Video

UNDER THE RADAR: Crunching video data and hawking goods in Second Life

Companies that help videographers track the popularity of their clips and another startup that wants to cash in on virtual world economies led the afternoon session at the Under the Radar conference on Thursday.

Cruxy offers to help musicians, break-dance instructors, authors, videographers and other artists sell their work online. In addition, Cofounder Nathan Frietas said the company can track sales data and customer behavior in Second Life as well as other virtual worlds.

Vidmetrix touts itself as a way for professional videographers and marketing execs to determine how their videos are faring on sites, such as YouTube. Vidmetrix, tells … Read more

NBA playing ball online

Expensive sports rights are a major cost for the United States television industry. Sports also brings huge ad revenue and a male audience that is much prized by advertisers because it's so elusive.

Now the NBA has signed new TV deals that run nearly a decade. This time the buyers get significant rights to Internet distribution of games, highlights and related content. Clearly, this is just another step toward the Internet becoming a full-fledged alternative to typical TV distribution. An ESPN executive said its Web site had a million unique visitors daily during the NBA playoffs earlier this year.… Read more

NBC, News Corp video venture hires CEO

The video venture created by media conglomerates News Corp and NBC Universal finally has a leader.

The tentatively named NewCo has hired Jason Kilar, a longtime former Amazon.com executive as CEO. Kilar is credited with helping form Amazon's video and DVD strategy during his 10 years at the company.

NewCo will distribute full-length movies and clips from at least a dozen television networks and two major film studios over the Web, including at three of the Web's largest Internet portals, AOL, MSN and Yahoo. Some of those contributing content, besides NBC and Fox include Comcast, MySpace and … Read more

Under the Radar: Video ads are here, now what?

Advertising is an important part of the Internet, but how are content creators and advertisers going to come together to start making money off videos? At Under the Radar this morning four new Web 2.0 advertising companies that specialize in video are trying to figure that out.

Adap.tv is an online video advertising platform that looks at the context of a video to place advertisements. Almost like Google's contextual AdSense program, Adapt.tv reads a video's metadata to figure out what the video is about before serving up an ad that (hopefully) is related. Ads pop … Read more

AMA: Video game addiction not clear yet

The American Medical Association on Wednesday said it is not yet ready to link heavy video game playing with addiction.

"Given that approximately 70 to 90 percent of U.S. youths play video games," the association said in a statement, "the AMA today called for more research on the long-term beneficial and detrimental effects of video game and Internet use."

AMA President Ronald Davis said the organization is still concerned about the effects of heavy play on kids, urging "parents to closely monitor their children's use of video games and the Internet."

The … Read more

What's the mobile video hold up?

BOSTON--Device and network technology is not holding back mobile video, it's the money makers who can't agree on what to do with it.

At least that was the consensus among several mobile video leaders, including Nokia and MobiTV, at Red Herring East's Wednesday panel on mobile video.

"From a network and device perspective we are ready," said Ray Derenzo, vice president of business development for MobiTV, one of the leading mobile video distributors.

Proprietary nuisances, on the other hand, are an issue.

"It's all about the open platform," said Nokia research director … Read more

MySpace's video czar gives details on new 'TV' endeavor

On Wednesday, CNET News.com checked in with Jeff Berman, MySpace.com's general manager of video operations, to hear more about the gargantuan social network's latest project: MySpace TV. The New York Times reported Tuesday that MySpace would be refurbishing its in-house video operations this week, creating a new video hub at myspacetv.com (site not yet active) to host a mix of amateur and professional media content. Berman filled us in on exactly what to expect.

"It's really just the next step in what has been a very busy few months for us on the … Read more

Dramatic Chipmunk with more cowbell, er, lightsaber

We know the next few days are just going to be iPhone, iPhone, iPhone. That's why we're bringing something completely different to you: the Dramatic Chipmunk (who is really a prairie dog, but you knew that already) is back. Except, thanks to a little bit of low-grade video editing, he (she?) is now the Darthmatic Chipmunk. Thanks, CollegeHumor!

Azooca: a new video mail provider

Azooca is a new video mail service that launched earlier this month. It joins the ranks of other video mail services like Springdoo, EyeJot, and Gabmail to let users send and receive video messages. Azooca steps it up a notch by giving its users a full-fledged e-mail in-box, along with 250MB to store attachments and incoming video messages.

Recording videos is managed entirely within the e-mail composition window, and users get three simple controls to record, play, and stop the recording. Users can also preview their video messages before sending, or save them as a draft. Video clips are limited … Read more