After months of hype, Apple introduced its new iPad tablet today, which boasts a $499 price but is unlikely to wow folks in the digital media or TV business. The devices marries iPhone functions with laptop capabilities, but lacks storage and doesn't multitask well. It does, however, contain a full-color e-reader so may make a run at Amazon's market leading position [...]

Online video network Revision3 is hiring, adding new advertisers, and charting a course toward profitability by year end, the company’s CEO Jim Louderback told me during an interview at the NATPE conference in Las Vegas. The network is home to high-profile Web shows such as “Scam School” and “Tekzilla” and has also launched ten new shows in the last year, including [...]

Kyte, the video services platform, has announced significant improvement to its user interface and range of services. Originally a site dedicated to uploading live mobile video, Kyte has become an increasingly sophisticated video management solution for big enterprises.I spoke with Kyte's Gannon Hall recently about developments at the San Francisco-based company.  We have republished the interview today.Here is a story about [...]

LAS VEGAS -- As one of the top-rated cable networks, USA continues to bet heavily on digital extensions to grow and nurture audiences for its programs, said the network’s digital strategy VP Jesse Redniss. I caught up with Redniss at the NATPE conference in Las Vegas where he’s speaking on a number of panels about online extensions, such as gaming. USA rolled [...]

Justin.tv has changed its user interface which it hopes will be easier for users to users.  The company made the announced earlier today. We have a little video demo created by Justin's Evan Solomon.More details from Josh Lowensohn at CNET.  Andy Plesser, Executive Producer

International expansion is going to be vital to the growth of the cable and network TV business over the next several years.  At the NATPE conference in Las Vegas I interviewed Discovery Communications CEO David Zaslav for Beet.TV and also for the New Media Minute. He talked about the opportunities in markets like India, Russia, and Romania. Also in this week’s [...]

LAS VEGAS, NV--One of the first television networks to announce plans to launch a 3-D network, Discovery told Beet.TV the new network will likely launch later this year or early 2011. The 3D network is a joint venture between

Recent moves by YouTube and Vimeo to preliminarily embrace HTM5, a technology for publishing video directly onto Web pages, using an open source code, has been generating a lot of excitement, but not from the Mozilla Foundation which manages the Firefox browser. In a blistering commentary, Mozilla's Director of Evangelism Chris Blizzard claims that the new initiatives from YouTube and Vimeo [...]

Brightcove, the big online video services company, has announced an initiative to enable its customers to participate in the much anticipated initiative known as "TV Everywhere." While this industry effort is mostly Comcast and Time Warner allowing cable subscribers to watch cable shows on their PC's wherever they travel, the bigger opportunity is for programmers to distributed content on a payment [...]

Ustream, one of the big live streaming video sites, announced on Friday that it is beginning a pay-per-view scheme on some of the sites channels.  This news follows the decision last month by Justin.tv to introduce a payment process for many live programmers.Good story on this development by Ryan Lawler at NewTeeVee. More up on Mashable.Last year, I inteviewed Ustream [...]

Google co-founder Sergey Brin conceded in an interview that Google’s management lacks "emotional intelligence," said the New Yorker's Ken Auletta, author of the best-selling book "Googled: The End of the World as We Know it." This could be one of a number of threats and stumbling blocks ahead for Google. While Google continues to show extraordinary growth and profitability, a big fault [...]

This is no joke:  JibJab, the video site which got its name from funny political video cartoons, is the second fastest growing media property on the Web, according to a report just released by comScore. JibJab makes most of its revenue from subscribers who pay to create humorous mash-ups.  Back in the fall of '08, we interviewed CEO Greg Spiridellis about [...]

Earlier today, Brightcove, a providers of video publishing and distribution services, debuted its live platform in streaming a news-making speech by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the topic of Internet Freedom. The U.S. State Department is customer of Brightcove.   While customers have the capability to use outside  live services video into the Brightcove player, including Livestream which is a [...]

Significant news today that YouTube is experimenting with HTML5, a web-based, non-player platform to watch video.  Whether this open-source movement will be broadly embraced is too early to say. Adobe, which owns the Flash ecosystem, has been supportive of the HTML5 movement, according to Jen Taylor whom I spoke with last year. Good story up on this on TechCrunch by Jason [...]

Ooyala, the Mount View,California based video services company, started in 2007 by former Googlers, has landed its first big newspaper publisher, the Telegraph Media Group of the U.K., which includes the Telegraph newspaper. More on the win by Ooyala by Robin Wauters at TechCrunch.  More by Robert Andrews over at paidContent:UK.Late last year, we interviewed Ooyala CTO Sean Knapp about the [...]

Vook, a company which publishes books in a multimedia mix of text and video for the iPhone and on the browser, is quickly ramping-up production with 250 new titles planned for this year, according to founder and CEO Brad Inman. The company, which is collaborating with Simon & Schuster and other book publishers, announced today its first project with a magazine [...]

Google's Android cell phones are quickly closing the gap on Apple's iPhone, according to new research from eMarketer. In the fourth quarter, the proportion of potential smartphone buyers who said they were going to purchase an Android jumped from 6% to 21%, surpassing BlackBerry for the first time, but still lagging behind Apple. However, the number of future smartphone buyers who [...]

Users of Verizon FiOS now have the opportunity to upgrade to a symmetrical connection speed of 35mps up and down, the company has announced.  The previous offering was 35 up and 20 down.  With the upgrade, Verizon is offering expanded television programming.  The upgrade involves a 24 month service contract.At my apartment in Manhattan, I have just upgraded to 35/35 [...]

As newsrooms shrink, newspapers are looking to a new crop of outside reporting organizations for specialized content. These new outlets might have their own agenda and bias, reports Richard Perez-Pena in The New York Times.  He raises issues about possible conflicts with The Fiscal Times, a new provider of financial reporting that appears on the pages of The Washington Post .  [...]

Digital media and metadata company Digitalsmiths paired up with Microsoft to demonstrate a technology partnership between the two companies, Digitalsmiths CEO Ben Weinberger told me at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. At the show, Microsoft demonstrated how Digitalsmiths can help add more interactivity to Silverlight so viewers could click on a character, actor, or object and link back [...]