Lawrence Summers, former cabinet secretary under Bill Clinton and a past president of Harvard, has been tapped to be head of the National Economic Counsel, the top economics spot in White House, the Wall Street Journal reported tonight. Summers is an investor in BigThink, a New York-based video site for featuring short, well-edited comments by thought leaders.  Here's a story by [...]

We are fascinated that President-elect Barack Obama is addressing the nation on Saturdays both on radio and on video via YouTube.  Today he outlined an economic stimulus plan. Last week's address garnered nearly 1 million views, as CNET's Dan Farber points out in his post.  Today's YouTube address has just 65,000 views as of 2 p.m. EST.  Not sure if the [...]

BitGravity, a new content delivery network (CDN) which is largely focused on streaming high-quality live video, has a new product out which delivers six high-def video streams at once.  The development was reported by Michael Arrington at TechCrunch.  Live streaming, while a niche, is growing, and BitGravity, with customers like Revision3, could be well positioned for growth. In July in Los [...]

As YouTube expands its offering of professionally produced--and advertising-appropriate--videos, its analytics tool YouTube Insight will become increasingly important. YouTube's Strategic Partner Development Manager Laura Lee explained the value of YouTube Insight for both content creators and marketers at the Beet.TV Online Video Roundtable last month. "That tool I think has been really powerful especially to our content publishers, because they can go [...]

Global ad network Adconion acquired production studio KTV Digital Media today and officially entered the branded entertainment game, driving home the point that product placement in online video is here to stay. Angel investor Ron Conway called it "the next multi-billion dollar industry" at TechCrunch50 in September, and more and more ad networks are getting on board. Check out our previous interviews with Digitas and Ogilvy about their [...]

Many of the experimental advertising budgets for online video are "now gone" as a result of the fiscal crisis, says Dina Kaplan, co-founder of Blip.tv.  I caught up with her yesterday at the "Future of Television" conference in Manhattan where she was a panelist. Moving beyond the the experimental stage, Dina says she is working closely with ad agencies to create [...]

Move Networks, the small Utah-based company which has created an impressive high quality, low bandwidth solution to streaming video for ABC, FOX, the and others, will now provide its technology to much smaller publishers through an association with Boston-based PermissionTV. Move's streaming technology is not Flash or Microsoft based, it is a technology it calls "adaptive streaming" -- a process which [...]

On TechCrunch today, Roi Carthy explores the new direction of pioneering video sharing site Metacafe.  Roi interviews founder Eyal Hertzog about the implementation of a system by which users are invited to annotate the metadata around video, in a Wiki-type process.  In August, I interviewed Eyal about the Wiki application here in New York; I republished the interview above. Click [...]

The United States is lagging behind many nations in high-speed Internet connectivity, coming in at eighth place with 26 percent of broadband of users on connections greater than 5 Mbps, Akamai's "State of the Internet" report shows. South Korea has maintained its top position with 58 percent of broadband users surfing on fast connections, and Romania soared up the list [...]

VideoEgg, the San Francisco-based video ad network, will introduce advertising to the iPhone, reports TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld. For the story, Erick interviewed VideoEgg's Troy Young, who talks about the opportunity of the iPhone for marketers.  Troy disses AdMob, a mobile phone ad network which presently serves ads to the iPhone. Here's the company press release. Whoever wins and how, it is inevitable [...]

Boxee, a home media networking solution provider (for an explanation read these posts by MG Siegler at VentureBeat and Robin Wauters at TechCrunch) has closed its first financing round with $4 million from Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures.  Earlier this year, we interviewed CEO Avner Ronen about the company.  In the segment, he shows us a demo of the [...]

StumbleUpon, the content recommendation site owned by eBay, has extended it premium service to several new publishers including Funny Or Die, Atom, Scientific American, and 5min.com, according to a report in CNET this morning. In June, I caught up with founder Garrett Camp for an overview on how his service works and the value StumbleUpon provides to publishers. I've republished the [...]

Late yesterday, Google announced that it is putting text advertising onto Google Finance, the financial news and portfolio/stock tracking site. Google is putting considerable resources into the site and plans to expand it globally, according to an interview with Google's R.J. Pittman we did in July.  R.J. indicated in the interview that Google will likely extend associations with stock brokerage [...]

Google has introduced technology to track Flash content, the company announced at the Adobe Max conference today. The new tool, Google Analytics Tracking for Adobe Flash, will allow publishers to see how many times an embedded video has been viewed or how often a distributed widget, like an online game, has been used. The offering is a significant move toward [...]

China was the leading source of Internet attack traffic in the three-month period ending September 30, according to Akamai's quarterly "State of the Internet" report, which the company published today. The United States has maintained its number two spot since Q1, and Japan, which topped the list in Q2, moved down to fifth place. Last week McColo Corp, a major [...]

Adobe has landed a two-year agreement with MLB.com to stream its 2,500-plus spring training, regular season and post-season games live to MLB.com's 1.5 million subscribers.  Games were previously streamed on Microsoft Silverlight, an arrangement announced in August of 2007.  In the rich media platform game, Adobe has a home run here.  Details were released a short time ago in a [...]

At the big Adobe developers conference in San Francisco today, Adobe will unveil the introduction of Flash video on mobile phones, just on Windows Mobile.  Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch has the story. In September on the MIT campus, I spoke with Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch about the future of Flash and the prospects for Flash on the mobile devices. [...]

As AOL prepares close its user-generated site on Dec. 18, it is recommending that users switch their files to Motionbox, the small New York-based video sharing site.  This development was first reported yesterday by Michael Arrington at TechCrunch who published AOL's FAQ's on the service change. Chris O'Brien at Motionbox has built an impressive platform.  It is the first which [...]

Long one of the biggest shows on television, 60 Minutes will drive considerable traffic to CBSNews.com on Sunday evening with its exclusive post-election interview with Barack and Michelle Obama. Correspondent Steve Croft interviewed the Obamas earlier today in Chicago.  It will air on Sunday at 7:00 p.m. Beet.TV has learned that immediately following the broadcast in the East, the entire interview will [...]

Election night night coverage at CBS News was streamed live on its site, on mobile devices and on CNET.com, the publisher recently acquired by CBS.  The live webcast was sponsored by Intel.  At the end of the Webcast, Katie gives a shout out to Intel. A sponsorship mention by an anchor would not be seen on most network news shows, [...]