Next New Networks received 300 million video views in 2008--three times more than in 2007, CEO Lance Podell told me at the AlwaysOn conference last week. We're betting Obama Girl helped boost those numbers quite a bit, but Next New Networks isn't planning on slowing down now that the election is over; as their name implies, they're already planning the [...]

At Beet.TV, we cover a lot of stories around online video, but a reverse phenomenon is going to reach half of the television homes in America this year, according to Dalen Harrison, CEO of interactive TV company Ensequence. Ensequence brings "the interactivity of the Internet" to the television, allowing users to interact with applications, vote on poll questions, and find [...]

Paid subscriptions to online video is not a business model for most publishers, save the porno biz, but it is working out well for Major League Baseball, Brad Stone of The New York Times reports today.  Brad has the scoop on the new video player and subscription service unveiled by Major League Baseball. We think that the subscription model of certain [...]

Adaptive streaming, the technology which allows high quality streaming video to play properly over Internet connections of ranging connection speeds, has been a part of the big success of Move Networks, a Utah company which provides the online video platform for ABC Television and others.  The quality is stunning.  Here's my interview with Move CEO John Edwards.  Adobe, the preeminent player [...]

Tumblr is the fast-growing, multimedia micro-blogging platform which has gotten lots of  attention from the downtown hipsters and big users including the Presidential Inauguration Committee.  The New York start-up is  is reading a subscription service, founder David Karp, 22, told The Deal's Mary Kathleen Flynn in this interview published last night. Karp says (at 2:45) that the basic services will continue [...]

In keeping up with the unprecedented demand for bandwidth for streaming the Inauguration of Barack Obama, CNN.com relied on a peer-to-peer program in a substantial way, according to a report by Janko Roettgers at NewTeeVee. Quoting a Turner a executive, Janko reports that more that half of the simultaneous streams were delivered through a P2P network of users who downloaded a [...]

The intersection of social media and advertising doesn't have to be on Facebook--or even online, according to Kevin McKeon, Executive Creative Director of highly regarded ad agency StrawberryFrog. "I consider everything we do to be social," he says. "...If we do a television commercial we want people to talk about it. If we create a billboard or a print ad, [...]

With news of a dramatic write-down and loss at News Corp, one academic says that the company's poor performance and reception on Wall Street can be laid at the feet of founder Rupert Murdoch who operates with "emotional bias."  This was most clearly demonstrated by his purchase of Dow Jones, parent of the the Wall Street Journal, says Syd Finkelstein, [...]

Mukesh Chatter is an engineer and serial entrepreneur, known for building the router company Nextabit and selling to Lucent in 1999 for $900 million.  He says the current economic downturn is an opportunity for innovators to find the inefficiencies in business and create new opportunities. Flush with excess in the boom times, this is the right time to dis-intermediate, he told [...]

Image recognition is an effective way to generate metadata and revolutionize image search. A new start-up, Milabra, which launched and announced $1.4 million in funding on Monday, has some of the most interesting technology we've heard about in this space. Rather than comparing an image to other known images to determine what it is, Milabra's algorithms mimic the mammalian brain and [...]

Blinkx has introduced a new set of buttons to its interface, allowing users to customize their video selection, Stephen Shankland of CNET News.com reports and has a review.  Here's the company's press release on the news. In an interview, Blinkx CEO Suranga Chandratillake told Shankland that the company has 65 employees, is hiring and will be profitable next year.  Analysts [...]

Cloud computing is certainly one of the big buzz words in the technology space -- but what does it mean and where does Microsoft fit into this movement?  Last week in New York at the Microsoft offices, I interviewed Dan'l Lewin, Corporate Vice President for Strategy and Emerging Business Development at Microsoft. In this interview, he provides a cogent explanation [...]

comScore just came out with the video view ranking for December and Google sites (principally YouTube with 99 percent of company views) has registered 5.9 billion views.  Fox Interactive (MySpace) is a distant number two in views and unique visitors  

NEW YORK -- Amidst gloom and doom news of tightening ad budgets and media layoffs, advertising technology company The Rubicon Project is seeing phenomenal growth. "The online advertising economy is still healthy. There's no signs of decline just yet," CEO Frank Addante told me at the AlwaysOn Conference in New York on Monday, where Rubicon was named Company of the [...]

Google News has just released a widget which allows webmasters to create a customized news feeds in two sizes, 728x90 and 300x250. The company refers to it as a "Google News–based element for webmasters and developers."  Details were just published on the Official Google Blog. The company said in a blog post: "This makes it easy to integrate headlines and previews from Google [...]

On January 12, 2009 in Washington, YouTube hosted an event: "Broadcasting the World: The New Ecosystem for News Online."  The panel ("Reeling Them In: Building an Audience for News Video") featured:  Chris Cillizza, Journalist, The Washington Post, Jim Brady, Executive Editor of WashingtonPost.com, Ann Derry, The New York Times' Editorial Director of Video and Television, Refet Kaplan, Managing Director, Fox News, Lila [...]

Interesting video interview up on TechCrunch from Michael Arrington from Davos where he interviews Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. Not much news, and Sanderg is a little coy, but a very enjoyable, interesting chat.  Michael asked if and when the limit of 5,000 friends on Facebook might be lifted, Sandberg assured him it was going to happen and she hopes that Michael [...]

While many video publishers distribute their shows as downloadable media, known generically as podcasts and mostly organized via iTunes, there has been scant standardization in advertising format size and measurement.  These standards have been finalized, reports Liz Gannes at New TeeVee. While video streams can be counted, it is very hard to determine the number of subscribers to a podcast who [...]

White label video SEO service EveryZing is working to reinvent video advertising the same way Google AdSense reinvented text advertising, CEO Tom Wilde told Beet.TV. "If you look at Google AdSense really reinvented text advertising and the contextualization of text. The same opportunity exists in video and that's sort of where we're moving next," he says. "In helping our customers better characterize the content [...]

Here at Beet.TV, we have been keeping a close eye on innovative online video journalism emanating from newspapers.  We have seen extraordinary work from The Washington Post, The New York Times and others. One of the most striking and unique videos we have seen is a five minute documentary about the crushing poverty in Mumbai done by Dai Sugano, a multimedia [...]