One of the rubs against online video has been the near-pervasive lack of subtitles. This might seem like a small issue at first blush, but with Web watching being a worldwide phenomenon, a creator can limit his or her audience by only offering the content in one language. Enter dotSub. The privately funded start-up whose mission is "any video, any language," is [...]

Online video advertising is on the rise, but the medium will grow rise faster as consumers watch more long-form programs online, eMarketer Senior Analyst David Hallerman says. That's because longer content is more attractive to advertisers. "With a four-minute clip from a baseball game, you can have maybe a 15-second ad and that’s not much money,” Hallerman said. Also, advertisers are [...]

NewsMarket, a New York based video services company which provides distribution for institutional and corporate video, has merged with the publicly-held MediaLink. The deal was just announced, here is the press release.  The acquisition was under $2 million.  Last year at the Beet.TV Online Video Roundtable, NewsMarket co-founder Shoba Purushothaman spoke about the emerging value of online video for marketers.  [...]

YouTube is broadly launching a program which allows video producers to insert their own promotional overlay ads into their clips.  They call it Call-to-Action overlays. Since March, the company has extended the free use of the new tool to several non-profits and has it been used by some publishers.  It has apparently gone well and it is now available to [...]

Twitter has gotten a lot of kudos for how it became a communications channel for the Iran election protests, especially when traditional news outlets failed, but a recent study from Zogby found that only 4% of Americans would turn to Twitter for news. Is the study reliable and how are TV networks like CNN dealing with getting scooped on Twitter? Also, [...]

NEW YORK, NY -- The White House has signed an agreement with TubeMogul, an Emeryville, California-based start-up to distribute and analyze web videos, said David Burch, a TubeMogul executive, in this video interview. I interviewed David this afternoon at the Personal Democracy Forum. (Please see the transcript below.)TubeMogul allows video producers to syndicate content to as many as 24 different video [...]

Firefox 3.5 has been released to the public.   What does it mean and specifically, what could it mean for open standards for Web video?  Earlier this month, I interviewed Chris Blizzard, evangelist for the Mozilla Foundation.   I have republished this interview with today's news.  Below is our interview with Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation.Here is an overview [...]

HP's line of fashion-oriented notebooks, designed by Chinese-born, American-based fashion designer Vivienne Tam, are being marketed globally around the world, including China. The team at HP is surely buoyed by news that the government of China will delay the order to PC makers to install Web-filtering software called Green Dam. We assume that Tam is also pleased by today's news.  But, [...]

Msnbc.com, the first major U.S. news site to provide embeddable videos, is moving to monetize its embedded videos and has a new association with YuMe, the Redwood City, California-based video ad network. Msnbc.com will continue to manage advertising on its own site, as YuMe will manage video insertion, sales and reporting for the embedded videos. While msnbc.com has massive traffic and [...]

ESPN plans to share regular results from its Disney ESPN Ad Lab for emerging media perhaps as early as this summer, Beet.TV has learned. The Ad Lab tests ad execution and ad models, providing insight into what works and doesn’t work, ESPN’s Artie Bulgrin, senior VP of research and sales development, explained during an interview with Beet.TV at OMMA Video in [...]

For branded Web content to be successful, marketers and creators need to set measurement and metric goals from the get-go, Digitas’ John McCarus told Beet.TV during an interview at OMMA Video in New York on June 16. McCarus is the VP and group director for The Third Act, the branded content division of Digitas formed last year. His group has shepherded a [...]

Firefox 3.5, the next big release of the popular browser, will be released to the public on Tuesday, a spokesperson for Mozilla confirmed today. The new browser will be a big step forward. It is "the next evolution of the browser," Mozilla's Director of Evangelism Chris Blizzard told me in this interview.  It will mean a faster browser and a "new [...]

BoingBoing, the popular and influential blog about culture and technology, has had video for sometime and now it's bigger than ever, literally. With the redesign of BoingBoing TV, featuring a larger video player and numerous thumbnails, the site has become increasingly "video-centric," said Xeni Jardin, co-editor, in my interview with her on Saturday. Boy, she's not kidding! The player occupies the [...]

TMZ, the Los Angeles-based Time Warner-owned entertainment gossip site, is getting quite a lot of attention for having first broke the news of Michael Jackson's tragic death earlier today. How does the site do it?  Last year in Hollywood, I spoke with Alan Citron, former Los Angeles writer and the founding general manager of the site.   He spoke about how the [...]

News reports today indicate that Mozilla's Firefox 3.5 will be publicly available next week.  One of the most significant elements in the new release is the ability to play web video without a plug-in. The browser comes with an open source video codec called Ogg Theora.  Last Friday, at the Open Video Conference in New York, I interviewed Mark Surman, executive [...]

NEW YORK , NY -- There is a powerful movement underway for open video standards for the Web.  The biggest implementation will be seen very soon on Wikipedia where you will watch videos in an open source video application called Ogg Theora. The imminent release of Firefox 3.5 will come with HTML 5, which allows video to be embedded into the [...]

CNN's iReport popularity as a destination has surged with the Iran crisis. A CNN spokeswoman citing internal numbers told me that page views for the iReport reached 1 million on Monday.  Nielsen put the monthly unique visitors to iReport at 1.8 million. But beyond the emergence of the CNN user-generated-site as a destination, it has become an essential part of CNN's [...]

Truveo, the big global video search engine which is a unit of AOL, unveiled a redesign last night along with its expansion into several new markets.  David Kaplan over at paidContent has the details.  In addition to the new functionality, there appears to be something of a new home for Truveo in newly formed AOL Ventures, David reports.I have republished my [...]

Live video, one of the fastest growing areas of the Web, could get a big boost with Facebook's integration with Ustream.  It's part of a new Facebook application called Live Stream Box. Facebook announced it on its developer blog this afternoon. Here's the take by MG Siegler at Techcrunch. I interviewed Ustream CEO John Ham earlier this year about the [...]

Showtime’s top-rated comedy “Weeds” has seen strong online results for its newly launched original companion Web series, Beet.TV has learned. The show’s Justin Kirk, who plays the lead character’s brother-in-law, Andy Botwin, has been teaching “how-to” classes in the online series "University of Andy," covering life lessons like "Starting a Band” and “Surviving a Bear Attack." In the first week of launch, [...]