Imagine a world where 7 billion people, the world's population, could afford a weekly session when they confront and talk. Wow. Then came talktala, a New York-based startup aimed at enabling people to "confront" in a scalable and, most important, an affordable way. Thousands of therapists are already signed up, ready to go online, and there are even more people on the other side looking for a session.

Before the Facebook IPO, a former-entrepreneur-turned-VC told me that Facebook was caught between a rock and a hard place, because its massive size was proving to be a double-edged sword: "How can it possibly ever increase revenues to match its user base?"

As the 2012 political conventions come to a close, we thought we'd look back 60 years, to the 1952 conventions -- the first time the conventions were telecast to a national audience. Television was in its infancy, the United States was in the midst of the Cold War era, McCarthyism and anti-Communism were on everyone's minds, and incumbent President Harry S. Truman had decided not to run. Absent in 1952 were the hundreds of consultants, lighting designers, focus groups, stylists, and other modern-day staples of the political process. Here are some of our Archive of American Television interviewees speaking about …

This summer, eMarketer published an interesting report on the integration of brand advertising across online video and television. They highlighted five factors that are impeding progress toward integration, which unsurprisingly, have come from TV's biggest players: cable companies, and broadcast and cable networks. Many of these companies have been using tactics such as data caps (to slow the growth of online video consumption) and authentication protocols (to stop cord-cutters from getting TV content online). Many do not sell TV and digital advertising as an integrated package. Because cable companies and TV networks believe that it's more profitable to maintain the …

Regardless of your political position, the race for the White House is really just starting to heat up. Both candidates and their parties have war chests of campaign funds already raised and are looking to spend in the most effective way possible. This influx of advertising should be a boon for the digital video space, namely Web publishers. But there's a big problem: inventory.

This Labor Day weekend, I went back and also looked at some of the predictions my peers and I had made for 2012, as well as 12 things that I suggested wouldn't be happening this year. Not surprisingly, the predictions my peers and I made could be summarized as "hopefully this year the reason why I started/run my company will become true." I guess that's normal -- we're either biased or naively optimistic, otherwise we would be literally insane, doing the same thing but expecting different results.

With the Republican National Convention in full swing in Tampa, the news media and general public are captivated with the storylines of the upcoming election. The story is extending into online video this year, where campaigns and causes on the national, state and local level are already spending more than ever before on video advertising.

Last week, News Corp. announced that Chief Digital Officer Jon Miller was leaving the company, before the split of Rupert Murdoch's empire into two units and after the parent company's failure to spin off IGN Entertainment. IGN is a blip on News Corp.'s P&L, which makes $35 billion in revenues from publishing and broadcasting. Let's face it, for News Corp., the Web is a distribution platform for its core units (as their Roku investment shows), but not an area where they plan on investing in new, standalone businesses, evidenced by the sale of MySpace last year.

Product managers, listen up: It's time to start worrying less about having conversations with your customers. There. I said it. Putting your efforts into creating a larger volume of quality content that stands the test of time will give your customer base what they're really looking for. In production terms, this means the more you have a director saying, "Action!" the more you'll be getting your message out into the marketplace.

My last article article focused on the challenge presented by the collapse of the long-established conventions for programming and promoting linear television in the new "television" viewing environment: increasingly un-tethered to the TV set and unbounded by time. This challenge is lent urgency by the fact that the online search-and-discovery experience has not kept pace with consumer interests. In spite of the superabundance of viewing options that online makes available, finding "something to watch" is still frustrating and often painful, so consumer awareness, adoption, usage and monetization of online video all suffer.