Hot on the heels of the NAB Show and the much-anticipated April 3rd arrival of the iPad, Netflix and broadcast networks ABC and CBS recently announced moves to offer video applications for the iPad. While CBS is relying on the HTML5-served video that will allow fans to access shows like "Survivor" and others using the iPad's built-in Safari Web browser, ABC appears to have taken a different approach, relying on a standalone app with HTTP-streaming inside Apple's QuickTime library. ABC's move to launch its own iPad application rather than relying upon a browser-based experience is really a game-changer in the …

A good video marketing arsenal is overstocked at all times. You need to have the tools to deliver a video email to a target audience at a moment's notice, to push a video out to your social network in reaction to some game-changing event in your industry, to inform multiple departments of product changes, and so on. There are lots of tools that specialize in each of these things, and there are appropriate times to use them. But in order to use these tools, you must first own them and be familiar with their operation.

One of the great privileges I have at BrightRoll is the opportunity to meet with incredibly interesting, talented people in the online video industry all the time. Of course, working in a common field gives us lots to talk about. Many of us in this space, however, have long known that our industry possesses important parallels to other, seemingly unrelated fields. Studying and exploring current trends in these non-adjacent areas offers us the opportunity to learn lessons beyond those our own relatively young industry can teach us. It's with this thought in mind that I respectfully extend an open invitation …

With television advertising being a $70 billion market and total online advertising weighing in at $22.7 billion for 2009, you can't help but wonder why online video advertising only represents a $1 billion market.

There's no formula for what makes something funny, but there are a set of expectations that people have when they press play on a video that's supposed to be funny. Taking these expectations into account will give your videos the best chance of getting more "LOL"s than "WTF"s.

The growth of online video traffic over the last five years has spurred publishers to monetize their streams and advertisers to distribute their brand messaging on this medium. Video ad delivery is inherently more difficult to distribute than display ads, and until now, limiting the avenues available for video ad sources and video inventory owners to direct relationships and static pricing models.

Today broadcasters -- as discussed in yesterday's mobile DTV Pearl Project announcement -- are in the unique position to launch something that I would describe as a new wireless service: one that could blend free over-the-air content with a la carte programming.

Every year around this time the press begins to pump the marketplace for any hint of what the television upfront is going to look like from a pricing perspective. And every year around this time the networks come out with their standard positioning of demand being high.

As I pack my bags for this year's NAB show and head to Vegas, I have a mental checklist of some of the tracks I want to check out. With all the presentations, I'm hopeful that we can get beyond the latest buzzwords and techno-shiny objects that so often distract us from the real opportunities that face us.

Last week, Brightroll's CEO Tod Sacerdoti touched on the "Syndicated Video Black Network," which he said was "dominated by codependent and unscrupulous video syndication firms, ad networks and publishers." He's right, but there's more to it than that.