The hip hop artist Consequence, who released his debut album "Don't Quit Your Day Job" with Kanye West's label G.O.O.D Music last year, is building his grassroots celebrity status online, he says. His Kyte channel "ConsTV" has received 1.4 million hits and his Web site itsthecons.com, started in the Winter of 2007, will be finsihed soon. Consequence is one of [...]

More online viewers watched coverage of the Barack Obama acceptance speech and coverage of the Democratic National Convention on August 29 on msnbc.com than any other news site, including CNN, the company announced today, citing Nielsen Online numbers. On August 29, the site served 5.6 million video streams, compared to CNN's 4.9 million streams. msnbc.com says it came out on top during [...]

Nielsen teamed with Integrated Media Mesurement Inc. to create the first out-of-home national television rating system, the companies announced yesterday. IMMI uses cell phones to measure consumers' media consumption wherever they happen to be, making it possible to track viewing in locations like gyms, offices, and bars. The full press release can be viewed here.  Andy interviewed Steve Jurvetson at [...]

Congratulations to Walt Mossberg, veteran Wall Street Journal reporter, who was just named by Vanity Fair as one of the top most powerful people in the world.  He comes in at number 100; Vladmir Putin comes in at number 1.  Walt is the Journal's lead personal tech columnist and co-executive producer of the AllThingsD site and conference business.  I've republished [...]

The first blockbuster web series has yet to be born, as Brian Stelter observed in his "New York Times" article Sunday, but there are plenty of content creators trying to change that. Santa Monica-based web production company Generate launched the political satire web series "Republicrats" August 18 and will premiere the second season of dark comedy series "Pink" September 16. I [...]

Viewing of live online video streams of Hurricane Gustav has reached a record 1.4 million  streams since midnight, as of 4 p.m. EDT, a CNN spokesperson has told Beet.TV.  This sets a record for the most live video streams in one day at CNN. The natural disaster and dramatic presidential campaign has been driving a great deal of traffic to cnn.com.  [...]

For small and big publishers, the key to successful search optimization is "compelling, original content," says Adam Lasnik, Google's Search Evangelist.  Having the tools to share and filter high quality editorial links is essential, he says in this interview. He explains that the Google search bot understands the value of quality content and links.  For little publishers competing in competitive areas like travel, [...]

The Washington Post has begun streaming live video via mobile phones to the newspaper's site using Comet Technologies.  The first implementation has come from Ed O'Keefe, reporting live from the floor of the Democratic National Convention in Denver. For the past year, there has been quite a lot of experimentation with bloggers and mainstream media streaming live using smart phones. We've been [...]

Last night House Speaker Nancy Pelosi answered questions about Congress, the economy, and marijuana legalization--posed not by journalists and pundits, but by contributors to online communities iReport.com and Digg.com. The interview is one of the ways CNN is adding the "voice of real people on the ground" to their election coverage, according to CNN.com Senior Producer Lila King. CNN's user-generated news [...]

Blog coverage of the DNC is high with a record 120 blogs credentialed to cover the convention. CNET reporter Kara Tsuboi goes behind the scene in the "Big Tent," a sort of giant blogger lounge sponsored by Google, YouTube and Digg.  I've posted Kara's report here. By the way, congratulations to Dan Farber and all at CNET on the site redesign that [...]

Although the Olympics ended this weekend, much of the online material from the Games will continue to be available through December 31 on NBCOlympics.com, a site hosted by Microsoft's MSN, Beet.TV has learned. Not just highlights, but most of the on-demand content will be available, a Microsoft spokesperson told me earlier today. There's been a lot of reporting about the disappointing loss for the NBC [...]

HOLLYWOOD/NEW YORK --  The creators behind "Lonelygirl15" and the UK-based "KateModern" have produced a new web series based in the LG15 universe, "LG15: The Resistance," set to premiere September 20. It's been a long journey since the pretended non-fiction debut of "Lonelygirl15" in 2006; the creators have formed social entertainment company EQAL and raised $5 million in venture funding. The finale [...]

Netscape founder and prolific entrepreneur Mark Andreesen and his long time business partner Ben Horowitz are making an investment in Qik, the Foster City-based mobile video streaming platform.  Terms of the investment have not been disclosed. Qik, pronounced "quick," has recently opened to public use.  To get an update on how the service is being used and by whom, I interviewed co-founder Bhasker [...]

Short-form video entertainment site Metacafe has a new solution to video search. It has launched a new feature called Wikicafe to let users edit the tags surrounding video content. Accurate metadata is the key to helping users find the videos they want, according to Metacafe Product Manager Avi Yaar. Wikicafe will help eliminate false metadata that users submit to get a video [...]

Not surprising that Microsoft will be a strategic investor in Move Networks, the small Utah startup which has introduced a new way to stream high quality online video through a process called adaptive streaming. In April at NAB in Las Vegas, I interviewed Microsoft's Steve Skleplowich about the newly announced alliance between Microsoft and Move. He explains what a future alliance will [...]

HiveLive, a platform for building business-oriented custom social communities, lets users create custom blogs, wikis, and forums with Web 2.0 building blocks called Hives. While a social network like Facebook is geared toward the mass consumer market, HiveLive is carving out a viable niche for itself the enterprise market. The company's different focus means it isn't in direct competition with Facebook: [...]

Fora.tv, the San Francisco-based, high-brow content site, has an agreement with Georgetown University to host and distribute speeches and conferences from the University. This adds to Fora's alliances with The Aspen Institute, The New Republic, The Brookings Institution and others. Fora is one of a growing number of "intellectual YouTubes"  -- sites which produce and aggregate  content from thought leaders in business, [...]

With 72 million video streams of NBCOlympics.com viewed through Saturday, developers at Microsoft have reason to celebrate.  The new rich media web plug-in, called Silverlight, which has had little implementation by the broadcast industry, seems to have worked well. On the day of Olympics began, I interviewed Eric Schmidt, Director of Media and Advertising Evangelism at Microsoft.  He is one of the key team [...]

We think the success of online advertising will result from user interaction.  Beyond just watching a video or seeing some snazzy Flash ad, users who opt-in to explore an ad will be more likely to establish brand loyalty...and buy stuff. VideoEgg is on the leading edge of creative use of Flash and online video.  The company has just launched a program for [...]

In what we consider a milestone in the syndication of live online video news, CNN has introduced a widget for its live streaming service. Still in beta and not yet available through the company's webmaster tools, it is being used on an invitation basis by key bloggers and Web sites. The Huffington Post has recently integrated the widget to stream live campaign events. The widget [...]