The tablet market is likely to be a successful one overall, but it's far too early to tell what the principal drivers for consumer use will be on these devices, said researcher Mike Bloxham from Ball State University.As the director of insight and research, he surveyed consumers before the iPad was released and is now going back to consumers for [...]

Tremor Media, the fast-growing New York-based video advertising network, has raised $40 million in new venture funding, the company announced today. Powerhouse VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson has contributed and others are in the new round. Tremor ranks as the largest video ad network in terms of video views of ads. Earlier this year we spoke with CEO Jason Glickman, who told [...]

Veteran rights management technology firm Thought Equity Motion has been busy this year, signing deals with both the NCAA and the BBC. I sat down with the company's CEO Kevin Schaff at the recent NAB show to learn more about how content companies, programmers, and networks are using Thought Equity's tools to better manage and monetize their metadata, rights, and video archives. Most [...]

The Huffington Post is up 94 percent in traffic this year, has 13 million unique monthly visitors (according to Nielsen), and is poised for profitability in 2010, co-founder Arianna Huffington tells the Associated Press. Launched five years ago (May 9, 2005), the site's content is created largely by an army of 6,000 bloggers who aren't paid and by readers who post [...]

Delivering a high quality, non-buffering video experience has become essential for distributors of premium content online.  To assure a satisfactory experience, several networks, including NBC, ESPN3, AT&T, MLB.com, NFL.com, and ABC.com, are working with Conviva, a San Mateo, venture-backed company. The Conviva software, which both resides in the head-end and is embedded in the users video player, can determine the bandwidth [...]

FreeWheel, the San Mateo-based online video platform has raised an additional $16.8 in new venture funding from strategic investors, including Steamboat (Disney VC arm), Turner, and top VC's Battery and Foundation Capital. Here's story on the funding up on TechCrunch and more on paidContent.Earlier this year at the NAPTE conference, Daisy Whitney caught up with Brent Horowitz who heads business development [...]

Blinkx, the London/San Francisco-based video search engine and destination site had a jump of 204 percent in video views in the U.K. over the past 12 months, just behind the torrid 205 percent increase of video views on Facebook, just announced by ComScore. While both have grown to 43 million views per month for Facebook and 29 million for Blinkx, they [...]

SAN JOSE, California --Exploding bandwidth consumption resulting from HD and 3-D video, gaming, and teleconferencing will create unprecedented demands on Internet services providers. Last month, our West coast bureau chief Daisy Whitney visited Cisco's company headquarters for a chat with Suraj Shetty, Vice President, Worldwide Service Provider Marketing.In March, Cisco announced CRS-3, its new platform for caching big files on the [...]

Techmeme, considered by many as the most authoritative tech news aggregator, spun off a media news site called Mediagazer in early March.  Since its launch, it has quickly garnered 100,000 unique monthly visitors, nearly a third of traffic of its parent site, according to Compete. The site is edited by Megan McCarthy along with an algorithm created by Techmeme founder Gabe [...]

SAN FRANCISCO -- The Writers Guild of America, the big trade union representing film and television writers, is developing rules around writing original online video content.  Spearheading the effort is Tamara Krinsky, who recently joined the WGA with the title of New Media Project Manager.   Earlier this week at AdTech, she spoke with Daisy Whitney, the West Coast bureau chief [...]

LAS VEGAS -- The Teleprompter is an essential tool for newscasters and public speakers.  A much less expensive device from Prompter People allows speakers to control the the flow of displayed text with their iPhone. The display can be an iPhone, iPad, Mac, or notebook PC that is held in a cradle.  It's priced around $500. Our West Cost producer Jeff [...]

LAS VEGAS--Alloy Entertainment, the producer of hit teen television programming, including "Gossip Girl" and "Vampire Diaries" films and books, is making a big expansion with its original Web programming, Sean Horvath told Beet.TV West Coast Bureau Chief Daisy Whitney at NAB earlier this month. Sean tells us about the new shows, a new video player and advertising strategy.  The company claims [...]

Today, on Earth Day, as we look at ways to preserve the environment, video is surely a way to limit our carbon footprint via video teleconferencing, video chat, and other technologies. The promise of the Web as a means to decrease our reliance on carbon-based transportation is the vision of two of the Internet's great visionaries:  Robert Metcalfe, who co-invented Ethernet, [...]

LAS VEGAS -- Founded by three ex-Googlers, Howcast is the New York-based video production and distributor of "how to" videos on a wide range of subjects.  Lately it has been creating campaigns for big marketers, seeking branded web video.    GE has a giant "takeover" ad on the directory page of Howcast's YouTube channel, something we haven't seen on giant video [...]

SAN FRANCISCO -- Advertising dollars are the foundation of the Web video business, and those coveted bucks are highly sought after by networks, programmers, and independent producers alike. How do big brands allocate, measure, and assess their spending in online video? I caught up with Jamie Cohen Szulc, the chief marketing officer of the storied brand Levi Strauss at ad:tech San [...]

SAN FRANCISCO -- The tablet computers, which provide a more engaging, extended interaction with content, akin to reading a book or magazine, could be a big boon to publishers, says Chris Anderson, editor in chief of WIRED and author. In this interview with Daisy Whitney, Beet.TV Senior Producer, he says that the high engagement and the opportunity for detailed user reader [...]

Over 30 years ago, Nina and Tim Zagat, two Yale Law School-trained Wall Street lawyers, figured that while critics have important things to say about  food and wine, it would be a good plan to source the opinions of citizen experts and organize that data into a guide. Today, some 375,000 food and wine lovers in 100 countries participate in the [...]

LAS VEGAS -- Much has been said about the looming showdown over software dominance to run video on the Web between Adobe's Flash and HTML5, an "open source" solution which is gaining traction.  HTML5 is one of the emerging standards for the iPad and iPhone which don't use Flash. How does the rise in development around HTML5 impact Adobe?  Just fine, [...]

KIT Digital, the big Pague-based video services company will be powering video on the Tribeca Film Festival site, which will feature several live events and clips from films from this and previous festivals. KIT is using Akamai for its CDN services.  KIT and the festival organizers made the announcement this morning.  Earlier this month, we spoke with KIT CEO Kaleil Isaza [...]

Epix, the premium HD movie channel co-owned by Viacom and Lion's Gate, has a big distribution deal with Dish Networks which adds 14 million more subscribers, Reuters reports. Last week at NAB, Daisy interviewed Thomas Carpenter, VP of Operations, about the new movie channel which launched last year on Verizon FiOS. Andy Plesser, Executive Producer