Any parent of small children knows the sinking feeling that comes when their kid gets the dreaded present with a thousand pieces. These usually come via your single sister or brother (the beloved, hyper-generous aunt or uncle) who is exacting some kind of puckish revenge on the parental sibling. "Oh, how nice, Janey, Aunt Sue got you the play grocery store with 5,000 plastic blueberries," you "celebrate" while shooting eye-daggers at your sister. "Thanks, sis. You gonna come over here and find those damn berries when they end up strewn across the living room," you ask Aunt Sue later.

This mobile video space is not for the feint-hearted. Apparently, streaming media apps are sort of a love-hate thing with many users. Leading video hub Break Media released some interesting stats touting its success with its iOS and Android apps. According to the company 1.5 million people have downloaded the Break Media mobile app, which launched over a year and half ago. Raw download numbers generally are uneven proxies for actual use, but Break says its mobile apps generate 10 million monthly visits or about 100,000 unique visits a day. In total, the mobile traffic constitutes about 12% of all …

We're not entirely sure what to make of Sir Richard Branson's life from the 22-minute synopsis that is the premiere episode of Hulu's "A Day in the Life." The head of Virgin Airways spends much of the 24 hours on planes, doing press interviews, and showing us what a decent, smiley, giggly guy he is.

Now that the initial dust has settled over the audacious Google acquisition of Motorola, analyst eyes are turning deeper into the deal and beyond the obvious. More than just mobile phone patents, the Motorola acquisition puts Google squarely where it has wanted to be for a while - on the set top box. As IMS Research points out in a brief yesterday, Motorola has long been one of the top manufacturers of set-top boxes for many MSOs. They also have longstanding relationships with the very companies that otherwise see something like a Google TV as an intrusive layer on their …

Mobile video finally is getting traction among users. In a recent Ipsos/Yahoo survey in the last year, video use just across the mobile Web was up by a third. As mobile users come to expect fatter pipes, they don't balk at the sight of a video play button on their phones. Under most 3G networks, buffer lag and consistency of experience are improving to the point where streaming media is a viable medium. But in most cases involving video, marketers either have to rely on the traditional pre-roll messaging, a branded video effort that pulls people in, or perhaps an …

Back in TV's sit-com heyday coming up with ideas for new shows was relatively easy. Who had the highest Q Rating with the public? Let's build a show around her. For smart online video producers, the rough equivalent may be Facebook popularity. Who has the network already in place, Web series producers might ask. "LeBron had 12 million people on Facebook already," says Dan Goodman, co-founder, Believe Entertainment, which appears to have a hit on its hands with the Web-only animated series, "The LeBrons."

Among the many other things I wish I had paid closer attention to in school was Spanish class. Especially now that we finally have a Spanish-language branded video series on YouTube. Madres y Comadres is an eight-part mini-series sponsored by Kmart. And it looks like fun. Two moms chat it up while their kids are off at school. The banter is brisk and light-hearted, the editing just as crisp with a fun soundtrack. The motif seems inspired by the TV telenovellas as well as the faux-reality show stylings of "Modern Family." Kmart maintains a very light branding touch here, with …

No problem is too big for Google to try to solve with an algorithm and a template. Its ambitions to get every shred of content old and new online and then slap a search box and crappy layout atop it continues to work because we are still a little dazzled by what is available online. My father, an old comedy fan of vintage performers, is amazed whenever I show him what a simple "Who's On First" or "Your Show of Shows" will render on YouTube. I can leave him for hours to get lost in the nostalgic rush and his …

How do you find that guy who starred in the movie about the thing at the place in the other country? You know the scene, right? The hunt for just the right film scene can start with such vagaries, as we all know. Memory being what it is, a film search can hang on small shards of information. And yet we recall movies from their great scenes. Do a search on YouTube for this sort of thing and you likely will turn up a mess of crudely ripped scenes at a range of resolutions. Understanding how movies really work in …

Arguments about the most effective length for digital video ads and consumer tolerance for ad-to-content ratios have been going on for as long as I have been organizing panels of agency creatives complaining about the need for discrete online spots. And that is a long time, my friends. I never understood why more marketers weren't experimenting with the various combinations of creative, frequency and length digital video allowed. In my experience being on the receiving end of countless multimedia ads (to which I am paid to pay attention, by the way) the ones that stick in my memory are not …