Having universal access to the media one buys in any one format has been the consumer lament for the decade or so that digital made multi-platform distribution so easy. In the coming weeks and months Hollywood is making a concerted effort to satisfy both that consumer desire and its own fears of piracy with the Ultraviolet initiative. This consortium of major studios and tech providers keeps the media one buys in a cloud-based locker for access theoretically across set top boxes, Web, tablet and mobile phones. The principle is simple: buy a film or TV show on disk or in …

We don't know exactly what will come of the recently announced transmedia entertainment project "The Karada." After all, the lost pages of the Internet are filled with failed Web video series launched by familiar talent. But with a writer of "Heroes" Web series involved as well as a producer of alternative reality games (ARG), I am pretty sure already that I am going to be lost by episode 3. The makers of ARGs for "The Truth About Marika" and "Conspiracy for Good" is partnering with Webby winner and author Jim Martin on what is being described as a supernatural …

WSJ.com has been pumping up its video assets aggressively in the last year, with new scheduled programming and market updates throughout the day. They appear to have enough of a critical mass to bring that content off their site and onto a range of mobile devices and set top platforms. "WSJ Live" offers the four hours of video the site says it generates each day in an on demand format. Unlike the slow roll-out that often begins on the iPad, WSJ is doing a full court press here with apps available on iPad, connected TVs from Panasonic, Samsung, Sony and …

Context matters for video advertising, but especially in matters of engagement and immediate action. According to the first stream report on traffic and ad performance trends from Tremor Media's Video Hub analytics platform, the company finds that different signals have widely varied impact on ad effectiveness and satisfying an advertisers specific marketing goals.

In the post-scarcity age, the network strategy is to leverage the abundance of viewing opportunities. This year the war takes to the devices, although the networks are as fragmented as ever in their various approaches. The new darling of TV programmers, the iPad, is getting a lot of love this time around. While ABC has been making full episodes of many prime time shows available on the platform since it launched, the rival networks have been slow to take it up. NBC finally stopped teasing us on its NBC app for iPad and issued an upgrade that now streams full …

Now that in-flight WiFi has moved beyond the market and tech test phases and into widespread deployment, expect media brands to vie for placement on the portals that give that irritating guy in the middle seat of Aisle 21 yet another way to distract you. Row 44, which provides in-flight broadband entertainment content to Southwest Airlines and other worldwide carriers has announced a series of media partnerships that pipe live TV into the aisle seat. CNBC, MSNBC, Versus (NBC sports network), Fox News Networks, BBC World News and Bloomberg Television have partnered with the company. A new live IPTV will …

The consumer packaged goods category continues to lead in video ad spending for Q2 2011, as video ad management provider YuMe reports off of the traffic it sees to its 1500 publisher partners and a claimed 2 billion monthly video streams. The CPG segment was responsible for 17% of video spending in Q2, down from 28% in Q1. Telecom was a close second, with 16% of spend and Pharmaceuticals with 13%.

Sometimes you wish social media had never been invented. Hasn't the poor consumer been drafted into enough goofy marketer ideas in an endless series of ploys designed to "involve the consumer" in the creative? To wit: the auto ads where an unsuspecting car owner is led into a press conference. His sole purpose, other than to deliver a predictable sound bite, is to look suitably dazed and confused just to convince us of the ad's "authenticity." And so it goes with Claussen Pickles' series of Web videos. Launched in June and refreshed with new episodes every few weeks since, the …

We applaud the democratization of video production and distribution (as we should) because it makes the tools of production now accessible to anyone with a smartphone and the trove of video history now available from any search box on any digital screen. We are shortsighted if we aren't cognizant of the costs attached to progress. This struck me the other day when I was on the hunt for a DVD of the famous rock and roll broadcast The TAMI Show, a 1964 concert film from indie, low-budget distributor American International Pictures. The legendary performances in that film by James Brown, …

Almost half (46%) of TV viewers surveyed in a new poll from Yahoo! TV And Entertainment Weekly of 2,000 people say they check email while watching the tube, second only to snacking (56%). In fact the need to use digital channels to communicate with others during TV watching is pretty much epidemic at this point, with 34% posting to Facebook, 28% texting to friends and family and 7% checking other people's online posts about a show.