I have to admit that I am not among the digerati who plug their laptops or a dedicated PC into their home theater. First, if I put one more fan-operated, CPU-driven device around my HDTV, I am certain to hit a kind of critical mass. Something is sure to catch fire. Second, I just never liked the idea. Call me a PC bigot or just a wishful thinker, but I always felt that hooking up a full-bore PC to my TV somehow was one geeky move too far. I was looking for the more elegant solution to getting digital video …

Or are you just happy to have your on demand film library available anywhere, anytime? When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone 4 and iOS 4 in the early summer, he shared the coveted on-stage-with-Steve spot with top executives from Netflix because the arrival of the movie rental store on the iPhone was long-awaited. More than any other media company, Netflix has successfully leveraged what I call the 'post-desktop' Internet. Not only does it give subscribers access to their streaming media film collection on all major game consoles and select streaming boxes and disc player, but the company has used these …

Metacafe's transformation into an entertainment video hub advances to its next stage with the company's acquisition of Action Sports, Inc. the owner of sports video destination Go221.com. Metacafe already aggregates and curates video content on the major mainstream sports at its Sport channel. This buy adds to the inventory more extreme pursuits like skateboarding, snowboarding and about ten others things my chiropractor tells me to avoid.

The low barriers to entry and infinite space of digital platforms leave just about every media maven with a simple quandary; how do you keep track of the good creative out there? Clients of digital agencies famously ask, where can I see my ad? But given the targeting technologies at work in serving digital display this can be harder problem to solve than one would think. Awards are one relatively random way of getting exposed to creative that you don't happen upon in your everyday browsing. This week MediaPost announced the finalists for its upcoming OMMA Awards. We have …

Someday I am going to do a deep search of my own past columns and reporting just to gather all of the local online advertising stories I have written in the past 15 years of covering digital. Cracking that mom and pop shop ad budget has been as prized and as elusive to digital markets as the proverbial Holy Grail. Over the years I have seen outlandish scheme after outlandish scheme designed to educate the small service business sector that online was the way to go. One directory start-up I recall years ago tried to recruit anyone and everyone just …

Repurposing is the perennial scourge of online video advertisers. Sure the overwhelming majority of pre-rolls just slap onto clips a reiteration of a TV ad most viewers likely have already seen scores of times before. And, sure, there is something to be said for echoing TV campaigns online for that surround-sound, in-your-head, coming-out-your-ears campaign strategy. But most marketers continue to wish for more custom creative that leverages the unique screen, timing and use cases of online video. But from San Francisco-based agency Crossover Creative we see the usual TV-to-Web polarity reversed in a series of video banners that moved from …

There is an old adage among Catholics (especially fully lapsed ones like me): "once a Catholic, always a Catholic." As far away as you may wander from the One True Church, wayward souls like myself will always find themselves bowing and greeting passing nuns with special respect, crossing themselves at altars, and balking at calling priests by their first names. The same holds true of being a childhood acolyte of Jerry Lewis.

I am not even an Apple fanboy and I have been a relentless defender of Apple TV. Other than the fact that it gives off a ridiculous amount of heat (no, I mean really hot), I have thoroughly enjoyed having that white slab attached to my home theater since it launched. In the years I have lived with it, Apple TV pretty much convinced me that connected devices posed a significant threat to traditional broadcast and cable TV. It ate about a quarter of my daily TV habits. On most evenings I will tend to spend at least an hour …

Okay, granted, every digital film library has to start somewhere. Back in the day when no one in Hollywood was eager to license anything online, the early catalogs at downloadable movie pioneers like Movieline were laughably bad. Straight-to-video animation and sub-B horror were the mainstays. With the limited but passable Watch Instantly collection at Netflix, we began to take heart. Maybe full-length film really had found its way onto the Internet in a credible fashion. Well, then there was that Hulu Plus hiccup. I used to think the circa-2003 downloadable movie hubs were bad until I saw what Hulu was …

As if to underscore the video-fication of all content, Google launched an informational video series last week called Google Beat. The weekly show lasts only a minute and a half. As a brand extension, it is nicely done, especially for the usually ham-handed Google. The lovely hostess Anne Espiritu stands before an oddly decorated backdrop of assorted furniture on a Google-white stage. Googling and the trends it reveals is the topic at hand. Each show will highlight and explain some of the top search trends for the week.