Personal video startup Seesmic laid off seven employees today, on top of the three employees it laid off last month. Seesmic founder and CEO Loic Le Meur explains in a video (embedded below) that the layoffs were mostly from the product side. September’s layoffs had been primarily on-camera talent. Tough times. Tough decisions.also read my blog post http://www.loicle... If our counting is right, San Francisco-based Seesmic is now down to about 13 employees. The company ...

Updated. In the first big network content coup it’s gotten in a long time, YouTube got access to some full-length episodes of old CBS shows today. The shows — five episodes of Beverly Hills 90210 (the original), five episodes of MacGyver, five episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series, and 14 episodes of The Young and the Restless — will be accompanied by much more advertising than YouTube has ever shown on a per-video basis, ...

Advertising market research is already being infiltrated by terms like “dramatically lowered expectations,” and even online video — where growth rates are huge because it’s so new — hasn’t been immune to downgrades. Indeed, eMarketer recently chopped its estimate for 2008 U.S. video ad revenue by more than half, to $505 million from $1.3 billion. But looking back at the recent past isn’t quite as painful. The Interactive Advertising Bureau said today that U.S. online ...

YouTube is experimenting with two new viewing options for long-form content: “Theater View,” which shoves down creator information, pulls a clip into widescreen mode, and frames it with red curtains, and “Lights Off,” which dims the browser window outside the video player. The options were documented in a Google Operating System post earlier today. Long-form content is not very common on YouTube, because nearly all users are prohibited from uploading it. The site recently changed ...

In the same way that mobile access to Wikipedia has transformed stupid arguments, mobile song recognition apps are truly neat when you need to name that tune. While they’ve been around for a while (though they didn’t always work so well and sometimes they cost money), the interface of the iPhone and the prominence of Apple’s App Store has given them a big boost. Today, Shazam (where you can hold your phone up to a ...

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This post was originally written for GigaOM’s syndicated column relationship with BusinessWeek. It’s relevant to NewTeeVee so we’re publishing it here as well. The sharp growth in online video viewing, increasing availability of TV online, and proliferation of high-quality, web-originated content has made it easy to point the arrow for online video advertising up and to the right. But while video will probably continue to be a bright spot of growth in a dull economy, ...

Celebrities — they care about using their power for good. They all want you to vote (for Obama). And they’re making videos about it! Most of them, however, are kind of bad. Here are the five (plus one) most recent celebrity get-out-the-vote videos we’ve seen, ranked from worst to most worst. 5) Diddy Blog #24 - Sarah Palin Scares Me In the dark, under the covers, illuminated by a flashlight, it’s…Diddy! The bogeyman is Sarah ...

Eyespot, a San Diego-based online video startup, has shut down operations and is trying to sell its assets. News of the dissolution comes via a Twitter from Eyespot co-founder David Dudas picked up by TechCrunch. Eyespot had initially offered web-based video editing tools before changing strategy earlier this year to be yet another white-label video vendor. Its white-label customers had at one time included Demand Media’s eHow and ExpertVillage. The company raised $3.7 million in ...

Later this month at Berkeley, a great group of people will gather to discuss the future of cinema, games, and online video. They call it “The Conversation,” and it will feature workshops and talks with speakers from Netflix, DreamWorks, Lucasfilm, JibJab, and many many filmmakers. If you’d like to attend too, the conference organizers are offering a special 10 percent discount to NewTeeVee readers if you use this link.

When Sarah Palin and Joe Biden emerge from cramming for the vice-presidential debate on Thursday, it won’t be hard to find them on TV. But should you wish to tune in online, here are some places to watch them on the web, via live stream or via post-debate, on-demand video with commentary. The debate starts at 9 p.m. EST on Oct. 2. MySpace has perhaps the best live-streaming resource, a dedicated “My Debates” site with ...

Among the many places you can live-stream tomorrow’s much-anticipated vice-presidential debate, you might think of broadcast and cable news sites, or maybe online video portals and social networks. But one more we left out from our extensive list this morning is The New York Times, which ran its first live-streaming debate effort for last week’s debate, and garnered a significant audience without any advance promotion. Thursday’s vice-presidential debate will also run with an option to ...

If there’s one thing to learn from today’s little bout of blogosphere hysteria about Flash coming to the iPhone, it’s that people REALLY REALLY want Flash on the iPhone. Adobe has said publicly for some time now that it wants to bring Flash to the iPhone, while Apple CEO Steve Jobs has grand-standed against existing Flash products as too slow or too basic for his masterpiece. But today, an Adobe exec speaking at a Flash ...

The Olympics may be fading off the radar screen, especially for anyone concerned with, say, government or finance. But they were still one of the biggest events of the year. A month out, exclusive U.S. Olympics broadcaster NBCU is releasing more numbers tallied across different distribution platforms during its main event in Beijing, via Multichannel News and Reuters. Though 90 percent of U.S. watchers’ exposure to Olympics content came exclusively via TV viewing, other platforms ...

While comedy video sites like AOL and HBO’s This Just In, NBC’s DotComedy and Turner’s SuperDeluxe have died off after suffering through corporate bureaucracy, bad budgeting and lackluster traffic, CollegeHumor keeps out putting out savvy and hilarious original videos. There’s something about web content that (profitable!) CollegeHumor just seems to understand and anticipate better than anyone else. I went behind the scenes last week to see how the site’s original video team works its magic, ...

Taking a little stroll through my RSS feed reader this weekend, I wanted to make sure you knew about five good blogs written by online video makers about their craft and the world around them. Maybe worth a bookmark of your own. JakeZim.com Safran Digital Group COO Jake Zim blogs about everything from company news to industry views to how to stream porn on your iPhone. Most of all, Zim understands the No. 1 rule ...

Video analytics firm Visible Measures has long said it has some impressive big-name customers, but it’s never been allowed to talk about them publicly. That’s changing today with MTV Networks announcing it’s chosen Visible Measures to analyze the performance of all the network’s online video assets. MTVN has actually been a Visible Measures client for a while, but it’s only now going public about signing the Boston-based startup for a multi-year global agreement to measure ...

Two new bits of video research out today: One from ABI Research saying 63 percent of U.S. online households watch video in their browsers, up from 32 percent a year ago. The other a projection from Gartner, which says IPTV services will grow to 19.6 million subscribers in 2008, or 1.1 percent of households worldwide. Gartner’s estimate would amount to a 64 percent increase over 2007, and $4.5 billion in worldwide IPTV revenue in 2008, ...

The last few years have brought enormous change to the world of online video. And every day, the number of people who know and care about this business grows. When we started NewTeeVee, this was a niche — now it is clearly a mainstream phenomenon. That’s not to say the topics we discussed at last year’s inaugural NewTeeVee Live are irrelevant — things like crossover hits, VCs funding content and making money on long-tail video. ...

Starting today and for the next six weeks, Diggnation will be sponsored by Michelob. The deal is significant for the beer-infused show, which runs down the top stories on Digg.com each week, because it’s with such a major brand and it ties in so well to Diggnation’s content. The new episode is supposed to be released any minute now. The sponsorship deal was reached after a year of conversation with Michelob’s parent company, Anheuser-Busch, according ...