VEVO Launches Upgraded Facebook Tools for Talent by Steve Smith

Today we are likely to hear a lot about media integration with Facebook as the highly anticipated f8 conference kicks off. Facebook's main challenge has been incorporating more of people's media sharing and media consumption on the social network itself. As we have been seeing in recent weeks with pay-per-view video models on the site and WSJ's new content-rich app, making that otherwise fugly Facebook screen into a palatable platform for media use is the new direction for Zuckerberg's crew. ...Read the whole story

  • Visible Measures Advances, Conde Nast Owner Targets TV Ad Dollars For Social Video by Joe Mandese

    Social video analytics firm Visible Measures this morning said it closed on a $13 million round of financing led by DAG Ventures, but also including Advance Publications, the owner of consumer magazine publisher Conde Nast, which publishes titles such as Wired, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Vogue, and related websites as well as Epicurious.com and reddit.com. Other backers in the round included existing investors: General Catalyst Partners, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Northgate Capital. ...Read the whole story

  • Netflix Defends Price Hike As Price Of Doing Business by Wayne Friedman

    Netflix management defended its recent and dramatic business model changes -- price increases, branding shifts -- saying they responded quickly to a changing marketplace. Part of that change is the creation of Qwikster to handle its DVD business. ...Read the whole story

Pepsi Re-Rolls Out The Big Guns In 'X Factor' Debut Spots by Thom Forbes

You weren't in a time warp, Bruce Horovitz assures us in USA Today, and pardon you if thinking you were while watching the likes of the late Michael Jackson and Ray Charles pitching Pepsi on the debut of Simon Cowell's "The X Factor" on Fox last night. There were other no-need-for-last names megastars of another generation in the 60-second spot, dubbed "Music Icons," such as Brittany, Mariah, Kanye. But it also features a "Pepsi-exclusive remix" of the song, "Tonight is the Night" by Yonkers-own Outasight. ...More

  • How Can I Run Ads On Connected TV When I Can't Figure Out How To Program My VCR? by Lewis Rothkopf

    Remember the 1980s meme about how hard it is to program a VCR? So insidious was this apparent difficulty that a system was developed to abstract out the whole "start, end, channel" business: a "Plus Code" was assigned to each show and published in programming guides. One simply entered the corresponding code into his VCR and boom, done. All that work, just so that consumers could watch what they wanted, when they wanted to. More than two decades later, people still grapple with the same core problem -- is the content I want to watch available? Is it free? How ...More

  • Blockbuster Accused Of Violating Video Privacy Law by Wendy Davis

    Blockbuster has been hit with a new privacy lawsuit alleging that it violates a federal law by keeping detailed records about Web users. ...More

  • Is Content Syndication The New SEO? by Raj Amin

    In a world with ad networks and exchanges, where companies are looking to aggregate content and audiences in scale, is the "destination" model still a valid business strategy? The largest destinations will continue to get significant share of media spend -- but for new content players, especially in the video category, syndication can be a critical element in getting scale -- arguably much more than SEO. In fact, comScore's latest VideoMetrix rankings, released this week, show that online syndicatosrs are creating scale and gaining traction in many categories. ...More