Premium cable network Starz has partnered with book publisher Penguin to create an "amplified iPad edition" of Ken Follett's bestselling book "Pillars of the Earth."    Starz just launched an original series based on the book and contributed original videos, art and music to the iPad edition, which includes the book as well.    It's a marketing marriage worth noting, because it taps into [...]

LONDON -- The Guardian newspaper has been in the forefront of managing, interpreting and publishing government data as a new form of content -- and business. While the publication of U.S. military secrets via WikiLeaks is not the sort of thing the paper has been doing with authorized, publicly-released U.K. government data, the publication is a big development in this [...]

Rob Glaser, chairman and founder of RealNetworks, now a partner with Accel Parters, says the quality and the form factor of the iPhone 4 could be suited better for video than text. While he likes and owns the iPhone 4, he is critical of Apple for "forcing" developers and consumers to use non-Flash technology to make and consume video. We interviewed him [...]

LOS ANGELES -- Digital shows increasingly should have multi-tiered international release strategies, said David Tochterman, a digital agent with Innovative Artists who sat down with Beet.TV at  NATPE LA TV Fest.  He pointed to Crackle's recently released show "Urban Wolf" that is rolling out episode by episode in the United States and via DVD in international markets. That's a model he [...]

Viewdle, the visual recognition software company with origins in the Soviet military, has received a venture round from the RIM's BlackBerry Fund, says John Albright, co-managing partner in this exclusive interview with Beet.TV. The company is headquartered in San Jose with engineering operations in Kiev.  It launched in 2007 and has recently gone into stealth mode.  It will launch visual recognition [...]

Analytics around online and mobile video is in the "prehistoric ages," with no single source to provide adequate information, says Alan Wurtzel who is President, Research & Media Development at NBC Universal. He says that while online video has become as normal as a "toaster" for consumer to use, the huge gap in the business is measurement data.Beet.TV sat down with [...]

LOS ANGELES --  7-Eleven, the world's largest store chain, is quickly making a name for itself as a marketer that's open to digital experimentation. On the heels of its popular Farmville integration, the food purveyor paired up with Blip and with digital producers Happy Little Guillotine Films on the $1 million branded Web series 7-11 Road Trip Rally and the show generated [...]

In an effort to maximize advertising dollars around the big U.S. market for online news, the BBC has launched a U.S. destination.   The site will be more U.S.-centric, surfacing up more U.S. based coverage.  In the U.S., the current BBC news site already has some 17 million monthly unique visitors.  In addition to surfacing news stories, the site will feature [...]

Verizon Wireless will "soon" introduce a comprehensive App development platform for Android OS, says Jennifer Byrne, Executive Director of New Business Development & Partnership at Verizon Wireless. The developer kit has been available for the RIM platform. A Verizon spokeswoman declined to provide a date for the launch of Android developer support. In addition to providing development tools, Verizon is providing advertising [...]

LOS ANGELES -- Digital show producer My Damn Channel is getting a piece of the action when it comes to Web-to-TV crossover show "Childrens' Hospital" that launched just last week on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim, My Damn Channel told Beet.TV at the NATPE LA TV Fest during an interview. My Damn Channel is creating promotional content and original material for the [...]

LOS ANGELES -- Brand advertisers are increasingly asking Web sites and publishers to conduct "intent-to-purchase" studies that measure the success or failure of a Web video campaign.  Break Media CEO Keith Richman tells Daisy Whitney in this week's New Media Minute how advertisers and publishers can use that data to improve their campaignsEditor's Note:  Daisy's New Media Minute is produced and [...]

CNNMoney.com the big business portal with content from CNN, Money, Fortune and a large amount of staff produced content, is serving up 450 million page views a month, according to a report in Talking Biz News which features a Q&A with Chris Peacock, executive editor.  The site includes extensive original video content.  Last September, we spoke with Chris about the site [...]

LOS ANGELES -- Film and TV star Kevin Pollak, whose career includes roles in such hits as "Usual Suspects" and "A Few Good Men," just inked deals with Amazon and Hulu for the entire library of his one-year-old Internet talk show, he told Beet.TV in an exclusive interview we snagged last week at the NATPE LA TV fest. Those twin deals [...]

As many video publishers seek to syndicate their content and accompanying advertising to blogs and Web sites with embeddable players, some advertisers are cautious about seeing their ads on sketchy sites. YuMe Networks, one of the big video advertising platforms, has developed a database of 1.5 million websites which are "blacklisted."  While these sites can embed video, they won't get the [...]

Tremor Media, the New York-based online video ad network, had over a billion video ads viewed on its network in June, just trailing Hulu, according to June numbers released today by comScore. This is the first time that comScore separated video "content" views from ad views. In the rankings of ads views, Hulu had 560 million and had 127 million content [...]

Akamai, the Boston-based content delivery network, said today that demand for Internet services around the World Cup doubled over demand in 2006 during certain peak times.    The busiest time for traffic was on June 24 for the Italy vs. Slovakia competition, the company says.Akamai streamed video for 24 broadcasters into 65 nations. Earlier this year in Las Vegas at the NAB [...]

Nominations for Emmy Awards for news and documentaries were announced today.  PBS leads with the most nominations followed by CBS and the other television networks. In a nod to emerging online video news producers, the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences nominated several newspapers and Time magazine for their innovative work. Nominated are the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Boston [...]

LOS ANGELES -- Disney's Web original studio has a distribution deal for its I Heart Vampires series to run on BeeTV, the Japanese mobile broadcaster. Earlier this week at NATPE's LATV Fest, our Daisy Whitney sat down with Chris Williams, who is general manager of Disney's Take180. Wiliiams says in this interview that Take180 is getting 5 million monthly unique visitors. [...]

LOS ANGELES -- Is brand integration the wrong approach to Web video advertising? It may very well be, said Chris Williams, the general manager for Disney-owned digital studio Take180.  Daisy Whitney caught up with him at the NATPE LATVFest this week and he shared his contrarian point of view on why he believes pre-rolls are a smarter and more scaleable [...]

LOS ANGELES -- Michael Eisner's web video studio Vuguru is readying the launch of two new series, "The Booth" and "Pretty Tough" in Canada and Europe, says Larry Tanz, president of the studio in this video interview. In Canada, the series will debut on Rogers Cable, where they are sponsored.  Rogers is an investor in Vuguru and a distribution partner. Beet's Daisy [...]