Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch as a story up tonight about plans to allow a greater number of content creators to sell their own advertising for their YouTube channel.  A few companies have been at this already, as Erick notes in his post.  NextNewNetworks has been doing a brisk business selling its own ads on its YouTube channel. Last September I [...]

Audi, as the exclusive sponsor of the live webcast of the Obama Inauguration on CBSNews.com, MSNBC.com, ABCNews.com and the WashingtonPost.com, had expected 30 million views of its pre-roll advertisement titled "Progress."  Beet.TV has been told by a spokesperson for Audi USA that its pre-roll ads have been watched nearly 70 million times.   Here's the breakdown of views of the ad [...]

Driven by unprecedented demand for live online video of the Inauguration of Barack Obama, CNN.com was forced to limit the number of viewers of its online stream during the speech.  Some visitors who logged-on during the speech saw a message, explaining that they would be put in a "queue" and provided the stream when available.  Here's the explanation provided to [...]

Akamai, the world's largest private global computer network, which provides distribution services to many of the world's news organizations, had record traffic today during the speech of Barack Obama. Total traffic on the Akamai network surpassed a rate of more than 2 terabits per second at approximately 12:15 p.m. ET.  Akamai also delivered over 12,000,000 requests per second at the same time.  It [...]

In what will surely be the be the biggest day in Internet history, CNN.com has seen historic traffic for its live feed.   Today, as of 11:45 a.m. there were 14 million streams, nearly three times the biggest day, which was the past election day.  Update: CNN.com streamed an incredible 19 million individual streams of the speech.  Msnbc.com had 9 million [...]

Interesting to learn about a development at Pixsy, a video search and syndication company, which is now introducing a way for publishers of premium content to distribute their clips via embed codes and make money.  Not sure how this well work out, but as videos are widely shared, it would be extremely helpful for publishers to be paid for their [...]

Here is the live stream of CBS News continuous coverage of the Inauguration of Barack Obama.  View this as full screen  -- hit the rectangular icon in the control box.  Looks great. This player was created by CNET and is not the player for CBS News.  CNET is a unit of CBS Interactive.-- Andy Plesser, Executive Producer

// Get the CNN Live News widget and many other great free widgets at Widgetbox! Here is the CNN.com Live feed of the Inauguration of Barack Obama. We have embedded the live video widget. The player requires a small client download which takes just s few seconds. On Beet.TV, we are also hosting the live streams of msnbc.com, cbsnews.com and others. -- Andy [...]

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy For several of the biggest TV news operations, this will be an Inauguration to share, literally.  Over the past year, most of the major broadcast news operations have made a decision to provide a sharable embed code which allows smaller Web publishers and bloggers to publish live video feeds. It [...]

Nexidia, the Atlanta-based company which provides video search software, has an agreement with msnbc.com to crawl, "listen" and create text metadata around msnbc.com video clips.   The first implementation is on the msnbc.com Inauguration Player page.  The page provides a great deal of multimedia clips going back to FDR.  I've pasted a screen shot here. This story was first reported on Friday [...]

Consumption of news and politics videos on YouTube increased by over 500 percent last year, according to Olivia Ma, News Specialist. Olivia made these comments at the YouTube news media conference in Washington last Monday.  Surely the Olympics and the presidential campaign were key drivers.  The Associated Press, the world's largest media organization, has been one of the big parts [...]

YouTube leads Yahoo! as the world's second biggest search engine according the the latest numbers from comScore released on Friday.  It is a different sort of search engine of course, as the queries are for videos.  Seeking to monetize all that traffic, late last year YouTube launched "Sponsored Videos," a program modeled after and managed by Google AdWords.  It is [...]

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- CNN.com leads the news business in the live streaming of news events. From its home page, visitors are offered the choice of four different live streams. In 2008, the network provided 83 million individual streams, a CNN.com spokesperson told Beet.TV CNN.com general manager K.C. Estenson told me in this interview that the Inauguration of Barack Obama will likely [...]

Big story today in the The New York Times by Brad Stone about Boxee and its growing success.  Brad reports the company was much sought after at CES and has 200,000 active users.  Avner Ronen visited Beet.TV for an explanation and demonstration.  I've replublished the interview today.-- Andy Plesser, Executive Producer

This Tuesday, if the sky is clear over Washington, the world will see a detailed color image of the throngs attending the Inauguration of Barack Obama.  GeoEye, the Virginia-based satellite company which owns the new satellite, has an exclusive arrangement with Google Earth to provide quality satellite images.(There is no relationship with Google and this Inauguration project.) On Tuesday afternoon, the [...]

We read this morning Newsweek's Dan Lyon's rant about the "rotten press" corps in Silicon Valley and that  PR people are mostly paid to "tell lies. "  Well, we don't think that Apple handled the health issues around Steve Jobs properly, but we wonder why Dan is so worked up about Apple coverage these days. Could it be frustration?  Maybe he [...]

Video search engine Truveo has released an updated version of its  iPhone application, Beet.TV has learned. The application, first launched in July, allows users to access videos in Apple-friendly formats from major sites including CNN, NBC, HBO, The Discovery Channel, and YouTube. In November, I interviewed CEO Peter Kocks about the then-forthcoming updates, and he demonstrates the new query completion and [...]

Steve Hamm over at Business Week has a story out on two potential candidates who could be chosen as the nations' first Chief Technology Officer.  Citing sources close to the Obama team, Hamm names Padmasree Warrior, CTO of Cisco and Vivek Kundra, CTO of the District of Columbia city government. Neither individual nor the Obama campaign would comment for Hamm's [...]

Demand for bandwidth dramatically spiked immediately after the first reports of the emergency landing of a U.S. Airways jet in New York Hudson river.  Shortly before 5:00 p.m. EST, demand for bandwidth  to view the event live online hit nearly 5 million demands per second, according to records of Akamai, the world's largest content delivery network. Akamai manages global distribution [...]

The sinking US Airways plane in Hudson River makes compelling live online video.  Here is the CNN.com coverage.  You will need to download a small application.  (This still image was taken at 4:11 EST)CNN.com has been leading the online media industry with live streaming of news events.  This will certainly be among the most widely viewed. Beet.TV has learned that [...]