Innovid, a New York-based provider of interactive pre-roll technology for publishers and marketers, has raised a new venture round of $4 million from T-Ventures, the venture capital arm of Deutsche Telekom. Funds will allow the company to expand its operations in the U.S., Europe and in Israel where it has its R&D operations. The new round brings total financing to $7 [...]

Fred Seibert, who as the first employee at MTV, later president of MTV Online and a key mover in the success of Nickelodeon, has taken over the CEO role of NexNewNetworks, a company he co-founded in 2007. NextNewNetworks is a New York-based producer and syndicator of original entertainment programming for the Web.  Seibert replaces CEO Lance Podell who is stepping down.  [...]

PARIS -- Last year, the Web sites of The New York Times and the Times-owned International Herald Tribune were combined to become the Global Edition of the Times.  Today, the home page of the integrated site registers some 800,000 daily page views, according to Denise Warren, General Manager of the NYTimes.com, in a statement to Beet.TV Warren says that the readership for [...]

A small Bay Area, angel-backed start-up called SpeakerText provides publishers with a plug-in  to transcribe videos with clickable and shareable transcripts.  The software works with players from YouTube, Blip.tv, Brightcove and just went live with Ooyala. It will be implemented soon with Vimeo. The company creates transcriptions through a process which is part human/part machine, using speech-to-text software, natural language processing and [...]

VideoEgg, the online video technology and marketing company, will acquire the giant blog software company Six Apart in a deal to be announced tomorrow.  The new company will be called SAY Media. Both companies released a news about the deal late today, but did not reveal terms.  Here's the report by Brian Morrissey at Adweek. VideoEgg was one of the first video [...]

Watch live streaming video from beet_tv at livestream.com Here is our 30-minute conversation with NPD lead tech analyst Ross Rubin. This is the first of what will be a series of live program on Beet.TV.  The show originated live earlier from  the Livestream studios in Manhattan. Andy Plesser

Rocketboom, the daily topical Web video show, went live on YouTube with three, one-hour programs last week as part of the YouTube live programming pilot. Andrew Baron, founder of Rocketboom, says that one of the shows recieved 7800 comments and that viewership was higher than some news reports as the counters for the live stream were not properly registering views.  Last week, [...]

Los Angeles-based Break Media, a producer and distributor of online video for young men, has beaten all the big video ad networks in the just released numbers for August, the category of unique monthly viewers, at 66 million.  Coming in second place for uniques is BrigthRoll. Earlier this year, we spoke with Break's CEO Keith Richman about the company's expansion into video [...]

Nick Bilton, the lead writer of The New York Times technology Bits blog, says that the porn industry has lead the way with digital media by first harnessing interactivity and more recently in pioneering multi-screen content delivery. These are some of the topics covered in his book about technology, titled  I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works, published [...]

With AOL's hyperlocal digital network Patch.com on track to reach 500 towns by year end, the business of online local news is growing fast. AOL is not alone; ESPN, New York Times and NPR are all expanding quickly in the hyperlocal online business to capture the ad dollars and viewers. Local online advertising has grown 45% each year for the last [...]

Conviva has raise a series C $15 million venture round, the company announced today.     The San Mateo-based company provides a solution to deliver high quality video to individual consumers based on their location-specific connectivity and computing power.   The company is headed by Darren Feher, former CTO of NBC Universal.  We spoke with him about the company and its solution.  We have republished [...]

Earlier this week, YouTube streamed and promoted the live shows of a few content partners including Rocketboom as part of a two-day pilot program. Whether "live" is viable for YouTube and for smaller content producers, is is difficult to say right now, but the experience of producing live is different and exciting. Yesterday, as Rocketboom prepared to Webcast its third live show [...]

Google is playing an increasing important role as a paid media platform for entertainment companies seeking bigger viewerships and cable subscriptions, says Dan Taylor who heads East Coast Media and Entertainment for Google. Recently, as part of promotional deal with Showtime, Google's YouTube streamed the first episode of "The Big C." In this interview, Taylor explains how Google works with television networks [...]

The Financial Times has been investing heavily in producing online video programming and has made a "major investment" in building a television news studio in its London headquarters, paidContent reports. Earlier this year, we spoke with the FT's Rob Gremshaw, who heads digital operations for the paper, about online video opportunities.  We have republished the video here today.Andy Plesser

Justin.tv, the big San Francisco-based live Web video site continues to grow with an average of 32 hours of live video streamed and ingested into the system every minute to viewed instantly and for later viewing on demand, says Evan Solomon, head of marketing said in this interview. Solomon categorizes this amount of uploaded material "staggering."  When we spoke earlier this year, [...]

Ooyala, the fast-growing online video platform company, has raised $22 million, brining the total raised to $42 million, the company just announced. The investors include several prominent Asian companies including Shanghai-based CID Group Japan's ITOCHU Technology. We recently caught up with co-founder Bismark Lepe for an update on Ooyala.  This is our second part of our interviews.   You can find the first [...]

ScanScout, the big New York-based video ad network, is getting favorable results for its advertisers, says Jason Krebs, Executive Vice President.We sat down with Jason recently for this update.Andy Plesser.

Here is our chat with Raj Amin, CEO of HeathiNation, the producer and distributor of consumer health videos.  He talks about syndication strategies for his company and opportunities for other publishers. Andy Plesser  

Ooyala, the Mountain View, California-based online video platform is expanding into Australia and hiring senior executives in the region, the company announced earlier this week. For an update on these developments, we sat down with co-founder Bismarck Lepe.  More on the news is up on TechCrunch. Andy Plesser

Vimeo, the video sharing unit of IAC has over four million registered users and has 30 million monthly unique visitors, nearly doubling those numbers over the past six months. The site, which historically has been a video site for video enthusiasts and the creative community, has garnerered a broader consumer audience. The site provides free and a paid service.  Unlike most video sites, [...]