RealPlayer SP is a desktop application that allows users to save streaming, online video files, including YouTube videos,  to a local drive to watch and then move to connected mobile devices and Facebook. Not all video can be saved with the program, notably premium entertainment and sports programming.  The company says that 70 million applications have been downloaded to date.  The [...]

NBA Digital reports that it had 4.95 million video streams of the All-Star game on Sunday, February 15, with a total of 17 million views, which is 20% more than last year.  Andy met up earlier this month with Bryan Perez, Senior VP & GM of NBA Digital to discuss the developments in the NBA's online and mobile viewing platforms. Perez [...]

YuMe, the online video ad technology company, has raised an additional venture round of $25 million lead by Menlo Ventures, the company announced today. YuMe provides a technology and advertising networks for advertisers to insert ads into videos produced and distributed by a wide range of publishers.In October, I sat down with YuMe founder and president Jayant Kadambi for this chat [...]

PALO ALTO, CA -- With more than 400 million worldwide users, Facebook has become a critical partnership platform for media companies including all of the major television networks. I traveled to Facebook's Palo Alto offices to sit down with Ethan Beard, the director of the Facebook Developer Network, to discuss how Facebook Connect works with broadcasters like ABC, CNN and [...]

News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, Publicis boss Maurice Levy, and Google CEO Eric Schmidt are some of the luminaries who will be heading off to Abu Dhabi next month for a three-day international media summit, the first in the Persian Gulf. We caught up with Spencer Reiss, a contributing editor to Wired, who has been programming [...]

BARCELONA -- Brightcove, the big online video services company, will announce today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona a solution to bring true Flash video to a number of smart phones.  The announcement is part of the big initiative to bring Adobe's Flash 10.1 to mobile phones.  The Brightcove videos will run on Google Android, Symbian S60, Palm [...]

Associated Content has some 350,000 contributors uploading millions of articles and videos and is growing quickly, according to Patrick Keane, CEO in this interview with Beet.TV. Associated Content is among the first of the so called "content farm" companies which assign and pay for original, "pro-sumer" reporting on a mass scale.   Recently we reported on Demand Media, another company which is [...]

The Beet.TV Online Video Executive Roundtable, London Moderated by: Robert Andrews, PaidContent UK and Andy Plesser, Beet.TV   Our first overseas event was on Monday, March 8 at the London offices of the Guardian. Helping me co-moderate was Robert Andrews, editor of paidContentUK.  We are publishing a number of segments from the conference on this page, so please check back for updates: 3/9/10  Financial Times [...]

A year after its founding, social video startup Vpype launched one of its first applications in partnership with Facebook. Since social video is an area that's bubbling up in attention, I traveled to the company's offices in Milpitas, Calif. for an interview with the CEO Shoieb Yunus. Yunus explained how Facebook's 350 million users can quickly tap into the live broadcast [...]

A year after its founding, social video startup Vpype launched one of its first applications in partnership with Facebook. Since social video is an area that's bubbling up in attention, I traveled to the company's offices in Milpitas, Calif. for an interview with the CEO Shoieb Yunus. Yunus explained how Facebook's 350 million users can quickly tap into the live broadcast [...]

Microsoft's Silverlight, which will power online video for NBC Sports Olympics coverage, will have a number DVR-type functionalities and will offer bloggers and others the opportunity to grab the embed code of certain videos. NBC is not permitting the sharing of competition clips but of the "color," personality, feature video coverage of the Olympics. We spoke with Microsoft's Jason Suess about the [...]

Lots of buzz yesterday with Google's announcement that it is in early stages of a system to deliver ultra fast Internet service, at 1GBPS to homes in the United States. Getting into the costly, capital-intensive ISP business is certainly a new business for Google and it will be interesting to see how this plays out.Meanwhile Verizon FiOS has has [...]

Twitter has a deep integration with NBC Sports for its Winter Olympics coverage. You can find Twitter throughout the site and on the "Olympics Pulse" page.  This is the most significant media integration for Twitter to date, but is just one of many to come, according to Chloe Sladden who heads up media alliances for Twitter. Beet.TV's Daisy Whitney caught up [...]

The big upside for publishers around the industry-wide TV Everywhere initiative is the opportunity to serve highly contextual online video advertising to specific subscriber groups, says Ian Blaine, CEO of thePlatform, a video services unit of Comcast. Last week, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts told Congress that the TV Everywhere content would be made available to rival cable, satellite, and phone companies. [...]

Adobe's Flash 10.1, which has been in Beta on some smart phones since October, will get a big push into the mobile ecosystem next week when Adobe and many industry partners are expected to to announce key partnership at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. While Adobe's thinner application for mobile, Flash Lite, has been deployed on some phones, the [...]

Running a news organization in heavily censored countries including China and Iran is not easy, nor is it always easy working with U.S. and British authorities, says Sean McGuire, Reuters top global news and politics editor in this interview with Beet.TV. Earlier today, Sean and his colleagues were pleased that a freelance Reuters videographer was released by the U.S. military in [...]

The comic business is estimated to be a $1 billion business annually, but it's one of the few media forms that hasn't yet fully transitioned to the digital world. That may change with the coming influx of Apple iPads and sexy new eReaders. The business of digital comics is also one TV networks are already starting to leverage, including Starz, which [...]

REDMOND, WA --  Regardless of how fast your broadband connection is, Microsoft plans to deliver consistently high quality,  "smooth streaming" of the Winder Olympics with adaptive streaming technology, a system that delivers video tailored to the connection speed and CPU power of the end user. NBC Sports is using Microsoft's Silverlight to stream the Vancouver Games. Microsoft is teaming with Akamai to [...]

MILPITAS, CA -- With social media usage across Facebook, Twitter, and niche social sites continuing to climb, it's inevitable that a number of start-ups will emerge to piggyback on the opportunity. One such company aiming for a role in the social video world is the startup Vpype. I visited the company's offices and sat down with both the CEO, Shoeib [...]

Demand Media, the fast growing creator of  instructional online text and video content, has a huge backlog of assignments:  some 150,000 assignments waiting for a network of 7,000 freelance writers, editors and videographers to undertake, according to Steven Kydd, Executive VP of  Demand Studios. I interviewed Kydd last week at the AlwaysOn OnMedia conference here in Manhattan.In a story in Monday's [...]