YuMe welcomes a great addition to our music channel: Baeble Music.  Baeblemusic.com is a destination for fans of live music concerts – visitors can check out online videos of the hottest bands playing at the best venues around the country.  Baeble’s community of twenty-something music enthusiasts view concert footage, review shows and compile band profiles for emerging acts such as: The New Pornographers, Blond Redhead, Ben Kweller, The Bravery, Shout Out Louds.   In addition, Baeble Music distributes the shows through Youtube, Imeem, Veoh, Vuze, Blinkx, Babelgum, as well as key music destinations on the web.

- Rosanne Lee Vathana

Recently I had a chance to connect with Mark Glaser from PBS’s excellent MediaShift blog to talk about video advertising.  Mark’s post went up today, and it’s a great overview of what’s going on in the industry today.  Great stuff on ad formats, the rise of Hulu, and on small and medium businesses making video ads, and quotes from companies like Brightcove,  Tremor Media  and AR&D.   

If Mark isn’t one of your daily reads, he should be…

 - Jayant Kadambi

Our growth in quality publisher impressions continues unabated today with our announcement of Microsoft’s unsold inventory to the YuMe stable of premium publishers. We are proud to announce not only that we can now offer advertisers MSN inventory, but we have also been selected as the video ad platform to serve and manage all of Microsoft’s unsold and excess video inventory. For little YuMe, this is great validation of our technology, our platform and our business in general. Our network now reaches over 65% of the US online audience; comprises over 120 million unique visitors and continues to offer real scale for targeted, premium ad spending in the US.

- Jayant Kadambi

So, it’s finally happened. What you ask? A content owner, and not a shabby one at that, Disney is streaming a feature length movie, in its entirety, for free, albeit with a couple of adverts. There is a single 30 second Post Cocoa Pebbles commercial, followed by a Disney commercial at the beginning of Finding Nemo, which ended last week. I believe Monsters Inc is next.

And there is this impossibly cool companion banner that kind of glides in from the lower right-hand side of the web page. Compared to sitting through what seems like an interminable 15 minutes of trailers at the beginning of some blockbuster movies, this is great.

You can’t fast-forward, rewind, or anything, but it’s still great to see content owners begin to dabble in streaming high-value content. If they had ways to monetise it on sites all over the web and they could syndicate the distribution of it, and still track everything, they’d get a lot more eyeballs, I bet.

- Jayant Kadambi

Digitas and it’s newly formed brand content division, The Third Act:, held their first ever Digital Content NewFront ’08 yesterday in Chelsea, where video content production companies showcased their original, web-specific video productions and discussed the state of original online video content in front of a standing room only audience of fellow producers, agency folks and advertisers. There were around a dozen different companies from the space, including ABC/Disney’s Stage9, showing their sizzle reels and participating in panel discussions.

While there was a disagreement over whether the internet has seen its first real original video hit and how “hit” status should be determined, there were some very consistent themes across panels and companies. Most notably, a repeated theme was that original video content produced specifically for the web presents advertisers with a chance to get involved early in the process of production with the content creators (writers, directors, editors, producers). Rather than “lease” an association with content via a :30 spot in a TV show pod, brands have a unique opportunity to “own” original content in an evergreen fashion through brand integration and product placement.

Questions remained on the overall efficacy and ROI such initiatives would yield the advertisers, and that leads to a bigger question on how many forward thinking brand marketers would be willing to take a risk and invest in the plethora of content now available. The NewFront however, did a respectable job in helping present the opportunity to advertisers and was a solid step in moving this dynamic segment of the online video landscape forward.

- Gian Lombardi

Mr. Malik writes that YouTube is reportedly not making as much money as it should and if that’s true, I’m sure there are a battalion of Googlers remedying that situation (or trying to), so I won’t pontificate about that. (OK, I will, a bit). We’ve already gone on record as saying that in our estimation, advertisers want premium safe content, in a safe environment, and we’ve got tons of that. But what struck me as more interesting was the last two sentences, reproduced here for your reading pleasure - “In comparison, the number of visitors to YouTube continues to rise, making it by far the most dominant player in the market. So much so that even Hulu decided to set up a channel on YouTube to attract traffic to their site.”

Even Hulu he writes. I’m not sure how to interpret that, since CBS and others have been populating trailers of their content for some time now in an attempt to drive traffic to their destination site. In fact, at iMedia last week, Patrick Keane of CBS went on about how CBS are purchasing and producing made-for-the-web shows and populating YouTube and other sites in order to drive traffic to CBS’s audience network.

OK, now I’ll finally get to my point, which is this whole concept of seeding the online-ether with teasers that point to the real meaty content that people want to watch, presumably at your destination site or your “affiliate or audience” network, is an interesting tactic that will only increase and morph. Already there are several companies with search technologies that will promote your content on search engines, RSS Feeds and the like to get your “page-rank” higher. What I wonder is whether this method of getting more viewers is as affective, more effective or complementary to a straightforward syndication of your content to known partner sites.

- Jayant Kadambi