I've long held that the barrier to T/V (Television/Video) advertisers getting ads seen is not consumer ad avoidance, but rather interruption avoidance. HitBliss, a new service in private beta trial right now, has addressed this problem by giving the media consumer a way to avoid interruption but not advertising (a la iTunes) or watching ads of their choice in a time of their choosing.

I predict the video industry will be awash in predictions. No, it's not because I have an awesome crystal ball. It's because once an industry amasses enough data, then predictions are a natural outgrowth. But predictions also represent a logical desire to understand a market. This week the online video business is focused on the Digital Content NewFronts, run by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which reported that original professional online video captures the attention of 45 million U.S. viewers per month.

The segregation of TV and digital is deeply engrained in advertising culture, resulting in separate and often competing silos. The common view has been that video is an either/or proposition: TV vs. online, with the two camps vying for advertiser budgets and attention. The unhealthy result is inefficiency, requiring higher budgets and more effort to engage fewer people. Advertisers, however, are ready to move on

By just about any measure, marketers are missing the boat on the mobile video opportunity. Mobile provides an incredible revenue-generating and brand-building lever, yet most of the best marketers out there are simply not leveraging the channel to the extent that they should. I don't even work for a company specializing in mobile, but as someone who's been in the video space for a long time, the case for mobile is compelling.

According to Harvard's Nathan Nunn and Yale's Nancy Qian, 22% of the increase in population growth after 1700 could be attributed to the potato. Requiring no tools, potatoes were easy to grow - and that fact, combined with the vegetable's health benefits, which led to a lower child mortality rate, partly explains why the world population exploded after the potato's introduction. Without the potato, the world simply wouldn't be what it is today. Somewhat analogously (please, bear with me), I think that many in the online video landscape are waiting for the proverbial potato to come along and reduce the …

As always, the next coming television upfront will dictate the overall trajectory for 2013 media spending. But for the first time, the prospect of digital video grabbing a more significant share of advertiser budgets actually goes beyond hype-for the first time, it's a viable possibility!

Recent data from Parks Associates indicates that U.S. consumers often turn to their mobile devices regularly while watching TV. The research firm said 22% of U.S. broadband consumers check or update their social network on a smartphone or tablet while watching TV, while 18% of U.S. homes with a smartphone or tablet use an app from their pay-TV provider to check TV listings, program their DVR, or watch TV programming. Those are solid numbers, demonstrating how quickly mobile devices have become vital "companions" while watching TV.

TV advertisers make up the vast majority of brands moving media dollars to in-stream video. More than 90% of their online video creative is the same as, or a variation of, the ads they run on TV. This multiscreen approach opens up a variety of new opportunities for optimizing ad creative across screens. New cross-media technology solutions are enabling advertisers to increase their campaign ROI and take greater advantage of the unique and combined benefits of both TV and online video.

These days, you have to be living under a rock not to have heard the term native advertising. There's no single, commonly accepted definition for it. But whereas native advertising implies one thing for non-content producers like Twitter and Facebook, I think that for producers and publishers of content, the line between native advertising and branded content (or advertorial) is way too slim to matter. However, always the cynic, I think that part of the reason why so many have jumped on the native advertising buzzword is because the branded content moniker failed to deliver on its much-ballyhooed promise.

"Subscriber," "customer," "home passed." There are many terms that cable operators or other pay-TV providers use to refer to those who purchase or who are potential purchasers of their products and services. "Audience" is rarely one of them. But things have changed.