In a letter heard round the Web yesterday, Steve Jobs posted what sounded like a break-up letter to Adobe. Its specific purpose was to explain the much-debated refusal of Apple to allow Flash-based products on its iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch platforms. But it sure reads like a steadfast note written by a former lover that both reviews and buries a relationship. "We met Adobe's founders when they were in their proverbial garage," Jobs recounts. Apple invested in and eventually owned 20% of the fledgling company. "The two companies worked closely together to pioneer desktop publishing and there were many good …

At this week's Media Magazine Outfront Conference, keynoter and Current TV Chairman Al Gore teased the audience with an offshoot of Current TV he called "Crowd-sourced TV." Without revealing much detail about the upcoming project, Gore suggested that the new service would leverage user-generated content in ways we haven't seen before to work with marketers, perhaps in crafting and distributing their messages.

For many small and medium publishers video has become in 2010 what images have been online for years, an indispensable way to make an article feel more compelling to the reader. Just as many bloggers and other publishers always rooted around the Google Image search engine to find just the right illustration for a text piece, now many of them are hunting around for just the right contextually relevant video to pull into a page. And of course the best source for videos on just about anything is still YouTube. The problem, of course, is that YouTube video embeds offer …

Last week Nielsen Games released some research about the degree to which games consoles are intercepting viewers from prime time TV. And it seemed to rattle media types. I am not sure why anyone would be surprised at this news though. It was Microsoft and Sony's plan all along, and it was brilliant. There are over 30 million Xboxes and Sony PS3s in U.S. homes right now, many of which are connected to the Internet and already pushing both long form and short form video into the living room. All of those "streaming media boxes" that came at us for …

While monthly video viewing in the U.S. may be showing signs of leveling off, the British market is in serious growth mode. According to figures released today from comScore Video Metrix in the U.K. overall video viewing grew 37% between February 2009 and February 2010, with more than 5.5 billion streams viewed for the month. The BBC more than doubled its videos viewed last year to come in second place. Each visitor to the broadcaster's site consumes 15.7 videos a month.

Well, at least I know that I am not alone. Netflix reported this week that it had a net increase of 1.7 million subscribers this year in the first quarter of the year. I was one of the 1.7 million. Netflix got me from all angles this quarter. The streaming Watch Instantly service was on my Xbox 360 and then on the PS3. But it was the iPad that sold it to me. As I wrote here last week, seamlessly synching my movie experience across screens so that I could take my movie to bed with me, is revelatory. I …

Maybe I am a bit too steeped in mobile media to appreciate the gee-whiz factor that newbies experience. But do most of you still consider it some kind of treat or magic to see a video clip on your cell phone? Some mobile marketers continue to treat video as an end in itself rather than as a medium, and it seems to me that the shelf life on that idea expired a while ago. For instance, a number of magazines in recent months have experimented with 2D mobile codes. But more often than not lately, mobile video is the payoff …

Remember when business-to-business marketing was all white papers and spec-filled product sheets? You advertised new server technology in magazines like InfoWorld by purchasing some outrageously priced multi-page spread. You filled it with copy the marketer probably didn't understand. And you wrapped it around images of huge hunks of iron that some IT administrator somewhere may have found sexy.

Ridley Scott imagined video billboards plastered up the sides of skyscrapers in "Blade Runner" decades ago. Check, we got 'em now. Harry Potter films visualized TV-like news clips in the daily newspaper. Okay, embedded video on the iPad is a nod in the direction of video-enabled e-paper. Video clips playing on the sides of plastic Slurpee cups? I don't think any of us saw that one coming.

A mildly disturbing theme emerged in last week's Visible Measures Top 5 list of viral video ad campaigns. Apparently, testosterone (an overabundance of testosterone, in fact) is driving viral video. Hip Hop and unfaithful male babies, a Dad-humbled Tiger Woods (arguably a blend of Lothario and man-baby) and male odors topped the list