Boxee, the developer of software that allows users to connect PC's to television to watch Web video, has just announced a new application for MLB.TV.   Separately, Kyte announced that its videos are integrated into the Boxee system. In February, I interviewed Boxee founder and CEO Avner Ronen.  He speaks about the upcoming Boxee "box" and the emergence of various pay models [...]

Los Angeles-based Break Media, the fast growing network of young man-oriented Web sites, announced today the launch of its proprietary online video ad server called Apex. Late last year, I sat down with Break's CEO Keith Richman for this chat about the company's advertising and syndication strategy.Andy Plesser, Executive Producer

Silverlight, Microsoft's rich media Web plug-in, will will soon be available on the Ooyala and Kaltura video players.  To our understanding, this the first time an online video platform company has offered Silverlight. Ooyala will continue to provide support in Adobe Flash and HTML5.  Here is the press release. Kaltura will continue to offer Flash and HTML5 as well.  Here is [...]

LONDON -- Video news reporting for the Web, different than conventional television news, is quickly evolving and the BBC is innovating in a variety of forms including one which the newsroom calls a "show and tell." Recently in London, I spoke with Mary Hockaday, Head of the BBC Newsroom, about video news reporting for the Web.  She refers to an emerging [...]

Way back in September of 2008, newly appointed Newsweek tech columnist Dan "Fake Steve Jobs" Lyons confided in me that he was "uncomfortable" covering Apple after having skewered its CEO in his blog. I asked him about following Steven Levy, his predecessor on the tech beat, who had extraordinary access to Apple, including direct contact with Steve Jobs.  In response, he [...]

While the iPad may be a marvelous and elegant new kind of computing device, and our show looks very nice on it indeed, the inconsistent WiFi connection and subsequent buffering is insufferable for consuming streaming video. From our own tests and with conversations with others, we find that WiFi connectivity is simply not stable enough to sustain consistent streaming. For downloaded [...]

Consumers will tolerate more ads and stay tuned into online TV when networks up the ad load, according to data I came across during my reporting on Comcast's TV Everywhere initiative. Executives at sister networks History Channel and A&E tell me that when they increased the number of ads in full-length episodes of their shows by 20% in the early TV [...]

SAN JOSE, Calif -- The Flip, the pocket-sized HD video camera that is popular with high-profile video bloggers and a growing number of consumers, is finding its way into the corporates suites of Proctor & Gamble, Cisco, and other big companies as a new, easy-to-use communications tool. Cisco bought the Flip's parent company last year. Recently the networking giant has created [...]

Brightcove, the Cambridge-based online video platform company has raised a "final" round of venture funding of $12 million from a group of venture capital firms and media companies and expects to go public next year, the Wall Street Journal's Jessica Vascellaro reported this afternoon (sub.). This brings the total raised to $99 million.   Brightcove confirmed the funding  in a blog post [...]

New York-based Canoe Ventures has created a technology for cable subscribers where they can interact with programs and commercials in a more Web-like experience.  The implementation involves an e-bit, a common software download sent to cable set-top boxes. Canoe aims to bring this technology to the six biggest cable operators in the United States. I spoke with Canoe CEO David [...]

LONDON - The Financial Times, which serves and an increasingly mobile audience, is finalizing efforts around a non-Flash solution to deliver video to Apple and other mobile devices based on H.264, according Stephen Pinches, Lead Product Development Manager for the FT.com. We caught up with Pinches last month at the Beet.TV Online Video Roundtable where he was a participant. In this interview, [...]

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- The amount of data associated with video consumption per user in the United States has reached 12 gibabytes per month -- globally it is about 4 GB.   With advent of 3-D video, 4-G mobile, teleconferencing, and other bandwidth intensive video services, consumption per user in the U.S. will eventually reach an astounding 15 terabytes per [...]

Walt Mossberg, technology columnist for the Wall Street has one of the first reviews up of the iPad. He says it has the potential to challenge the whole user interface of personal computing. We have embedded the video here. Andy Plesser, Executive Producer

SAN FRANCISCO -- Kyte, the San Francisco-based online video platform that has been a front-runner of video distribution for customers, including MTV to mobile devices, will soon release a software developer kit (SDK) for the iPhone and the iPad. The Kyte iPhone/iPad SDK enables iPad Application development as an alternative to the playback enablement of video via HTML5. Last month, we sat [...]

The New York Times, long an innovator in creating unique news video for the Web, is now allowing anyone to copy videos from the site and embed them onto blogs, social media, and Web sites. The video embed codes are made available around the videos, which are inserted into article pages.  Embed codes have not surfaced yet on the paper's video [...]

LONDON --  The BBC has found a growing audience for online news in the U.K., with some 5 million unique visitors watching 28 million videos in January, up 25 percent over the previous four months, according to the latest numbers from comScore. Why do visitors watch videos on the BBC and what are the compelling elements which drive consumption?  These are [...]

An alliance between Adobe and Google has taken significant step with today's announcement of Flash being integrated directly into the Chrome browser.  While Flash is installed on nearly all the world's computers, integration with the Google browser will mean that the Google browser always will have the most up to date version.Here's a report in TechCrunch.For an update on Adobe, [...]

Hotspotting, an emerging technology that allows users to click on an object in a video to get more information on it or even to buy it, is getting traction with big brands and media companies. Companies like ConciseClick, VideoClix, and Clikthrough are reporting extraordinary engagement rates and purchase rates when using the clickable capabilities. Marketers from Mattel to Macy's are [...]

3-D Teleconferencing, long the communications tool of choice for characters in sci-fi movies, will be part of mainstream teleconferencing in the future, according to Charles Stucki, VP and GM of Cisco's TelePresence division. While Cisco won't comment on specific product development plans, it is a project referred to internally as "TelePresence Magic."  One of the first demonstrations was done by Cisco [...]

The imminent introduction of the iPad, which does not use Adobe's Flash to play video, has accelerated the the creation of HTLM5 solutions by video services companies and sharing sites, including Ooyala, YouTube, Vimeo, and now Brightcove. HTML5 does not require a special player.  It is an emerging system to embed video into a web page, akin to images that don't [...]