Blinkx, the video search engine based on speech-to-text technology, offers both a white label solution for video publishers as well as a consumer destination. The destination has grown in popularity from under 500,000 to more than 3.5 million monthly uniques over the past 12 months, according to Compete.  The company has indexed many millions of clips of professional and user-generated video. Separately, the company [...]

Technology spending might not suffer along with the rest of the economy, a new study by The Consumer Electronics Association and CNET shows. The CEA-CNET Consumer Sentiment Indexes, launched today, map consumer sentiment about technology and the broader economy. Many consumers spent their economic stimulus checks on items like computers, televisions and wireless phones, which they now view as necessities [...]

The office of Britain's Prime Minister has launched a online video channel called Number 10 to provide speeches, media events and archives.  We've embedded a segment below. The site is powered by the U.S.-based Brightcove, a company that provides video publishing solutions to a number of publishers, governments, not-for-profits and companies. On Friday, I spoke with Brightcove founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire [...]

For those of us who don't like to see overlay ads pop up or stream while watching video, you won't see any on the NBC Olympics coverage on MSN.  That's a mandate from the International Olympic Committee, which keeps tight control of the way the Games are presented. Microsoft's Eric Schmidt is one of the key executives in the MSN/NBC Sports [...]

Salon has introduced its new section for community-generated blogs, called Open Salon. The site had been in beta since April. In something of a first for a media company, registered members of Open Salon will can pay fellow members with real money from Revolution Money.  Registered users will get $10 and will be able to pay more by connecting to their [...]

Despite the grumblings from some media critics and bloggers over the weekend about the selective delays by NBC around the distribution of online video coverage of the Summer Olympics, the depth and quality of the online video offering is astonishing.  There is quite a lot live and mostly everything else is up on demand. Nielsen just release information on traffic to [...]

With the audiences relatively small for original Web video, the opportunity for producers and distributors to make money will come from brand messages and product placements "baked" into the video, says Jigar Thakarar, Director, Web Original Content Strategy at CBS Interactive.  (You will find his comments 2:30 into this clip.) Also in this segment, Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback explains [...]

Watching the ghastly war unfold this weekend in Georgia between Georgian and Russian troops over the breakaway region of Ossetia, we found Reuters reports to be widely used online including by the The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. The speed, technical and editorial quality of this coverage is impressive. Earlier this year, I interviewed Victor Antoine, the top [...]

Mobile video ads targeted at a user's demographics and location could soon become a reality. GoldSpot Media has developed technology that can insert targeted ads into mobile broadcast networks in real time.  GoldSpot is already in commercial trials with broadcasters in Europe and Asia, and is currently in talks with broadcasters in the U.S., CEO Srini Dharmaji says. According to [...]

The online coverage of the Olympic Games on MSN is spectacular.  The Olympics often provide  a showcase innovation, as Business Week's cover story explains.  For this Olympics, in the digital media realm, a milestone innovation will surely be the entrance of Microsoft's Silverlight. Earlier today at the Beet.TV studio, we spoke with Eric Schmidt, director of media and advertising evangelism at [...]

Andrew Baron, founder of the pioneering webisode Rocketboom came by the Beet.TV studios earlier today for a debrief about the just announced syndication deal with Sony and its implications for his company. Andrew told me that the guaranteed revenue from syndication will provide the resources to increase production by as much as double.  He doesn't plan new shows, only an expansion of [...]

LIVESTRONG.com, Demand Media's newest venture and a trademark of the Lance Armstrong Foundation, wants to differentiate itself from other health information sites with its variety of high-quality content and the community surrounding that content, Director of Community Lex Friedman says. Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt, the former CEO of MySpace, knows a thing or two about social communities. Friedman told [...]

Google recently released a new set of webmaster tools which provide smaller sites the ability to optimize search and communicate with Google directly from the dashboard of a site's hosting company. Google has signed up several hosting companies which have started to integrate the tools. These include Go Daddy, IPOWER, StartLogic, PowWeb and Strato.  A Google spokesperson tells Beet.TV that several other companies are [...]

Consumers may find pre-roll ads annoying, but they're still the highest-performing asset and the model favored by large TV advertisers, according to Jayant Kadambi, CEO of video ad network YuMe.    Kadambi says that overlay ads, which are banners at the bottom of the screen, perform-second best and get a good viewer response because they're non-intrusive. According to a comScore press release, YuMe had [...]

Digital advertising agency Avenue A-Razorfish wants to bring brand experiences to the "fourth screen"--a screen beyond the silver screen, TV, and computer. The term "fourth screen" is sometimes used to refer to mobile phones, but Avenue A-Razorfish has envisioned something larger: the storefront window. Consumers will be able to interact with a brand's website through storefront touch-screens, according to Emerging Media [...]

Veveo, the Boston-area start-up video search company, which has been getting noticed for providing video search for mobile devices, is getting some traction as the video search engine in FiOS TV.  The the company announced that Veveo has powered 170 million searches for FiOS television customers. I've reposted my interview with CEO Murali Aravamudan. --- Andy Plesser, Executive Producer

BitGravity, a start-up content delivery network (CDN) which has staked a claim to providing live video streaming services and counts Revision3 as one of its customers, has raised $2.5 million, its first funding round from Allen and Company and Blake Krikorian, founder of Sling Media. Clair Cain Miller at Bits has the details and an interview with Perry Wu, CEO and [...]

Our friends down the block at the Silicon Alley Insider have a report out tonight that Daily Candy, the email newsletter company that's been around for eight years, giving buying tips on fashion, has been sold to Comcast for $125 million. Looks like the business of email lists is still pretty darn relevant in our Web 2.0, Facebook/Twittering age.  In May [...]

Peer39, an ad network that processes the meaning of text on web pages and delivers related ads, will help make advertising more relevant to viewers, CEO Amiad Solomon says. Basing ads around keywords on a page, as Google AdSense does, can yield tangential results. A page about a trip to Hawaii that mentions taking photos might display camera ads rather [...]

Here at Beet.TV we eat beets whenever we can.  We've always loved to grill, boil and juice them.  Now, it seems that our little root vegetable is getting some press for their taste and super nutritional value. We are pleased to see that The New York Times is providing extensive coverage of our root veggie. Writes Martha Rose Schulman in [...]