This holiday season could give the online video industry a boost. Two major new video game consoles are set to debut before the end of the year, Amazon reportedly has its own new device nearly ready, Roku just refreshed its line of streaming devices, TiVo has a slew of new DVRs with extra online-video features and Google's $35 Chromecast is already the best-selling item.

Al Jazeera will go live online with a 24-hour news, current affairs and human interest channel in early 2014 called Al Jazeera Plus, says the Hollywood Reporter .

Those Chicagoans in your office always going on and on about how beautiful the city is? Well, cut them some slack. They're right. Max Wilson shot over 200,000 photos over a two-year period to create the six-minute "Windy City Nights." That's over eight terabytes of data.

Alloy Digital and Break Media, are expected to announce on Tuesday that they will merge, and some say it's a sign of merger mania to come in the digital biz. The privately-held companies said the combined company will be named Defy Media. 

AOL in July announced it would buy ad technology platform provider Adap.tv for $405 million. This StreamingMedia.com story notes that in none of the many articles written about the deal did anyone disclose Adap.tv's revenue which Streaming Media said did "less than $100 million." By author Dan Rayburn's reckoning, AOL paid too much.

ComScore added the Netherlands to its measurement service, and though it's the smallest of the European nations whose video heads it counts, only United Kingdom are streaming more.

According to a survey released Monday by research firm NPD Group, 75% of respondents in the crucial 18-to-34-year-old demographic have viewed “over the top” content on TV. By contract, only 68% of respondents say they use their connected TV to watch programming from cable or satellite.

On its Fox News' Website, viewers can get a tour of the upgraded Fox News studio showing staffers working at what appear to be enormously large tablets. They're "information specialists" navigating what Fox calls BATS (for big area touchscreens) that puts 55-inches of stuff in front of their faces.

A journalist tries a month without TV and online video, lives to tell about it. One resolution: "I’m not going to watch online videos unless it’s to learn something useful (no entertainment videos)." This month's challenge: No sugar. 

Hulu, iPhone, and Prius didn’t come to market because their creators asked status quo questions.  Those innovations exist because disruptive, transformative, even uncomfortable questions without easy answers were asked. That's what  Lisa Bodell, CEO of Futurethink innovation research and training firm says in this think piece..