With the Republican National Convention in full swing in Tampa, the news media and general public are captivated with the storylines of the upcoming election. The story is extending into online video this year, where campaigns and causes on the national, state and local level are already spending more than ever before on video advertising.

Last week, News Corp. announced that Chief Digital Officer Jon Miller was leaving the company, before the split of Rupert Murdoch's empire into two units and after the parent company's failure to spin off IGN Entertainment. IGN is a blip on News Corp.'s P&L, which makes $35 billion in revenues from publishing and broadcasting. Let's face it, for News Corp., the Web is a distribution platform for its core units (as their Roku investment shows), but not an area where they plan on investing in new, standalone businesses, evidenced by the sale of MySpace last year.

Product managers, listen up: It's time to start worrying less about having conversations with your customers. There. I said it. Putting your efforts into creating a larger volume of quality content that stands the test of time will give your customer base what they're really looking for. In production terms, this means the more you have a director saying, "Action!" the more you'll be getting your message out into the marketplace.

My last article article focused on the challenge presented by the collapse of the long-established conventions for programming and promoting linear television in the new "television" viewing environment: increasingly un-tethered to the TV set and unbounded by time. This challenge is lent urgency by the fact that the online search-and-discovery experience has not kept pace with consumer interests. In spite of the superabundance of viewing options that online makes available, finding "something to watch" is still frustrating and often painful, so consumer awareness, adoption, usage and monetization of online video all suffer.

Mark Zuckerberg is yet to reveal to his investors his strategy to generate meaningful revenue from mobile traffic. Facebook's monetization challenge is unique, as it is not necessarily trying to solve its own problem, but rather solve an industry problem: mobile. The mobile screen is small. On a per ad-unit, mobile ads actually make higher RPMs, but you can only display 1-2 ads, versus desktop ads where you can display 20 ads that make less money each. Mathematically speaking, then, the solution need to be some sort of media/invention that generate per real estate substantial higher RPMs than regular mobile …

The latest comScore figures show that Facebook has overtaken Yahoo for the No.2 slot in video, trailing Google's YouTube. This isn't the first time this has happened; back in August 2010, Facebook pulled off this feat, but Yahoo managed to usurp its slot soon thereafter.

The "golden age" of television (1950s and 1960s) offered limited offerings (and channels) of high-rated programs easy for viewers to find. Consumers now have an overwhelming number of choices, and must spend more time identifying their options. With 50%+ U.S. household penetration of DVRs within the 80%+ U.S. cable, teleco and satellite subscriber homes, consumers are paying a lot to program their own "personal channels" of recorded and stored content. With thousands of T/V (television/video) choices now available each moment, the search function is a vital choice management tool. Here's a look at the current and future role of T/V …

Are corporate blogs dead? USA Today recently reported on a University of Dartmouth survey that revealed a sharp decline among the Inc. 500 fastest-growing companies who used blogging as a way to communicate with target audiences in 2011. Marketing and communications professionals are quick to blame Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and others, saying the social media sites are eating into the time consumers used to spend on brand sites. But I think many of the companies have only themselves to blame and are killing interest in their blogs through poor content strategies.

I read the recent post on real-time bidding video exchanges with both fear and sadness. Fear that some might take the market view to heart, hurting both advertisers and publishers at once. And sadness, because the near-limitless potential of digital video advertising was given short shrift.

he oil industry is profitable for producers when the costs of exploitation are low and/or the prices at the gas tank are high. That is pretty much the case for any producer, but oil and online video are different in one key way, which serves as a good indicator of what will drive 2013. Last week we took a trip down memory lane and looked at some of the trends (and fads) that shaped online video. Today we ask, "What does next year have in store?"