Fora.tv, which wants to become the C-SPAN of the Web, closed a $2 million seed round from Adobe Ventures and Will Hearst. The site has about 1,500 hours of public speeches from people like Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker and neurologist and New Yorker contributor Oliver Sacks. It gets its videos through partnerships with organizations like the Aspen Institute, the Commonwealth Club, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Long Now Foundation, and, yes, C-SPAN. In fact, founder and CEO Brian Gruber once worked at C-Span as its chief marketer. He prefers calling Fora.tv the “thinking man’s YouTube.” Gruber plans to raise another $5 million in an A round within 90 days. More via TechCrunch.

Trick or Treat!

TubeMogul has released a free report entitled Web Video Marketing – Best Practices. The report starts out with some various statistics supporting the claims that online video is essentially where its at right now. If you have current ad representation for your video content, this is a great report to forward on to them for source material in your media kit.

Essentially what TubeMogul does is allow you to, for free, follow the trend of your online videos, as well as upload your videos to many different video sharing sites simultaneously, including YouTube, Revver, MetaCafe, MySpace, BrightCove, Yahoo, and AOL. Additionally, they’ll aggregate and graph your stats for you across all the sites with which you choose to distribute your video with. It is the stat-tracking and aggregation of data expertise at TubeMogul that really played into provision of valuable data released in this report.

The juicy bits come in the disclosure of a “Secret Formula” for the success of an online video, expressed “mathematically” by the equation:

.5C + .15M + .20T + .15P = Success.

Here’s what it means:

50% C = Content and Production.

15% M = Metadata.

20% T = Thumbnail.

15% P = Promotion.

Full story via Mashable

We got wind of a big chess tournament happening with some of the big names in hip hop, so of course we had to see what this was all about. Turns out the Hip Hop Chess Federation was putting on the inaugural Chess Kings Invitational, an event with the brightest young minds of chess competing for scholarships and the big belt. Chess, hip hop music and martial arts are the elements that build life strategies according to founder Adisa Banjoko. Irina gets the scoop behind the 64 squares and meets legends PopMaster Fabel of the Rock Steady Crew and The RZA of the Wu-Tang Clan among others.

Episode links: Hip Hop Chess Federation, HHCF blog, Adisa Banjoko, Pop Master Fabel, Emma Bentley, The RZA, DLabrie, Davey D’s wrapup, Chesspark, [full interviews: Adisa Banjoko, PopMaster Fabel, Emma Bentley, DLabrie, The RZA of Wu-Tang Clan, Rugged Monk]

Formats available: Quicktime (.mov) | Portable (iPod) | YouTube

Viacom is set to unveil a new site that will include 13,000 video clips of its popular “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” representing every minute of the show since its 1999 inception.. wOOt!

To prepare for the site launch, 16 Comedy Central writers and video encoders have worked two shifts a day on the project since June, according to the report. Erik Flannigan, executive vice president for digital media at MTV Networks, the Viacom unit that includes Comedy Central, said one particular challenge for the site was designing ads to satisfy advertisers without turning off viewers. The site will include a database of clips searchable by both date and topic. More via CNN Money

Stream Solutions, a suite of production and programming tools to create customized Internet television networks for national and international companies. According to this press release the “proprietary, Web-based video platform designed to provide effective and efficient communications and training content across the Web in real time. The platform’s flexibility allows it to be customized to provide a turnkey private-label television network for businesses that is delivered over the Internet.”

An online demonstration of the Splash Stream Solution is available Here.

This year’s Fierce 15 IPTV Innovators are small telcos, the majority with 30,000 lines or fewer, that have deployed IPTV via fiber-to-the-home or hybrid copper/fiber systems. Many of the innovators have been among the first to employ MPEG-4 or its Microsoft counterpart in order to deliver high-definition channels to cutting-edge set-tops. They have broken ground with shared headends, brokered programming deals with multinational media conglomerates and field tested untried technology.

A lot of these companies are legacy community phone companies, some more than 100 year old, yet they were out of the gate with IPTV before the Big Bells–Verizon and AT&T. FierceIPTV conferred with several telecom industry executives in the compilation of the list, which was not meant to be comprehensive, but rather a snapshot of the diversity, history and flexibility of some of the most enduring businesses in the United States.

Podcasters and videobloggers from all around the world converged recently on the eastern Los Angeles wasteland of Ontario, California for the Podcast and New Media Expo. As one can imagine, much incestuous self-referential media making went on among the attendees. And we at Geek Entertainment TV are no different. See which micro-celebrities Irina accosts with her microphone. Odds are, you are probably one of them.

Episode links: Steve Garfield, Women of Warcraft Podcast, The Clip Show, Cinema Psychic, Daily Breakfast, Lab Rats, Total Podcastrophe, The Medical Minute, Nick Starr, Rocketboom, Paul Dateh, Midwest Teen Sex Show

Formats available: Quicktime (.mov) | Portable (iPod) | Viddler

Most software entrepreneurs’ ambition is to sell out for a huge wad of cash, or maybe go public for an even bigger pile. Not so Nicholas Reville: He wants to overthrow the television industry, and he doesn’t care if he gets rich. In fact, as co-founder of the Participatory Culture Foundation, a 501 nonprofit, Reville is unlikely to make much money at all.

Reville oversees the PCF’s core project: a free, open-source video player called Miro. Formerly known as Democracy Player, Miro is a desktop video application that lets you search and view videos. It uses RSS, BitTorrent and media-player technologies. But the PCF’s ambitions go far beyond making and distributing a popular internet video platform. Ultimately, the foundation’s goal is to promote and build an entirely new, open mass medium of online television.

Values aside, Miro still has to make money like any other venture-backed startup or major media company. And as a nonprofit, Reville is the first to admit that that’s not always easy. While the PCF just wrapped up a successful $50,000 fundraising drive, that money is a small portion of the project’s overall budget. Indeed, with 12 full-time staff members and two part-timers, most of Miro’s budget is earmarked for the employees responsible for what Reville characterizes as “the core of the application.”

Full story via Wired

This video chronicles the dedication of a Native American memorial in February of 1913. 32 chiefs from varying tribes are on hand to witness the ceremony, as well as the American President, William Howard Taft. To symbolize the building of the memorial, President Taft breaks ground with a spade and then with an Indian Stone Ax. Then Chief Wooden Leg breaks ground on behalf of the North American Indian. As a final showing of ceremony, the Indian Chiefs raise the American flag as a symbol of unity with the United States government. See the full length video at: www.qualityinformationpublishers.com

Author: QualityInformation
Tags: native americans indians tribes memorial chiefs monuments president william howard taft ceremonies chants politics
Posted: 09 October 2007
Rating: 5.0
Votes: 1

And so the “Aha Hammer” finally drops.. Google has admitted it will integrate the YouTube platform their AdSense unit in order to raise awareness and revenues for themselves all players going forward.

“Video units” will display two different kinds of advertising, both pegged to the content of the site and the subject matter of the video itself. The resulting revenue will be split three ways, with the site owner, content owner and Google all taking a slice.

The two types of ads to be displayed within Google’s new video units are a banner ad that will sit on top of the player at all times, and a so-called overlay ad, which will pop up after the video has been playing for 10 seconds. The bulk of the ads will generate revenue based on how many user clicks they accrue.

We’re not surprised.