Think video is the future of online media? Broadband revolution, right? Apple perfecting the digital video experience?

Well, not if everyone decides to embrace that future all at once. Time Warner Cable is experimenting with caps on broadband usage, which means too much movie downloading and suddenly you’re paying $30 per movie.

Nearly every major original content brand that publishes in both analogue and digital started in analogue and then extended to digital — and in nearly all instances, the analog operation took priority, which made sense given that the newspaper, magazine, TV show, etc. was generating most of the revenue and profit. That balance of power […]

The new YouTube InVideo ad format is big news not because the format is new — Google has been testing the format for a while, and other sites like VideoEgg have used it. It’s big news because the ad format is being rolled out on YouTube’s massively scaled video site — kind of reminiscent of […]

To understand why the inclusion of videos on Google News pages — which can be played via YouTube embeds right on the page, without leaving Google News — can be a valuable distribution channel for video content producers, first take a look at this video embedded right here on Publishing 2.0:

I’m picking on the New York Times because they are the 11th largest “audience aggregator” on the Web, but many newspapers and other traditional media companies are similarly using strength in their digital operations to conceal weakness in their legacy businesses. Here’s an example of the consequences of such “obfuscation” from MediaPost’s coverage of the […]

Why does TV advertising continue to do well in the face of declining viewership and transcendent online video? Here are some examples of the typically contradictory reports that make it so difficult to get a handle on what’s really going on (bold is mine):

As newspapers struggle to transform themselves into digital media publishers, many have begun to produce online video, in some cases going head-to-head with local TV stations for traditional newscasting. Newspapers have struggled with the transition to digital because classified ads, their cash cow, are available for free online, and because they can’t command the same […]

Magazines are trying to evolve into digital media brands to stay relevant and vibrant in a digital media world. This evolution in many case includes online video, which is a lot easier said than done — producing video content that creates unique value for readers is not part of the traditional magazine’s core competency.

One […]

Google has disintermediated media companies, not just through Google News, which has been the focus of newspaper lawsuits and handwringing, but also through Google’s main search results — and even more so with the introduction of Google Universal Search. But of all the features in Universal Search, the most disruptive may be the Video PlusBox, […]

What’s striking about the news that CBS has acquired the video blog Wallstrip (congratulations, Howard) is not that a content startup can get successfully acquired, but rather that CBS had to buy it rather than build it. Here’s how Fred Wilson describes the startup process that Howard Lindzon pursued for Wallstrip:

Google announced a major change to its standard web search results — the inclusion of results from its vertical search engines, e.g. Google News, Google Video, Google Maps, inside its standard search results, which they are calling Google Universal Search. That means links from Google News and YouTube videos (playable right in the search results!) […]

The following piece was co-authored with Robert Young.

One by one, the big media companies and the Internet giants have started to ante up for the big poker game over the future of the video content business. Google started it all with its acquisition of YouTube. Then GE’s NBC-Universal and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp responded by […]

Everybody in the video content business is focused — to the point of obsession — with distribution. Viacom is going to distribute through Joost. NBC Universal and News Corp are creating their own distribution channel. CBS is going to distribute through everybody and their dog.

All these content owners are right to be focused on distribution. […]

Last spring I wrote a post “Has The MySpace Downturn Begun?” Dan Mitchell at NYT picked it up in a piece “MySpace No Longer Their Space?” My post was purely speculative and, not surprisingly, completely wrong. But the fact remains that MySpace belongs to News Corp, not MySpace users, which is why News Corp can […]

Since the merger with AOL, Time Warner has been emblematic of the media industry’s struggle to evolve, and it’s now become emblamatic of the tail-chasing confusion over the future of media. I read the following stories about Time Warner back to back (via Forbes and MediaPost):
Time Warner shares jumped Monday on hopes that the media […]

Or maybe you know of one that has. If you do, let’s discuss.

I’m just curious.

I’m at the Online Publishers Association Global Forum listening to a panel with digital execs from Disney-ABC, NBC Universal, and CBS (moderated by Larry Kramer of CBS). Some interesting comments on the deep infrastructure problems that online video needs to overcome.

1. What ad creative works?

15 second, 30 second, pre-roll, mid-roll, post-roll — oy vey

“It requires […]

I was struck by this statement from a NYT report about the ongoing dialogue among Viacom, NBC, and News Corp about the future of online video, GoogTube, etc.:
It has become evident that the question of who will rule video on the Web is incredibly tangled. For now, most of the sticky strands lead to Google, […]

Everyone assumed that when Viacom demanded that YouTube take down 100,000 clips of Viacom content, it was just a hardball negotiating tactic…but maybe it wasn’t. What if Viacom suddenly realized that they don’t need YouTube.

I went to ComedyCentral.com, and thanks to a recently introduced embedding feature, here I am with a Comedy Central clip […]

Nothing brings into sharp relief the radical change sweeping through the video-based media industry (TV, movies, etc.) like hard data:
Downloads of Walt Disney films on the iTunes platform have risen sharply to more than 1.3m after only three months on sale, putting pressure on other Hollywood studios to join Apple’s digital service. (Via FT)
And […]

According to a new poll by Harris Interactive, “73 percent of frequent YouTube users say they would visit the site less if it started including short video ads before every clip.” And…
Of the frequent YouTube users, 66 percent claim they are sacrificing other activities when on YouTube, including other websites (36 percent), time spent watching […]

I embedded Barack Obama’s Brightcove video announcing his presidential candidacy in a post about how the use of viral videos may be shrinking the advertising pie for media companies. The video seems to have gone MIA.

It also appears to be MIA from Obama’s own site:

A word of caution to candidates or anyone else jumping on […]

Barack Obama followed the presidential candidate online video trend by announcing his run with an embeddable video courtesy of (the freshly funded) Brightcove — that video is now embedded and playing on dozens of sites (including now this one) — FOR FREE.

Media companies have long depended on the ever growing bucket of money that gets […]

Google is experimenting with ads in some Google Video clips (via Inside Google via Boing Boing) — a stunning failure of innovation, here is was an example of an Allstate ad embedded into a Charlie Rose clip, which is was as interruptive, untargeted and utterly old school as anything mass TV advertising has ever inflicted […]

If you spend too much time in Silicon Valley you’d think that the technology industry — with Google leading the charge — already owns the future of advertising. But don’t count out Madison Avenue just yet — they may be responsible for perpetuating the imbalance between media time spent online and ad dollars spent online […]

Turns out that the vast majority of “users” who “generate” video content don’t share it online (via MediaPost):

IN A FINDING THAT UNDERSCORES the potential of a vast, untapped market for user-generated video, new research conducted by interactive agency Sharpe Partners indicates that more than half (54) percent of adult Internet users currently create their own […]

There’s been a flurry of news about new video downloading services — BitTorrent, Wal-Mart, Time Warner — as copyright holders get busy taking back control from consumers. YouTube just cut a deal with Verizon that gives users so little control that the blogosphere couldn’t find enough pejorative adjectives to describe it.

The glory days of consumers […]

Last week the big news was CBS and YouTube crowing that distributing video clips of CBS TV shows through YouTube was (ostensibly) increasing CBS broadcast TV ratings. Today, the big news is that UK viewers who watch online video are watching lest broadcast TV.

The online video boom is starting to eat into TV viewing time, […]