Kelsey interviewed Greg Bauman, editor of TelevisionWeek, at the Beet.TV online video executive conference at Stanford.

Steve Grove heads news and politics for YouTube.

Jim is the VP of Product Management for Dynamic Media at Adobe.

PALO ALTO -- "There are no TV journalists," says Charles Tillinghast, president and publisher of msnbc.com in this interview with Beet.TV Nope, he didn't mean that there's any downsizing over at NBC News, he means that video news gathering has no longer television-centric. A few days ago, we visited him at the NBC headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Plaza for this overview of the transformation of video journalism. Charlie will be the featured speaker at the Beet.TV online media roundtable taking place on the Stanford campus in a few hours. Our session today is moderated by former CBS News President Andrew Heyward and myself. We have a great line up of folks from YouTube, CBS Interactive, The New York Times, Adobe, VideoEgg, HP and many others. We are not streaming live, but will provide numerous segment from the sessions and one-on-one interviews over the next few weeks. Kelsey and I will also cover the AlwaysOn conference which begins later today. -- Andy Plesser, Executive Producer

Speaking about online video with Andy Plesser of Beet.TV

Blip.TV has acted as a partner to mega digital ad agency Digitas in the creation of Holiday Inn Express' web series The Smart Show, according to Director of Advertising Sales Sam Stahl. It designed The Smart Show destination site and rounded up some of the "smartest shows" using its platform to run Holiday Inn express advertisements, including Beet.TV. A close working relationship with a large agency like Digitas demonstrates how a small web start-up can have a big influence. Blip.TV focuses on episodic content rather than personal videos, and has a largely open source platform. Disclaimer: Beet.TV uses Blip.TV as its video hosting platform. --Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer

Online video developments at Qik

Kyte has substantially transformed from being a video camera phone sharing site, to a full-blown online video delivery tool for big brands. It is much more akin these days to YouTube or BrightCove than Flixwagon or Qik.Uploads from mobile phones are a small part of the content on the Kyte platform. It's really more about big brands that want customized delivery including a customized video player, branded channels on social networks and other valuable utilities.The Huffington Post is using Kyte to stream the NetRoots conference. 50 Cent uses the Kyte platform to stream an astounding number of clips daily: Nearly 200,000 video views per day on some 30,000 web sites, according Danial Graf of Kyte. Some 22 million videos have been viewed since the channel started in November. Daniel told me that monetization for his company's services will come through ad ad model, unlike BrightCove or the Platform which are paid sofware solutions. We caught up with Daniel in Madison Park a few days ago. --- Andy Plesser, Executive Producer

Far beyond the limitations of the 30 second television spot, marketers now have the opportunity to connect with audiences through episodic, branded content. Of course, marketers must connect with consumers who have migrated in mass numbers from television to online. Digitas is one of the largest world's largest interactive advertising agency. In May, the company announced the formation of a digital studio production unit called The Third Act to create branded episodic programming. For an insight into how marketers and their agencies are transforming in this new media landscape, Kelsey interviewed Christine Beardsell, creative director of The Third Act. The Third Act is producing The Smart Show for client Holiday Inn Express. -- Andy Plesser Disclaimer: Holiday Inn Express is presently a sponsor of Beet.TV

The Third Act, the newly formed branded content arm of mega advertising agency Digitas, launched the second season of The Smart Show for Holiday Inn Express last week. To learn about branded online video content and how The Smart Show is shaping up in its second season, I visited Digitas VP/Creative Director Ben Jones at the Digitas New York office. The Third Act's distribution partnership with TripAdvisor could significantly expand the show's traffic. It will be interesting to watch how Web video is providing opportunities for big interactive advertising agencies to create digital, branded content. Blip.tv is publishing the show on an embeddable flash player. Disclaimer: The Holiday Inn and The Smart Show presently sponsor Beet.TV. Blip.TV publishes our videos and sells ads into our video streams. --Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer

The Third Act, the new brand content unit of advertising agency giant Digitas, launched the second season of The Smart Show earlier this month for Holiday Inn Express. In his inteview with Beet.TV, Digitas Senior VP/Creative Director Ben Jones explains the strategy behind the campaign. He talks about the value of branded content and some changes in the new season.

There's been a lot of speculation in the blogosphere lately about whether Kyte, Qik,or Flixwagon will finish first in the cell phone video streaming trifecta. But according to Kyte CEO Daniel Graf, Kyte's broader focus means it's not really in the race with Qik and Flixwagon. Kyte is focused on a different market, partnering with entertainment companies including the four major record labels (Universal, Sony, EMI and Warner), MTV Europe and K-Rock. It also will support any type of video content, whether online, mobile, live or recorded, while Qik and Flixwagon are primarily concerned with the live cell phone streaming of individual users. Kyte also lets users embed branded, automatically updating players on their websites and allows fans watching a channel on different sites to chat. So the thousands of fans watching 50 Cent's Kyte channel on Facebook, 50cent.com, and MySpace can form a cross-platform community. Kyt'es big-name deals, broader production focus and better distribution sure make it seem like they're beating Qik and Flixwagon. FastCompany TV founder Robert Scoble thought so; he named Kyte the winner in a much-discussed guest blog at TechCrunch.Of course, Qik and Flixwagon are still alpha testing and Kyte's Mobile Producer is in private beta, so it's too early to declare the race over. All three sites will undoubtedly make exciting progress in the coming weeks.--Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer

Steve Sklepowich on DRM and Silverlight

MSNBC correspondent Courtney Hazlett, who has been reporting on the celebrity gossip scene in a series called "Scoop," has just gotten her own branded destination with customized video player. The site is up and looks pretty good. This would be the second microsite over at msnsbc.com -- the first was launched for Keith Olbermann.Because msnbc is the first and only major online video news organization to provide embeddable video codes, anyone on the Web can grab Courtney's reports and put them on their blogs and Web sites. Below I've pasted her definitive report on A-Rod and Madonna. We are so glad she sorted this out!To understand the value of providing embed codes for videos and other topics related to online news, Kelsey and I had the opportunity to interview Charlie Tillinghast, President and Publisher of msnbc.com, the joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal. Charlie is based in Redmond, but we caught up with him during one of his frequent visits to 30 Rock.This is the first in a series of interviews with Charlie. I am pleased to say that Charlie will be the featured speaker at the Beet.TV media roundtable at Stanford on Tuesday, July 22. -- Andy Plesser

Google announced today that it has made its free Webmaster Tools available to qualifying hosting companies worldwide. International webmasters now have the means to make their sites--and web videos--more "Googlable." Google Webmaster tools can generate video site maps that make a site's videos and metadata searchable in the Google Index. R.J. Pittman described how video site maps work in his interview with Andy last month. Google's introduction of Universal Search in May will make it even easier for users to find and watch videos online. The new search system blends text results with videos and images so that users can watch a clip without being redirected to another site, a concept similar to the the one behind SeeqPod Playable search, which I recently blogged about. --Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer

Consumers want access to digital content anytime, anywhere, but it's going to take a lot of brainpower to make that happen. That's why David Wertheimer at the University of Southern California's Entertainment and Technology Center helped establish the Anytime, Anywhere Content Lab to bring innovators together.The AACL will showcase the latest digital equipment to members of content, technology and products industries, highlighting how content currently can and can't move across different platforms. To achieve total content transportability--the ability to reach consumers on any device in any location--cross-industry collaboration will be crucial, and the AACL will provide the forum. Content transportability is perhaps the next great frontier in digital media. At the very least, it's a hot industry buzzword these days, and we've talked about it with a lot of people lately, including the CEO at Boxee, the creative director at MRM digital ad agency, Steve Abraham at IBM and Mitch Singer at Sony Pictures. We're hoping industry professionals take advantage of the opportunity to work together in an environment like the AACL. --Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer

No longer a cheap solution or a recycling bin for television advertising, Web video advertising is now a big budget affair, declares Mark Jacobs,the creative director of the New York office MRM, the big digital unit of Interpublic. Consumers expect quality video on the web, and digital ad agencies like MRM are delivering it with high-production, big-budget campaigns. Mockumentarian Christopher Guest directed MRM's Hard Meets Soft rock music videos for Intel, and Radical Media production of videos for its Army Strong campaign. Michael Jacobs, thek, told Andy last week that a larger share of clients' budgets are now going toward online campaigns, which he calls a "white hot channel."-- Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producerwww.beet.tv

Mochila, an online marketplace for syndicated news and feature content, has increased distribution of its media by 35 times since late last year, according to a spokesperson for the company. Mochila currently offers rights-managed content from 360 top content brands to its 3,800 members and is adding half a million new content assets each month. The Associated Press, Reuters, Getty and hundreds of others already offer their content through the site.Mochila's connects content owners, publishers and advertisers to everyone's advantage and isn't facing much competition, so this impressive level of growth makes sense. Most of Mochila's members acquire ad-supported content for free, but articles, photos and video can also be purchased a la carte for a fee. CEO Keith McAllister told Andy that Mochila will launch a new feature called Mochila Sections this August, which will let big-brand advertisers own the brand experience over verticals like health, family, and automotive. --Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer

As it seeks to monetize the exploding universe of uploaded images to the Web, which Google says is nearing one trillion, it is developing image processing to more effectively search and organize images. Presently, photos are indexed primarily by text and other metadata. In May, Google announced plans to begin matching images from its fast-growing Google Image Search with display ads. Yesterday, Andy and and I met R.J. Pittman, Google's Director of Product Management for Consumer Search Properties, who was visiting the company's Manhattan offices. He said that Google is developing image processing and visual search to crawl the pixels of images. Beyond facial recognition, the company is also developing scene analysis.Adding to the utility of image search will be geo-tagging, which is already underway with a product called Panaramio. This is the first of several posts from our chat with R.J. We will be publishing additional segments over the next few days.--Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer

Google Finance, in beta for the last year, has been quickly evolving with with introduction of realtime quotes from the NYSE late last month and international launches of Google Finance in Canada the U.K. and China. The integration of Google News and portfolio management tools means that Google Finance is moving to become a bonafide consumer destination site, a sector long dominated by Yahoo! Finance. It may also compete with consumer trading sites and services. Although Google is not going into the broker/dealer business, it will bring the financial services industry into Google Finance as advertisers and strategic partners, Beet.TV has learned in this interview with R. J. Pittman, who heads consumer search for Google. He told me and Kelsey in this interview we conducted last week that Google Finance will be "a great lever for the financial industry." R.J. indicates that Google Finance is poised for broad global expansion. Up and running in North America, the U.K. and China, the company is evaluating opportunities in the 100 countries where it operates. -- Andy Plesser, Executive Producer

Boxee users can watch YouTube videos, listen to Last FM music, and sort through pictures from Picasa and Flickr--all on their television sets. The process requires only a free software download to a PC or Mac, a cable, and a comptuer or universal remote. Boxee, which lauched private alpha testing a couple of weeks ago, isn't the first to try and bring digital content to the living room, but it's one of the first to do it using an open source platform. CEO Avner Ronen views content aggregators like Apple, Netflix and Amazon as possible partners rather than competition. It won't just be large companies integrating their content with Boxee--users can make their own homemade content and applications available to others. One user created an application that combined Last FM and Youtube to create a "personalized MTV," Ronen told me at the Beet.TV office last week. Boxee is working out the bugs and cultivating the social networking aspect of the site to get it ready for Beta, and will explore ways to monetize the site after the product is publicly available. Possible business models include advertising, premium services, and software licensing, Ronen said.The Boxee got a great response at the NY Video 2.0 event in June, scoring the highest in the live SMS poll. Now Boxee will rely on feedback from at least 5,000 alpha testers to help move the site forward. Digital content from Beet.TV will be available on the site by the end of the week. For an early review of Boxee, check out this piece by Josh Lowenstein on CNET s Webware.--Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer

An online video campaign is attracting 70 percent of new army prospects, Beet.TV has learned. MRM, a digital ad agency owned by Interpublic Group, produced videos for the online Army Strong campaign that highlight and demystify the Army experience. Last week we spoke with MRM New York's Creative Director Michael Jacobs, who heads digital campaigns for the Army, Nikon, and Intel.Army Strong video categories include "What It's Like Being a Soldier," "Army Parents" and "Ways to Serve." The "Basic Training" category receives the most traffic, suggesting prospects are most concerned about meeting the army's physical demands. In addition to views on Army Strong campaign's destination site, some of the Army Strong videos receive hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube. --Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer

The interoperability of consumer electronic devices is essential for the entertainment industry, but it is not yet a reality, says Steve Abraham, who is co-head of IBM's global media and entertainment practice. I caught up with him last month in Los Angeles at the OnHollywood conference. He says that work is going on behind the scenes to make digital devices work together. Earlier, I spoke with Sony Pictures CTO Mitch Singer on this topic. -- Andy Plesser, Executive Producer

Compete, the Web metrics company, is being dropped from coverage by Nielsen Online due to its dip in traffic to 370,000 unique visitors in May, I was told by a Nielsen spokesperson earlier this week. Website traffic metrics, the solutions and services used to monitor and count traffic, is not a perfect science yet. There are some big players who charge substantial fees to publishers and advertisers, these are Nielsen Online, comScore. then there are consumer-friendly services which offer a combination of free and subscription -- Compete and Alexa, the Amazon unit, are the best known. Alexa had 1.16 million uniques in May, Nielsen Online tells Beet.TV We think Compete is pretty good - and the paid service is valuable. Maybe the lower traffic reflects its evolution as a B2B tool. We're not sure. The sector is becoming more crowded. In June, Google introduced its consumer-friendly web metrics page, Google Trends for Websites. Earlier this month, I spoke with CNET Senior Editor Dan Ackerman who spells out the challenge in getting accurate Web metrics.

HOLLYWOOD -- 50 Cent, who is touring to promote his new album and has been getting good notices, including story in The New York Times, has a successful fan site which prominently displays fan-uploaded videos in to Kyte player. Watching a video, iTunes open on my browser right to the song/album/ringtone for sale. In Los Angeles last week, I caught up with 50 Cent's producer Sha Money. He told me that thisis50cent.com has 300.000 monthly unique visitors and is adding 10,000 new users per month. He told me many are uploading camera-phone videos to the Kyte player. Sha says the opportunity for success lies with artists who are embracing innovative digital solution. The record companies don't help. -- Andy Plesser

Google Labs will soon become "more transparent in its interaction with end users," R.J. Pittman, who heads Google's consumer search operations, told Beet.TV earlier this week in this video interview. He also said the company is making a major commitment to expand and accelerate the rate of innovation of the Labs. In June Google made the first big step in opening up the Labs with the launch of of GMail Labs. Here is a report on that development by Saul Hansel of The New York Times. R.J. did not disclose what product development would be opened to the public, but it will happen shortly. And, we can surely expect the inevitable expansion of new clever products from Mountainview. It would be very cool for some of us to be part of that process. -- Andy Plesser

TechCrunch

LOS ANGELES--The online movie distribution company Jaman has made a niche for itself in the online film distribution market, focusing on indie and international films rather than big Hollywood hits. The site offers 3,500 films--the kind that do well at film festivals, like The World's Fastest Indian and Redacted. Films can usually be rented for $1.99 or purchased for $4.99, and some can be watched for free with ads. Jaman CEO Gaurav Dhillon, who spoke with Andy at OnHollywood, said he expects free ad-supported content to be the more pervasive business model in the future.So while Apple, Wal-Mart, Netflix and Amazon compete over online distribution rights for mainstream films, Jaman heads to the film festivals to make deals. Many of the films on Jaman's site don't get distributed at all in the US, so there's not as much competition. Dhillon invested $3.5 million of his own money to start the company in 2006. The company has attracted a number of notable advisers and investors, including top Hollywood agent Jeff Berg, former senator Bill Bradley, William R. Randolph Hearst III and the celebrated Hollywood producer Ed Pressman.Jaman's platform called Cascade makes it possible to transfer and watch the videos on different devices, including computers, iPhones, TiVo and DivX.--Kelsey Blodget, Associate Producer

In May, Google announced plans to begin matching images from Google Image Search with display ads. As it seeks to monetize the exploding universe of uploaded images to the Web, which Google says is nearing 1 trillion, it is developing image processing to more effectively search and organize images. Presently, photos are indexed primarily by text and other metadata.

LOS ANGELES -- Instead of the $10 million spent for network pilot shows, creative web producers are filling the critical role of program development, a senior NBC Universal executive told me. Although Quarterlife didn't work out for NBC, it wasn't a big financial loss. I spoke with Vince Manze, NBC Universal's President of Creative Services at the OnHollywood conference earlier this month. He filled me in on some creative programs within the NBC Universal organization including a co-promotion for the new film Hell Boy and a possibly 3D film about the Summer Olympics. -- Andy Plesser