MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA -- YouTube recently added automatic captioning to its videos, in a move that has far-reaching implications for the deaf and hard-of-hearing, international users, and publishers who seek increase search optimization. I traveled down to Google's headquarters yesterday to meet with Ken Harrenstien, a software engineer at Google who helped develop the system. While YouTube has offered captioning capabilities since 2006, [...]

Video teleconferencing, long an expensive technology, hidden inside the enterprise firewall, is becoming a pervasive social media platform. New York-based Paltalk, a provider a live conferencing platform, allows up to 10 participants to be live on a user's page. The company claims 4 million active users around the world and says that an average of 100,000 users are online at [...]

David Payne, former chief of CNN.com, has been working his start-up called ShortTail Media, which aims to help publishers increase revenue by integrating television advertising the online experience. In beta since this summer, the company is funded by powerhouse Boston venture fund General Catalyst Partners.Payne says that traditional display advertising is not working - as consumer engagement and rates continue to [...]

Comcast's much anticipated launch of its its "TV Everywhere" service, which allows subscribers to Comcast to watch selected video on their computers, has gone live in beta, today. The company has just announced a number of television shows and films which have not been online before including a number of shows from HBO including all the episodes of the Soprano's, Curb [...]

At this time last year in my New Media Minute, I picked five new media companies to watch in 2009: Kaltura, My Damn Channel, Quantcast, 5min, and Boxee. They all had good years and made news, with many of them raising venture money, inking deals with content partners, and landing ad dollars. But only one can be the winner of [...]

Interactive pre-roll ads are four times better in engaging consumers than standard pre-rolls do, video ad network ScanScout told Beet.TV, citing the success from a recent Vaseline campaign run across its network. The Vaseline campaign generated more engagement than typical pre-roll ads because of the interactive features, said Bill Day, CEO of the Boston-based ScanScout. ScanScout ran a campaign with a [...]

WASHINGTON, DC -- Creating quality, enduring online video news content doesn't need to be expensive, but it has to be done with skill and credibility. It is the skilled video producers who will emerge in this new ecosystem of online video news, those who bring strong journalistic skills, notably editing, to the effort.  These are the comments of Mark Whitaker, [...]

SAN JOSE, CA -- Loomia provides recommended links and videos to visitors of big publishing sites for text content as well as links to video.  The company claims its recommendation engine boosts consumption by 24 percent for video publishers.  The San Francisco-based company's program is integrated into the WSJ.com, Time.com, and other big sites. Last month in San Jose, we caught [...]

SAN JOSE, CA -- Portland-based Elemental Technologies, a producer of video encoding hardware, sees a big opportunity in the industry's move to adaptive streaming, meaning the delivery of video to users with varying connection speeds in consistent, high quality. The company says its processing units can process video "faster than real time" and do it with one seventh the number of [...]

SAN FRANCISCO, CA  -- For the most part, the advertising model for online video is not working  The ecosystem for premium content  is going to be a paid-model/subscription model and Cisco is planning to be a big part of this, according to Murali Nemani. At Cisco, the initiative around the emerging subscription-based Video web is called Medianet. The movement to this paid [...]

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Whether user generated  video from the new YouTube Direct will create valuable content for its launch partners including the Washington Post, NPR, Politico and the Huffington Post is too early to say. But UGC can augment the traditional news gathering operations of big news operations, according to participants at the Beet.TV Online Video Roundtable held earlier this [...]

Sara Lee's recent "Mama Saga" campaign is a good example of how viral video made by a brand can take off, sometimes unexpectedly, said Jack Rotherham, senior VP of strategic sales and partnerships at Metacafe. The iconic food brand launched its first big social media campaign this fall for its deli meats line and created three mom-centric viral videos for the [...]

WASHINGTON, DC --  To succeed with monetizing online video, media companies need to better understand their audiences --  but they don't, said Caroline Little, former CEO of Washington Post/Newsweek Interactive who is now CEO of the Guardian News & Media, North America. And, they need to build targeted audiences with strong content, a clear brand identity, and an in-depth understanding of [...]

Saul Hansell, the veteran technology reporter and columnist for The York Times has left the paper to join AOL's new "Seed" unit, a mostly automated news site.  The site been getting some mixed notices lately from some media watchers. Saul is the first "live" journalist to join the new venture.  He shares the news on his personal blog.He created and edited [...]

What's the next big thing in new media?To answer that question, I turned to Bill Tancer, author of of Click and the research guru at online audience measurement firm Hitwise. Tancer shared some exclusive insight for New Media Minute viewers into where the online trendsetters who made Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr popular way back when are now hanging out on the Web. Essentially, they [...]

TubeMogul, the Emeryville-based video syndication and analytics company, has entered into an agreement with Brightcove to provide analytics tools to the big Boston-area video services company. Analytics around Web video usage has become essential to many publishers and advertisers.  While TubeMogul's analytics tools are integrated with other video services companies, including thePlatform and Castfire, the deal with Brightcove will allow [...]

Livestream, the New York-based live video services company, is getting traction with its premium service, booking some $350,000 per month in revenue from 1,000 premium customers who pay $350 each. CEO and founder Max Haot gave us this rundown last month in San Francisco when we interviewed him at the NewTeeVee Live event.The company has a two tier offering: a free, [...]

WASHINGTON, D.C. --  Stung from  the 2008 election losses, Republican members of Congress are uploading videos to YouTube in much greater numbers than Democrats. Here's what YouTube's Olivia Ma told the Beet.TV Online Video Roundtable in Washington, D.C. last week.  (At 2:00)"It's been very stark to see how eager the Republican Party has been to get on YouTube....uploading tons and tons [...]

SAN JOSE, CA -- Software giant Adobe Systems is using its new open source media framework player on Adobe.TV, the company's new video site.  The site launched in September. Adobe, Akamai, and others have been working on a open source video player, which is easily customized and deployed.  The implementation of the player on Adobe.TV is the industry's first.  The back-end [...]

SAN JOSE, CA -- Some of the most innovative uses of online video have been pioneered by technology companies, notably Microsoft's Channel 9,  the videoblog for customers and developers.   Sun Microsystems has been using video for some time.  One of the latest entrants into corporate use of video is the new  Adobe.TV  Intel has been using online video as core communications [...]