If Madonna was the main driver and emblem of the MTV music video wave of the early 90s, then OK Go! is the poster child of viral music video in our era. From the time the group broke through in 2006 with its incredible treadmill ballet for "Here It Goes Again" to the more recent Rube Goldberg epic contraption for "This Too shall Pass," this is a group that like Madonna, defined itself by the latest technology. Their music and video are now inseparable. You can't hear the song without the viral video images playing in your head, and in …

Even here in a country where more people know the name of 47-year-old pitcher Jaimie Moyer than they do Diego Maradona (the legendary soccer great (and legendarily insane) Argentina coach (who characteristically came unhinged and made headlines the world over when he attacked Pele in the press this week) there is a tradition of being able to watch the World Cup just about anywhere. From a giant screen in Grand Central Terminal to taxi stands, the inescapable and constant sound of that damn horn has never been far away this week. So far this tournament I have watched everywhere from …

Mars needs women, and the online video universe needs more ads. That was the startling opening salvo from yesterday's OMMA Video conference here in New York. Tania Yuki, comScore Director of Product Management, kicked us off with a stat that bowled most us over. While watching TV, up to a quarter of time spent is with ad media, when it comes to online video viewing, only 1% of our streaming time is spent with ads. To be sure, the way-unmonetizable inventory of low-quality user-gen media skews the averages. But even when you look at high-end "professionally produced" entertainment sites with …

Kraft is breaking down the conventional wisdom about demographics and user-generated video. In a successful promotion for Philadelphia Cream Cheese, the company succeeded in getting over 5,000 women mostly age 35 and older to upload videos of themselves preparing their favorite recipes. It was all part of a "Real Women of Philadelphia" project done with Digitas. The brand solicited home recipes involving Philly Cream Cheese as a way to promote its use beyond the bagel. Yes, even grandma will upload videos if the appeal is on target.

You have to wonder what the branding pitch might have been behind the new Orbit gum Web series "Dirty Shorts" that premiered last week. This is the first effort from actors Jason Bateman and Will Arnett and their DumbDumb branded video production company working under IAC's Electus. In it, Dad Jason Bateman meets his teen daughter's prom date, who turns out to be the girl's Social Studies teacher (played with greasy panache by Will Arnett). Orbit gum has had this sort of "dirty mouth" campaign running on the air for years, but online they take the concept to a new …

I will admit it up front that I know zip about soccer. Somehow I managed to have missed that worldwide phenom altogether. Grew up too early for it to be part of my young sports life, and as the father of a daughter who loathed sports I had no opportunity to catch it on the back end either. Although I would have loved to be an obnoxious soccer Dad yelling at officials from the sidelines.

There is a deft little bit of online programming premiering over at CBSNews.com and on-air this week. Katie gets Twitter-fied. Anchor of the Evening News Katie Couric is soliciting news-oriented questions from her audience on her Twitter feed and Facebook account that she answers on-air. In a four minute segment, the questions usually follow a specific theme, like the oil disaster in the gulf. The idea is to bring audience voices and interactivity into a format that has been the very model of top-down, authoritative news media for five decades now. Nothing speaks to old media power and elitism …

For much of streaming media history, Web video has portrayed itself as the cure for prime time ad glut. While the overwhelming majority of TV ad dollars tend to concentrate on just a few viewing hours a day, on-demand Web video shows a more even usage curve throughout the day. Helped in the early days by office broadband connections that were faster than the dial-up most of us suffered at home, the at-work market was Web video's first big target. Here is where advertisers could reach viewers outside of the clutter and cost of TV's prime time with all of …

How much more legacy media can the iPad be expected to save? Newspapers and magazines, having failed to make the money they wanted on the Web, are lurching towards the tablet format in the hopes the larger, lusher platform will attract more serious ad and consumer dollars. And now one of the biggest disappointments in early mobile media, mobile TV, makes its play for the iPad. Cellular industry chipmaker Qualcomm has created a device that will connect its network of streaming live broadcasts to a WiFi iPad. The small unit taps into a network that Qualcomm grew for its MediaFLO …

Some optimist in the media industry (are there any optimists left in the media industry?) really feel the iPad is a game-changer. Well, after last night's attempt to watch the MTV Movie Awards across two screens, it is clear that there is one game even the coolest of devices can't change. You still need enough content to fill one screen before you can think of going to two.