The mobile video market has grown so rapidly over the last six months that it has caught a lot of folks off guard. As a result, research firms such as eMarketer are underestimating current and projected mobile video advertising revenue by a significant factor. Most of these firms expect revenue from mobile video advertising to hit $50 million for the 2011 calendar year, but I believe this number could be closer to $250 million. That's five times current industry expectations.

I've often argued that video is a tool of social media. So as many social media responsibilities are being taken on by PR departments, we are seeing public relations teams becoming more actively involved in the creation and deployment of social video content. Viral videos, branded entertainment, web series videos and video game trailers top the list along with original, entertaining product launch videos. This new breed of video content, rather than simply supplementing the efforts of PR teams, is often spearheading them.

Would you send your friend a Pampers TV commercial to watch? Of course you wouldn't, unless it happened to be unusually funny or otherwise compelling. He or she could see that on TV any day of the week.< This is the crux of the problem with social media videos: In their anxiousness to get involved with social media, marketers continue to repurpose the same old TV commercials on Facebook and other social platforms for their friends and followers. And that's just wrong.

It's no longer a matter of "I want to watch X when I get home"; it's "I want to watch X on my nearest screen." It doesn't matter what your nearest screen is -- a smartphone, tablet, PC or even TV. People are transitioning from delayed gratification of watching where and when media is being pushed to them, to instant gratification of watching where and when they are pulling media to their (mobile) devices. As a content-generator, that means you must work to remove any barriers that keep the user from getting to the desired content: your mobile content.

At the Elevate Video Advertising Summit in New York last week, executives from Disney, Turner, and Comcast nearly sent the audience into cardiac arrest by demonstrating that their heads weren't actually fully stuck in the sand: before long, the majority of TV content will be available online and on mobile devices. At face value, that is surely to make viewers ecstatic. But upon reflection, you have to wonder: Will that make Big Media more or less controlling of its content?

YouTube is a good way to get started with online video to promote your business, products and services. It's free, easy to use and almost everyone knows how to play the videos. However, you can compromise your content by only using free online host sites like YouTube.

Yesterday I was invited to a "C-Level dinner" with folks from great companies such as Facebook, JetBlue and even Dunkin Donuts. Usually those encounters entail conversations you don't want to have, with people you don't really want to meet about things you don't really care about. This was actually a great event, great conversation and incredible people. One thing, though, caught my attention. Someone said the very well-known line: "Content is king." I've said it once or twice in the past. We all did. It's time to come clean. I've changed my mind. Aside from a very specific type, content …

A few years ago, the term "YouTube generation" emerged, describing those who watch video online on their PCs. What a novel idea! The YouTube generation was generally identified to be males between 18 and 34 years of age. Even before YouTube, I built my first Internet TV/OTT video platform while at a then-prominent online media company. The big debate was not what to build, but whether anyone would even watch video online. All that changed very quickly post YouTube.

A new branded web series is born every day. 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. There's no doubt that discovery is a big problem. No longer can a brand just develop online video content, wrap it in a paid media plan and launch it upon a target audience with hopeful expectations. To succeed, marketers must move beyond serving up content alone. They need a larger, strategic program.

There's no shortage of phenomenal video content online today. Movies, sitcoms, music videos, sports highlights, cat videos... they're all just a click away. And yet in Q1 2011 alone, we chose to watch ads nearly 800 million times. Why?