Should online advertising during the holiday season be devoted to the brand-stroking, feel-Christmasy-good message or the flat out hard sell? It's a short shopping window this year, so messaging should be crucial.

Once,content creators-studios and networks-were satisfied, if, after the first run, programs were sold in syndication or packaged for DVDs. Now, increasingly, producers want recent first-run programs to be available quickly online or on VOD to consumers so they don't have to wait for months to catch up.

The Republican National Committee is buying time on "The Daily Show" to lampoon the Obamacare Website, just another video that attacks the law the White House seems to have done the bare minimum to explain.

The American Academy of Pediatrics today said parents should limit their kids to just two hours of Internet use per day, not counting time it's used for homework. That seems almost logical but it is, for sure, absolutely impossible.

At the MediaPost Video Insiders Summit going on now in Montauk, N.Y. , some experts talk about the shocking amount of advertising fraud they say is committed in the online video space.

The BBC, no doubt through BBC America and other ways, means to compete worldwide with online content providers like Amazon, Hulu and Netflix on over the top devices and smart TVs. It's aggressively adding to its programming budget and consolidating its OTT capabilities into one powerfully branded worldwide Website, says Broadcast Engineering.com.

New research from Akamai Technologies says that mid-roll ads stand the best chance of being seen to completion, but obviously those can't be very effectively used in videos that are pretty short themselves.

Is YouTube destroying the online ad market? Can online advertising ever make serious dents in the TV ad market? Dispatches from Nielsen and an online trailblazer are taking a hard look at the biz, one with numbers (Nielsen) and one with observations.

Advertisers and marketers don't give older consumers much love, but a Videology study says people 65+ are most likely to click on an online video ad, and among the most likely to see it through to completion. Why can't you be more like your parents? '

The New York Post is reporting today that Disney CEO Robert Iger is looking to see what kind of prices he could get if Disney sold the eight big city stations in owns in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and more. ABC's not commenting but as OTT and smart TV ramps up, the content world is exploding with choices--and uncertainty.