What if I were to tell you there was a mobile video startup you’d never heard of that sees 100 million page views per month from users in 130 countries using 2000 different devices? Don’t worry, pigs still can’t fly. But Vuclip, which is officially launching Tuesday after spending a year under the name Blueapple.mobi, has a mobile video search interface accessible through the web and WAP. The Milpitas, Calif.-based company transcodes videos on the ...

Break Media and Tremor Media are both out today touting numbers that show pre-roll and other video ad units are effective. Video ad firms are especially eager to show that consumers are willing to watch pre-rolls, given the ad format’s bad reputation. Break looked at 5.85 million impressions for three campaigns, applying four ad units built to the new IAB specs: pre-roll, interactive pre-roll, non-overlay and overlay. The site saw completion rates of 87 percent ...

We hadn’t checked in with Kiptronic in a while, but it sounds like the San Francisco-based startup is doing quite well. CEO Bill Loewenthal, who joined about a year ago, tells us the ad insertion provider now has more than 40 publishers as customers, including Fox, Time Warner, CBS, Viacom, The Economist, Sony BMG, National Public Media, and Conde Nast. Kiptronic delivers and tracks ads in any kind of media experienced outside the browser — ...

Not a week goes by when Google CEO Eric Schmidt doesn’t wring his hands in public about the problems of monetizing online video. Could it be that algorithms and contextual ad targeting will do the trick, just like they did for web pages? That would be rather convenient, but it hasn’t seemed likely so far. But on that note, we’ve been looking into a stealthy Bay Area computer vision startup focused on video search called ...

Hayden Black is nice, funny, quotable and makes two critically acclaimed and modestly popular web shows. He may not have a face for television, but that hasn’t stopped him from becoming the poster boy for a market of online video producers that has a growing crowd of early-stage startups looking to meet its needs. Black, who has never signed an exclusive deal and whose shows — Goodnight Burbank and Abigail’s Teen Diary — are distributed ...

YouTube, in its ongoing attempts to make money and appease Eric Schmidt, today on its homepage is sporting a new sort of ad unit, an expandable HD trailer for the movie Pineapple Express. After clicking, a video of the trailer expands to take up the width of the page. Users can click again to get a full-screen version (actual full-screen, that is) that takes a bit longer to load. The video quality is excellent in ...

YuMe, the video advertising network that was recently involved in controversy with comScore over just how big it is, has brought in a new CEO, according to an email from a company spokesperson. Michael Mathieu, who previously ran the Internet business for Freedom Communication, and before that United Online, will replace YuMe’s founding CEO Jayant Kadambi. Kadambi will stay at the company, serving as president and board member with a focus on the YuMe’s technology ...

BitTorrent will lay off its sales and marketing department, a total of 12 employees, Valleywag reported this morning, based on a tip from an alleged company insider. The company has also supposedly failed to complete a deal to sell its neglected consumer-facing site to Best Buy for $15 million, and is considering making its network accelerator service free. We’ve been searching around for more information, and will update when we have anything. The normally very ...

Rocketboom, the pioneering video show — it provided an early model for the daily release schedule, the woman-reading-quirky-news format, and set many other precedents — has been going strong, content-wise, for the last three and a half years. But in terms of signing distribution and monetization deals — something it had also pioneered early on with an eBay auction for sponsorship — the show had basically dropped off the radar. Today, though, Rocketboom creator Andrew ...

Hulu today beefed up its HD gallery, which continues to be a testing ground for higher-quality video rather than a more pervasive aspect of the video site. The HD gallery launched in December with 10 movie trailers; now it contains a total of 27 full TV episodes, documentaries, and sports and movie excerpts (and whoo-hoo, the first game of this year’s NBA finals). That includes Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog in its HD entirety, which is ...

In the DVD industry, flat growth is exciting because it means you’re not dead yet. But alongside the growth of on-demand movies and the increasing irrelevance of buying a shrink-wrapped box, there’s something of value that’s getting left behind: DVD extras and special features. And that’s a shame, but it’s also an opportunity. From 10 years ago when a DVD buyer was lucky to get director’s commentary to the the extensive goody boxes included with ...

YouTube, as we mentioned this morning, was sued yet again on Wednesday, this time by Italian television company Mediaset over copyright concerns. The lawsuit, filed in Rome, charges the video-sharing site with “illegal distribution and commercial use of audio and video files,” and asks for at least $779 million. The Google-owned company’s response to requests for comment about the lawsuit seemed to come with a sigh: “There is no need for legal action and all ...

Networks continue to insist that online television viewing is additive, but I for one think there’s no way that will last long term. And for the first time ever in May, a significant portion of U.S.-based online viewers of prime-time episodic television shows failed to watch part of those shows on television as well, according to Integrated Media Measurement. Fifty percent of online viewers consider watching prime-time network shows online a replacement for television viewing, ...

GoAnimate, a New York City-based startup, launched a snazzy web-based animation creator at Comic-Con this weekend. Today we talked to GoAnimate founder and CEO Alvin Hung about his company, for which he’s raised $1.4 million in angel funding and is currently trying to add $5 million in venture funding (one VC firm is already committed, he said). Hung described GoAnimate’s tools as easy to use for anyone who has a story to tell, whether they’re ...

Though Facebook has never been that strong on the video front, online media companies are well represented in a small group of launch partners for Facebook Connect, the company’s new tool for authenticating users and sharing information and relationships on other sites that launched today at its F8 conference. Some eight of the 24 launch partners — CBS.com, The Insider.com, CNET, CollegeHumor, Disney-ABC Television Group, Hulu, Seesmic and Vimeo — are in the video space. ...

Joost launches a Chinese version today as a joint venture with TOM Online, the Chinese media conglomerate that’s majority-owned by Joost investor Li Ka-shing. TOM is providing local advertising and content — some 16,000 hours of programming from CCTV, China Record Corporation, BTV Media, and others — while Joost is providing the technology. We had recently commented that Joost’s investors could barely be nice to it in their public remarks, so it’s good to see ...

Episodic, a startup we’ve been eagerly anticipating, took the wraps off its service today in order to launch a feature for content creators to create their own iPhone-compatible sites. Episodic’s greater vision is to be a video hosting platform for web publishers of episodic, story-driven content. Basically, it’s trying to out-blip blip, by having a singular focus on online video shows. We had a chance recently to catch up with Episodic CEO Noam Lovinsky, who ...

Tracking trends and the rising stars in the world of web video is our job here, so we love tools that help us do it. A new entrant in this space is Video Breakouts, which creator Peter Winer has pulled together by noodling around with public data from the largest video-sharing sites to figure out who and what’s already hot as well as what’s on the rise (see a list of all of his reports ...

When Gossip Girl returns to the air on Sept. 1st, new episodes will also be available on the CW’s web site for ad-supported streaming. It’s a reversal we’d been hoping for ever since the new TV network — which is having trouble quantifying the show as a hit despite receiving widespread buzz for it — took Gossip Girl off its site in an effort to boost television viewership. The move, however, failed to have the ...

On the strength of its recent Microsoft deal, YuMe, the Redwood City, Calif.-based video ad provider, entered comScore’s ranking of the top ten U.S. online ad networks for the first time. YuMe had the highest rank for a video ad network. YuMe controlled ad inventory on sites with 134 million unique users in June, putting it in eighth place behind overall advertising leaders Platform-A (AOL), Yahoo, and Google. Video ad competitor Tremor Media comes in ...