College Humor inked a six-episode deal with MTV last month, according to a brief report in MediaPost , and a pilot from the College Humor creators will air this fall. I interviewed CHTV Original Content Director Sam Reich and senior writer Amir Blumenfeld at the College Humor offices last week. We didn't get any details (on the record) about what the [...]

Universal Studios' ad campaign for the upcoming "Heroes: Season 2" DVD, launched on Metacafe today, brings collaborative commercial mashups to the online video space. Viewers can use Kaltura's collaborative editing tools on the Metacafe Heroes 2 channel to remix videos and create their own "Heroes moments." This campaign is the first of its kind in the online video space and could [...]

Free Tibet 2008 reports today that Brian Conley, creator of citizen journalist video blog Alive in Baghdad, was detained Tuesday in Beijing with friend Jeffrey Rae. Conley's wife received a text message at 12:30 Beijing time yesterday that said, "In jail. All fine." Conley and Rae shot and distributed video of a Students for a Free Tibet protest that took place August [...]

New 12-episode web series Model.Live, which follows three international models as they strut runways around the world, launches today Vogue.TV and social networking site Bebo. Viewers can leave comments for the models on the Bebo page as well as receive text message updates about their activities throughout the day, making the television experience more interactive. Once a week, the models [...]

Just read Saul Hansell's big piece in The New York Times about Verizon's huge investment in bringing fiber optic television and Internet service to consumers around the country.  One analyst likens FiOS to a "Maserati for the price of a Volkswagen." There's been building anticipation in the Silicon Alley blogesphere about when FiOS will arrive in our fair City.  I'm excited [...]

While the technology now exists to identify fake photos on a one-by-one basis, there's no one-click solution to detect the enormous amount of doctored photos, says Dartmouth Computer Science Professor Hany Farid. Farid has developed sophisticated tools to detect photo forgeries, but it will be five or ten years before it is possible to automatically process the ten thousand photos news organizations like [...]

The campaign videos of presumptive Republican Presidential candidate Senator John McCain, are being hosted on Blip.tv, the small New York-based video publishing site, Beet.TV has confirmed. The campaign also has a YouTube channel, but it uses the Blip.tv player to feature its videos. Blip.tv, known as a favored platform for a number of videobloggers including Beet.TV,  and  episodic content creators, has been a [...]

As network television has largely abandoned live coverage of the national political conventions, the online media world is expanding coverage and resources. The Washington Post and Newsweek have just announced extensive Web casts from both conventions.  Newsweek's Jon Meacham and the Post's Chris Cillizza will co-host.  Above is a little behind the scenes I taped with Jon earlier this year. What's interesting here is that [...]

Kara Swisher blogs about Beet.TV this morning and publishes a video interview with me.  I have been grateful for the support and feedback of so many accomplished and experienced journalists who admire our work.  Having Kara compliment our work and take the time and effort to publish a segment about us is incredibly gratifying.  -- Andy Plesser, Executive Producer

The vast majority of online video viewers are watching pre-roll and overlay ads, a study released today by Break Media and Panache shows. Completion rates for 15-second pre-roll ads were 87 percent, and 77 percent viewed campaigns with overlay ads for at least 15 seconds. Break Media used Break.com's monthly audience of 17 million 18-34-year old men as guinea pigs for [...]

The Web site of the campaign of Barack Obama had 3.3 million unique visitors in June, double the 1.6 million uniques for the John McCain site.  Time spent per visit on the Obama campaign was over 11 minutes vs. 5:30 minutes on the McCain site, Nielsen Online has told Beet.TV We believe a big factor in the the longer stays on [...]

CNET News.com, now part of CBS, and CBS News are collaborating on the coverage of the Democratic and Republican national conventions.  Three News.com staffers, Declan McCullagh, Stephanie Condon, and Kara Tsuboi, will be covering, writes News.com editor Dan Farber today. He says the reporters "will be on the scene, covering the tech policies and positions of the presidential and vice presidential [...]

MOUNTAINVIEW, CA -- While the recently announced collaboration between Google, Yahoo! and Adobe to search and index Flash files (not Flash video) could yield better results, the project is in the very early stages.  For effective search optimization, Webmasters have to think text, says Adam Lasnik, Search Evanglist at Google. For video publishers, the takeaway here is to use descriptive text around [...]

On Thursday, August 7, Reuters correspondent Margarita Antidze was the first to report on the escalating fighting in the South Ossetian town of Megvrekisi. The news organization was quick to mobilize print and video reporters the region.  The first video segments appeared on the world's television stations and online the next day.   Reuters has provided Beet.TV with the following account of [...]

Toronto-based video platform mDialog lets users upload, share and watch user-generated and professional content online, on Apple TV, and on iPhones. mDialog launched its authorized  iPhone application in time for the release of the iPhone 3G, and gained attention for being one of the first video sites to do so. (Check out TechChrunch's early review of the product.) CEO Greg [...]

Now anyone can turn their blog into an video blog, thanks to the release today of Kaltura's  Interactive Video Plugin 1.0. Kaltura's video commenting and collaborative editing features, which will be coming to Wikipedia later this year, now can be easily integrated into WordPress. When asked if the availability of this feature could lead to a rise in video blogging, [...]

In what could be a watershed event for online video, Adobe Systems, the developer of the ubiquitous Flash video ecosystem, will introduce voice-to-text functionality into the workflow of Flash video production soon.  Jim Guerard, who heads all rich media at Adobe, says in this exclusive video clip, that we will see this functionality later this year. This has huge implications for [...]

The number of unique visitors to NBC Olympics video site soared to over two million on Monday as viewers tuned into the Games from the workplace, Nielsen announced today. These numbers show that the much-grumbled about time delay of the online coverage hasn't had a negative effect on online ratings. Not all of the coverage is delayed: Eric Schmidt, Director of Media and Advertising Evangalism at [...]

The digital brand experience should be an advertiser's first thought, not an afterthought, according to Organic digital ad agency Creative Director Gary Nelson. An online brand experience should be viewed as a product unto itself--one that can be advertised by broadcast media. The "Now What?" campaign for State Farm is one of the few already taking this approach. The television [...]

CNN has has long been a trendsetter in video journalism newsgathering and distribution methods.  Yesterday, CNN announced that is would assign journalists to 10 cities across the United States to work in mini-bureaus with not much more than a camera, a laptop and an Internet connection. Today, Brian Stelter of The New York Times reports on the developments at CNN [...]