Adobe announced it was providing developers with a tool to convert Flash video files to HTML5, the new format which is increasingly widespread on mobile devices. The tool that allows this conversion is from open source video platform company Kaltura.  Kaltura has provided Adobe with the code based on its open source library. Yesterday, we spoke with Kaltura co-founder and [...]

Boosting video consumption by offering thumbnails of "related videos" has become a top priority for a number of publishers. Taboola is serving up related videos for Demand Media's giant "how to" eHow site by topic and by the preference of the individual viewer. For an overview on how Taboola integrates semantic data and cookies to serve up videos, we spoke with Liz [...]

With news of YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley stepping down as CEO, we think it's a good time to republish our interview with him from the summer of 2006. Google aquired the start-up two months later. In this exclusive Beet.TV interview, done at the AlwaysOn conference on the Stanford campus, Hurley explains the fundamental principal which drove YouTube's success.  He calls it a [...]

SAN FRANCISCO -- While the threat of cyber terrorism is much discussed in government and the media, the biggest threat around Internet security are state-supported industrial espionage as practiced by the Chinese and organized crime activities in Russia supported by the government. These are the conclusions of Joseph Menn, technology correspondent who covers cyber security for the Financial Times out of [...]

The Wall Street Journal, which has been expanding live programming from its Manhattan newsroom with a twice-daily live show called The News Hub, will provide six hours of news and commentary on Tuesday evening, as returns for the mid-term election are reported. Hosting the program is senior editors Alan Murray, Gerald Seib and Gerard Baker.  Video reports from around the country [...]

The overarching theme of this year's Monaco Media Forum (November 10-12) will be the "mobilization" of digital media, says event programmer Spencer Reiss, an American journalist. It's not about hand sets, but about how digital media consumption is growing untethered, via apps and the mobile Web, he explains. Spencer stopped by the Beet.TV studios the other day for this overview on the [...]

Ross Levinsohn, former head of digital at News Corp and most recently a VC at Fuse Capital, will be heading to Yahoo to run the company's media operations.  Kara Swisher broke and confirmed  this development. Earlier this year at the NAPTE conference in LA, our Daisy Whitney sat down with Levinsohn for an overview on his investments, the vitality of online [...]

NEW YORK - In a significant development around online video viewership metrics for marketers and publishers,  Kantar Video has launched its new "Videolytics" platform in pubic beta today. Based in London, Kantar is the big global market research unit of WPP.  Kantar Video is a new operation dedicated to video analytics.  It is headquartered in New York. Earlier this month the company [...]