Wednesday, June 18, 2008 Pioneering Video Distribution Company "ThePlatform" Nails PBS and Continues to Grow ThePlatform, the Seattle-based video distribution platform for large online video publishers, has been at it for eight years, long before most of us were talking about this business. Just last month the company announced an agreement with PBS and its member stations to power online video distribution. The company was acquired by Comcast two years ago, but operates independently we are told. In Los Angeles last week, I caught up with Ian Blaine, CEO and Founder where he was at the AlwaysOn OnHollywood conference. He shares an overview with Beet.TV here. -- Andy Plesser http://www.beet.tv/2008/06/pioneering-vide.html
Tuesday, July 29, 2008 Google: Indexing All the World's Information.....PowerPoint and PDF Files Too Google wants to index all the world's information, and that includes finding PowerPoint presentations and PDF files, weather, flight information and currency conversions. Kelsey and I visited the Googleplex in Mountainview, California last Tuesday for a number of meetings and demonstrations. In our first segment, we speak with Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead. She gives some useful tips about using the Google search box for a number of uses. No news here, but we didn't know about using Google to search for files with specific file extensions. -Andy Plesser, Executive Producer http://www.beet.tv/2008/07/google-indexing.html#more
Friday, August 01, 2008 Venture Beat Has 100 Beta Invites for New Mobile Browser....MG "Paris Lemon" Siegler Has the Download MG Siegler over at VentureBeat has the story this morning about Skyfire, a new browser for mobile devices. VentureBeat is giving away 100 invitations to try the new browser in private beta trials, MG writes in his post. MG, dubbed "machine gun" by his editor Matt Marshall for his prolific writing, is one of the best tech bloggers -- he is known to many of us as Paris Lemon, for his influential personal blog. MG is one of the writers in the Digital Media channel at VentureBeat. Last week, I caught up with MG at Stanford where he attended the Beet.TV online video roundtable. He shares his experience using a Qik-enabled smartphone to cover the recent Apple iPhone 3G launch in San Francisco. -- Andy Plesser, Executive Producer http://www.beet.tv/2008/08/venture-beat-ha.html
03:02
Wall Street Mess, It's Just Like the Tech Collapse, Journal's Alan Murray
http://www.beet.tv/2008/09/wall-street-mes.html Greed and the expectation of the level of high returns enjoyed during the stock market boom of the late nineties has powered the excess in the credit markets which have lead to the current financial crisis, says Alan Murray, Deputy Managing Editor of the Wall Street Journal. The pain is just being felt and will likely impact hedge private equity and the broader economy, he told me in this interview done on Thursday at the Journal. Like the tech bubble, if you got out before the collapse, you're are in good shape, if not "it's gonna hurt," he says. For more about the connection between the current crisis and the tech bubble of the late nineties, check out our interview with John H. Vogel Jr, professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. For more about the role of technology investment bankers and the collapse of the credit markets, see "Calling out the Culprits" an op-ed in today's Washington Post by Eric Hovde. What Do Other Tech ...
04:15
Thomson Reuters Improves Searchability for Blogs, Publishers with Open Calais
http://www.beet.tv/2008/10/thomson-reuters.html Thomson Reuters announced commercial options for its sophisticated metadata generation service Open Calais at the EmTech08 conference last week. Andy interviewed Tom Tague, Vice President of Solutions for Thomson Reuters, about the service and its implications for the semantic web. Both commercial and non-commercial publishers will be able to continue using the service for free up to 40,000 times a day, "which is a lot of documents," Tague says. Customers that want contractual service and 24/7 surveillance can now purchase one of its professional services for a couple of thousand dollars a month. Open Calais automatically creates metadata for people, places, organizations, and other items within content, improves tagging, and incorporates pictures. Tague it offers the service for free because it wants its natural language processing technology to be the best in the world, and one of the best ways to achieve that is to expose it to thousands of ...
01:27
Exclusive: Traffic Spikes 400% on Election Day for CNN.com
http://www.beet.tv/2008/11/traffic-spikes.html 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 says. Since the election results won't be known until late tonight or tomorrow, she said she expects tomorrow's traffic to be even higher. Cnnlogo_2 Andy interviewed Grant at the CNN headquarters this afternoon. She told him election day concerns were focused on the site's capacity to handle the traffic, but that it was handling it fine so far. In the segment, she also discusses CNN's mobile offerings, including its live video feed available through AT&T and Sprint. Andy and I are blogging from the CNN Grill party where bloggers are watching CNN's live coverage. --Kelsey ...
02:33
Washington Post Has Biggest Election Day Jump in Traffic of All Major News Sites
http://www.beet.tv/2008/11/washington-post.html 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 4.) Surely part of the success of the Washington Post is its long multimedia approach to journalism. Last Tuesday, October 28, Chet Rhodes, deputy managing editor for multimedia at the washingtonpost.com joined us for the Beet.TV Online Video Roundtable at MSNBC in New York. Kelsey interviewed him about video journalism. You can check out the Post's video coverage of the election here. Congratulations to Jim Brady and entire Washington Post online team for this big day. Oh, and the "paper" version is selling briskly Editor & Publisher reports. Here's a rundown on the ...
03:34
MySpace Allows Users to Pull Hulu, Other Content to User Profile Pages
http://www.beet.tv/2008/11/myspace-alllows.html 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 sources. Primetime may keep MySpace users on its site for a longer time -- and provide content creators with an enormous audience. -- Andy Plesser, Executive Producer
03:01
Move Networks and PermissionTV in Link to Bring "Adaptive Streaming" to Smaller Publishers
http://www.beet.tv/2008/11/move-networks-a.html 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 breaks up and sends along small packets which are assembed by the user depending on local bandwidth. In July I interviewed Move CEO John Edwards who explains how the technology works. It involves a small web plug-in. PermissionTV is a software for service company which provides ways for companies to integrate video in various Web applications. It has primarily implemented Flash solutions. In October, the curtains went up on Permission and Move's implementation of streaming of on-demand performances by the Metropolitan Opera, available through a ...
05:27
Mumbai Terror Attacks, Big Event for Online Video Journalism
http://www.beet.tv/2008/11/mumbai-terror-a.html As the world has tuned into to live coverage of breaking news on network news channels, others found videos on demand on most of the major news sites and on YouTube, which has uploads of coverage of Indian broadcasters. I've posted the video below. We haven't seen much in the way of user-generated video yet, although there many dramatic photos up on CNN iReports. CNN has featured live streaming of the events from the beginning. Last month at the Beet.TV Online Video Roundtable, we discussed the value of user-generated video for news sites. Commenting in this video is Chet Rhodes of the Washington Post, Andrew Heyward, former president of CBS News, Mark Larkin of CBSNews.com, KC Estenson of CNN.com and co-moderator Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch. It will be interesting to see how the unfolding effects of the attacks in India will impact this trend. We will be watching this and updating this post throughout the day. -- Andy Plesser, Executive Producer
01:59
Ning has 600,000 Networks, Gina Bianchini Writes in The New York Times
http://www.beet.tv/2008/12/ning-has-600000-networks-gina-bianchini-tells-the-new-york-times.html Gina Bianchini, CEO of Ning, writes in The New York Times that the custom-label social network platform has been deployed on 600,000 networks. She is the guest author of the article. In September, we caught up with Gina on the campus of MIT where she was keynote speaker at the EmTech08 conference. Handling the interview for me was Jason Pontin, editor-in-chief of Technology Review. We have reposted the interview today. -- Andy Plesser, Executive Producer
03:10
Boxee Opens Alpha to non-Windows Users, Adds Joost to Library
http://www.beet.tv/2009/01/boxee-opens-alpha-to-nonwindows-users-adds-joost-to-library.html Boxee, the social media center that brings online video to the living room TV, has opened its alpha to all Mac, Ubuntu, and Apple TV users and added the BBC iPlayer and Joost to its library, the company announced from CES today. It has moved its Windows version into private alpha and will be releasing thousands of invites a week. Chris Albrecth at NewTeeVee has a story about the announcement here. I interviewed Boxee CEO Avner Ronen over the summer, before Boxee had made much of a splash. We at Beet have been fans of the start-up from the beginning, and we're happy to see that things have been steadily moving forward. In October, Boxee released a patch to jailbreak Apple TV; in November, it raised $4 million in its first finance round; and in December, it added Netflix Watch Instantly and thewb.com to its offerings. In the video, Avner explains how Boxee works and shows me its snazzy design. --Kelsey Blodget, ...
04:17
Savory Cities Has Largest Library of Editorial Restaurant Videos on Web
http://www.beet.tv/2009/01/savory-cities-has-largest-library-of-restaurant-videos-on-web.html Savory Cities, the restaurant website that profiles restaurants in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Seattle, has the largest library of editorial restaurant videos on the web, Co-Founder Chris McBride told Andy in an interview last month. Since restaurant reviews by users can be highly subjective, Savory Cities strives to provide trusted information to foodies by publishing documentary-style profiles of different eateries and posting chef restaurant recommendations. Savory Cities is currently developing an iPhone application that will allow users to watch restaurant videos on the go. --Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer
http://www.beet.tv/2009/02/seeqpod-gets-hit-with-multibillion-dollar-lawsuits.html SeeqPod, the search engine that crawls the web for "playable search results" like music--including pirated files--is under fire from the record companies again. Camille Rickets at VentureBeat reports that EMI and Capitol Records are seeking billions of dollars in damages from not only SeeqPod, but individuals in the company including CEO Kasian Franks. The Warner Music Group first filed suit against the company in January. We think SeeqPod has an innovative approach to search, so we're happy to read that they have a chance to come out ahead. Rickets writes: "But the only readily-obvious difference between SeeqPod and search giants Google, Ask and Yahoo is that the results it yields are more relevant, and a music player is provided. SeeqPod is quick to point out that a Google search for U2 would provide playable files as well. And in it’s favor, the music its users access is only playable on the site, not ...
01:36
Media Disruption can be a Plus for Marketers, Digitas' Christine Beardsell
http://www.beet.tv/2009/03/media-disruption-can-be-plus-for-marketers-digitas-christine-beardswell.html AUSTIN -- Original content for the Web can provide unique opportunities for marketers, according to Christine Beardsell, vice president, creative director of Digitas's brand content group, The Third Act. We caught up with her earlier this week at SXSW -- Andy Plesser, Executive Producer
02:33
Showtime's a Big Hit on YouTube...and "The L Word" Has a Life Online
From http://www.beet.tv/2009/05/showtime-rides-youtube-to-third-place.html: Showtime is the third most viewed entertainment channel of all-time on YouTube and the premium network relies heavily on the viral video site as a marketing platform. With 16.5 million subscribers to the pay TV channel, Showtime has found that digital venues like iTunes and YouTube can drive additional demand for a show, the networkâs Rob Hayes, senior VP and general manager for digital media, told Beet.TV during an interview at the companyâs headquarters last month. âWhen you put your content on iTunes there is a real demand for it because people have heard about these shows but they may not be subscribers,â he said. âItâs really the first time digitally they can access our shows.â The premium networkâs digital strategy is worth noting. Hereâs why: the networkâs growing popularity and critical acclaim with shows like âDexterâ and âThe Tudorsâ has risen in the last few years concurrently with Showtim...
02:49
YouTube, Justin.tv Among Winners of CNET's Webware Award
he third annual CNET Webware awards are out and YouTube and Justin.tv are among video-related companies among the 100 winners. Other video-related winners are Amazon Video on Demand, Hulu, Ustream and Vimeo. Here's the word from Webware's editor Rafe Needleman: "This is the year that people have truly embraced Web 2.0 sites, services, and applications as a medium to communicate and collaborate," said Rafe Needleman, editor of CNET Webware.com. "We've seen more people use services like Google Docs, Facebook, and Twitter, and believe the 2009 Webware 100 Awards will become a valuable resource for those who want to learn more about Web 2.0. Leveraging the expertise of our editors and the passion of our users, this annual list recognizes those companies and organizations who are committed to creating innovative experiences and tools on the Web." Here's the press release. Earlier this month, we interviewed YouTube spokesperson Chris Dale about developments at YouTube, surround new long form content. We ...
Friday, May 29, 2009 http://www.beet.tv/2009/05/yahoo-ceo-gets-high-marks-from-kara-swisher.html CARLSBAD, Calif -- One of the most talked about sessions here at D: All Things Digital was Wednesday's one-on-one on stage conversation between Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz and co-executive editor Kara Swisher. The session was informative and very entertainment. A video of the session can be seen below. Late Wednesday night I caught up with Kara for an interview about the conference and the Bartz session. Kara told me, "she's a character, I let her explode.....and she did a very good job." About the success of the conference, she explained the strong editorial focus of the sessions and the informal networking environment. She says the tech industry is "like high school...and people like to schmooze and mix." Kara Publishes Carol's Post-it note to Steve Ballmer Earlier today, Kara published the Post-it note left in the make-up artist's program book by Bartz for Steve Ballmer. Kara reported earlier that ...
http://www.beet.tv/2009/08/why-its-nearly-primetime-for-tv-everywhere-from-comcast-ian-blaine.html SEATTLE, WA -- There been much talk about the emergence of "TV Anywhere," an initiative from Comcast and Time Warner which allows cable TV subscribers to log into their cable menu on their PC's, regardless of where a subscriber may be. We got an overview on TV Everywhere from Ian Blaine, the CEO of thePlatform, a video services company owned by Comcast. We visited Ian recently in his Seattle headquarters. Andy Plesser, Managing Editor
http://www.beet.tv/2009/08/magnify-is-growing-in-dollars-and-partners-by-inking-a-deal-with-boxee-and-migrating-customers-to-a-fee-based-service-the-co.html Magnify is growing dollars by migrating customers to a fee-based service, the company's CEO Steve Rosenbaum told Beet.TV in an interview earlier this month. Andy interviewed Rosenbaum last week outside the NY Video Meetup. Daisy Whitney, Senior Producer
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