Msnbc.com is claiming an election coverage victory "by a landslide" over arch online rival CNN.com.  According to internal numbers, the Microsoft/NBC Universal joint venture had an astounding 53 million unique visitors to the site during the week ending November 8.  This would be about 400 percent above normal traffic. Citing Nielsen Online numbers, visitors to Msnbc.com spent 13.5 minutes per visit [...]

Veveo, the Boston-area start-up which has been a pioneer in bringing video search to mobile devices, has introduced a free application to search Wikipedia on the iPhone and the Google Android.  The company announced the launch of WikiTap, which can be downloaded here. The company says it is the first Wikipedia application developed for the iPhone and Android that allows people [...]

Charlie Rose, the reigning king of intellectual late-night conversation, today relaunched his web site.  Not just a redesign, it is the introduction of hundreds of new, short-form video clips edited from thousands of hours of on-air interviews. In cutting down the clips to around two minutes, Charlie has been edited out of many we've watched.  While Charlie Rose is the [...]

With the IPO window effectively shut, the most viable exit scenario for venture-backed online video companies is a sale to an established media concern.  So what do acquirers want?  According to CNN.com general manager K.C. Estenson, while CNN has a huge audience, it needs verticals--audiences within particular categories.  He made his comments at the Beet.TV Online Video Roundtable in New [...]

MySpace just announced a program to allow users to pull premium content from Hulu and other 150 other licensed video sources onto their MySpace pages.  It's called the Primetime Application. In June in Beverly Hills, I interviewed Jason Kirk who heads up MySpaceTV.  He spoke about the role of MySpace as "home" -- a destination where users consume video from various [...]

With YouTube, MySpace and most other video sharing sites blocked on U.S. Military installations due to security concerns, the Department of Defense has launched TroopTube, a video sharing site created by Delve Networks, the Seattle-based video services company.  The company announced this today on its corporate blog. Troops can send videos to families at home and families can do the [...]

Blinkx, the San Francisco-based video search engine, whose shares are traded on the London Stock Exchange, today reported $6.4 million in revenue for the first six months of the fiscal year ending September 30.  Although revenue is up 115 percent, the company still has a sizable burn rate. Unlike most video search engines, which are based on analyzing text metadata [...]

As video integration into newspaper and magazine Web sites accelerates, many wonder if in-stream advertising will prove to be profitable.  We know that many of the big newspaper publishers are expanding video offerings but most are not yet successful in selling ads in or around their clips. But are in-stream ads the total value proposition of video?  Adam Berrey, VP of [...]

Beet Media: Video Production and Consulting Services Beet Media, a pioneer in video blogging, is now offering video production and viral marketing services.  We produce high quality, low-cost Internet video.  Our videos, produced in a journalistic style, convey an authenticity that Web consumers like to watch and share with others.    Our philosophy is simple: Every company and organization can increase its [...]

User-generated content is notoriously difficult to monetize, but it's not a lost cause: Ogilvy Group Planning Director Gina de Mendonca says it has potential, especially when professionals play a role in curating it. De Mendonca is a partner at the advertising agency's digital division neo@Ogilvy, where she works with clients like IBM. "You have to think about it a little [...]

Akamai Technologies has landed IAC and Hearst as the first clients for Insight for Publishers, the first product in its new Advertising Decision Solutions line, the company announced Monday. The offering, bolstered by data from the recently acquired acerno, will help advertisers target attractive audience segments. With the new service, Akamai is diversifying its offerings beyond the crowded CDN market. [...]

The Washington Post, long a pioneer in the online media space, registered the biggest percentage jump of all major news sites on election day, Nielsen Online reported last night.  Although far from the newly crowned traffic leader, CNN.com with a record 12.8 million unique visitors, the Post jumped 113 percent to 2.3 million uniques. (Nielsen compared October 28 to November [...]

To identify illegal video uploads, YouTube has implemented a software technology to "catch" content which infringes on the rights of copyrights holders.  NBC Universal's general counsel Rick Cotton tells ZDNet's Tom Steinert-Threlkeld that the software is identifying 75-80 percent of illegal uploads.  For Viacom, which is locked in a legal battle with Google over illegal uploads, it has taken to [...]

Chris Hughes, 24, one of the three co-founders of Facebook, left the start-up in early 2007 in sunny Palo Alto for Chicago to join the nacent Obama campaign. Hughes went on to mastermind the digital strategy for the long-shot candidate and the MyBarackObama.com social networking site. Sarah Lai Stirland has a story in Wired this morning about how the the digital [...]

As the world watched the U.S. campaign coverage and the Obama victory speech on computers seven hours ago, demand for news content hit a historic record, according to data from Akamai, the Cambridge, Massachusetts provider of global web content distribution for CNN, NBC, the BBC, Reuters and many others others. Akamai registered a record 8.5 million "global visitors per minute" at 11:00 [...]

CNN anchor and special correspondent Soledad O'Brien spoke with me about reporting from the exit polls in an interview this afternoon. She discussed the process for analyzing the polls and gave her perspective on covering the technology space for nearly 12 years, as she was previously an anchor for ZDTV, the first technology news network. She discusses the CNN hologram, which [...]

CBS has live video coverage of the election available through Verizon Wireless V CAST and on-demand video for the iPhone, Ethan Dreilinger, Director of CBS Mobile News, told Andy in an interview this afternoon. "It's a much richer experience, and it's more of the experience that you are expecting," he says. "So if you're expecting a video or picture to come [...]

NBC News and MSNBC have taken over the skating rink at Rockefeller center for a public viewing of election results. Earlier today I interviewed Robert Dembo, Executive Director of NBC News about the event. If you can't make it there, you'll see it as part of the coverage on both NBC and MSNBC news. The ice skating rink has been turned [...]

CNN.com and CNN International had received 88 million page views by 3 p.m. this afternoon, three to four times more than on an average weekday, Executive Vice President of CNN News Services Susan Grant told Beet.TV. CNN.com Live, which has four simultaneous live streams, had generated 1.6 million views domestically and internationally--seven times higher than an average full day, she [...]

Tonight's election results will be the first time election results will be widely consumed on both television sets and computers, says NBC VP of Digital Media Mark Lukasiewicz, who spoke with me earlier today outside of the NBC News/MSNBC studios at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Mark explains the range of information on both the big screen and online.  For the increasing number [...]