GRD Google Fans

I’ve been a fan of Viddler’s platform for a while, mainly for its simplicity and high quality encoding. I turned to Viddler for my personal online video player needs when Brightcove abandoned their personal services.

On Feb 26th, Viddler introduced the first official release of their platform’s wordpress plug in, enabling WP users to embed Viddler-hosted video directly from the Wordpress dashboard. Nice touch for people who have already adopted Viddler as their “not-YouTube” video platform and happen to be bloggers. Like me. Works similarly as the Slide plug in for Facebook,…

Saul Hansell of the New York Times is reporting that Google has begun testing video ads on their search pages.

“The big insight of Google wasn’t text ads; it was that the ads should be conducive to the format. We were doing text-based search that was all textual. Visual ads don’t work in that format,” Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience told Saul in their interview.

“We don’t want all sorts of video and banner ads all over the site all the time,” Ms. Mayer said. “People who…

Wi-FiTV’s Newsblog has the Superbowl ads up and ready for you to catch early, so you can still tivo through the big game later. You can watch them as a consecutive stream or individually by clicking on the On Demand box and selecting the advertisement.

SpikeTV also has a collection of this year’s ads in case you can’t wait until later. Oddly enough, you’ll see :15 second pre-rolls before every other ad you watch. And, to save you the trouble of watching stuttering, broken up streams from GoDaddy during the game, head…

As the writer’s strike lingers on (hey, at least Broadway is back), more and more people throw their opinions into the mix. One of the most rational I’ve seen lately comes from Shelly Palmer. I’ve enjoyed the conversations we’ve had the few times we’ve met, but his recent Media 3.0 newsletter reminded me why I enjoy chatting with him so much.

If they’d just set a three year time limit on the Advanced Media portion of the deal, they could promise the writer’s 100% of the profits — there won’t be…

A step aside from online video to point out a post on Barrons Tech Trader Daily about a company I worked for a while back, bidz.com.

A negative report this week from Citron Research has sparked a steep selloff in bidz.com stock after pointing to irregular bidding activity and a major shareholder and supplier convicted in the 80s for fencing stolen jewelry.

Bidz today went back on the offensive, threatening legal action on a day when the Citron website has experienced Denial of Service attacks

In case you’ve ever considered buying from Bidz, consider these…

“The ironic reality of the writers’ strike is its irrelevancy,” leads Jack Myers’ blog post on Mediapost.

Not unlike the music industry, Myers points out that, “Today, fewer than one network television series in twelve breaks through to profitability. This one program in twelve has to support the enormous operating overhead of those who risk capital to develop and produce the programs. It is a business of failure, not success. The Writers Guild of America wants a piece of that American Dream — the ability to fail time and time…

Have a busy week at work or on the road and look at all the things you miss. Variety’s blog has been hosting a “Funniest Web Videos” awards. While the voting is already closed, you can visit their site and check out the finalists.

Typical for LA, everyone must be stuck in traffic. Despite having more than 400 registered attendees, the room isn’t even half full for the start of OMMA Video Hollywood.

Be sure to check Mediapost’s live event blog for feedback on the even from attendees at the conference.

Steve Smith kicking it off with some stats on the growth of streaming video across different types of video content, and how users are blurring the lines between platforms.