MediaWeek reports that podcasters Gretchen Vogelzang and Paige Heninger, hosts of the successful MommyCast podcast, have made a deal with Media Rights Capital to produce at least 120 original video segment.

Paul Vogelzang, the executive producer of MommyCast, says that they hope to reach a larger audience with the videos. “Video is more of a digestible bite,” he said. “It’s easier to forward on to your friends and easier to find in search.”

Mommycast was one of the indie podcasts to land a major sponsorship deal, and is in the third year of its relationship with Dixie.

Last week, while we were wondering whether NBC risked losing the online audience with all the barriers it puts in front of people wanting to watch the Olympics, everybody else seemed to be worried that NBC’s Olympic coverage might melt the Internet.

Three days into the Olympics, the Internet hasn’t melted and it’s starting to look like NBC’s Olympic traffic is pretty ho-hum

For the first two days of coverage, NBC Online averaged about 3.3 million video streams.

3.3 millions streams sounds like a lot, until you consider that YouTube streams nearly 50 times that many videos every day.

In other words, NBC’s online coverage of the Olympics is getting whipped by the likes of “Sneezing Panda”:

Why isn’t NBC’s online coverage doing better than this?

NewTeeVee’s Chris Albrecht says NBC’s online Olympic coverage “sucks”, adding “I tried watching these Olympics online at different points throughout the weekend and just gave up.”

There’s more to it than that, though. NBC’s online coverage plays second fiddle to their television coverage, and they’ve put up too many barriers to those wanting to watch online.

Beyond that, NBC hasn’t done much to grab the attention of the Internet television audience. A lot of people now do most of their video viewing online, and NBC just isn’t where people’s attention is moving. If you want to watch the Olympics on your favorite Internet video site, on your iPod or your phone, you either can’t do it or you’ll have Olympic-sized hurdles to jump.

NBC says that its online coverage is driving people to its traditional TV coverage – but it appears to be losing the online audience in the process.

ZDNet

NBC’s Olympics coverage appears to be getting a boost in interest from its Web presence, according to the company:

• More viewers tuned in to watch the first two prime-time Olympics telecasts on NBC than any Summer Games in a decade.
• Friday night’s taped opening ceremony attracted 34.2 million people, up 35% from the last summer games.

“The early numbers suggest that all of this is fueling more interest,” said Gary Zenkel, president of NBC Olympics.

“Streaming will not diminish the ratings,” said sports-media consultant Neal Pilson. “It encourages viewers and provides them with information.”

The Disposable Film Festival celebrates the artistic potential of disposable video: short films made on non-professional devices such as one-time use video cameras, cell phones, point and shoot cameras, webcams, computer screen capture software and other readily available video capture devices.

You can see examples at the DFF site.

Here are the details:

Blog Maverick Mark Cuban argues that the best way to increase your audience for Internet video is to allow downloads:

Many of the major video sites have added this option, but its amazing that newspaper, TV and other sites that have recently added video, for the most part do not.

With online video, maybe adding the word “Save” to Share & Replay might not double viewing, but every additional local view not only can increase revenue, but it can eliminate paying for bandwidth for those users who go back to the original link and stream the video again.

Most video sites are still making it too difficult to watch their content offline or on devices like iPods.

Cuban’s right – video sites can increase their audience by making it easy for you to watch videos on your own terms. One of the best ways to do this is by offering podcast feeds.

The New York Times today suggests that the Zune‘s sales are mainly coming from people that hate Apple and are anti-iPod:

The most salient feature of the Zune seems to be that it’s not an iPod. Jesse Thorn, host of the public-radio show (and popular podcast) The Sound of Young America, is a Zune proponent, praising, for instance, its ability to sync wirelessly with a computer. Plus he was able to update his first-generation Zune with the improved software and firmware designed for the newer version – in contrast to Apple’s charging iPod Touch owners for upgrades, he makes a point of saying.

Turns out Thorn has always resisted buying an iPod, having been put off initially by the price and later by the ever-growing number of “self-satisfied people carrying a ubiquitous object.”That sounds hostile, but Thorn is actually quite good-humored. On “Jordan Jesse Go,” another (less formal) podcast he co-hosts, he and his friend Jordan Morris regularly joke about the song-swap feature, inventing the term “rocket up your Zunehole” to describe the practice. Thorn also seems to take pleasure in examples of product-design oddities, like the inclusion of brown among the device’s first-generation color choices.

This is not the attitude you associate with fanatical brand devotion. Similarly, Julia Sliwinski, a media strategist in New York, likes the Zune her boyfriend gave her but has never detected the kind of cult-product passion that attached to the Rio Karma MP3 player she used to own. She hasn”t swapped songs with any other Zune owners because, she says, “I don’t know any.” Asked directly, she admits that “I probably wouldn’t buy an iPod,” as she is “a little bit anti-Apple.”

The New York Times makes its case with annecdotal evidence, but it’s clear that, for some, the biggest “feature” of the Zune is that it’s not from Apple and it’s not what everybody else is buying.

Blubrry’s Angelo Mandato has introduced a new option for publishing podcasts with WordPress, the Blubrry Powerpress Podcast Plugin. WordPress podcast publishers frustrated by the current state of the PodPress plugin may want to give Powerpress a try.

The Blubrry Powerpress interface lets you add/modify/remove podcast episodes from blog posts and includes a basic media player for your site.

Powerpress Features:

• Easily add/modify/remove podcast episodes from blog posts
• Integrated media player
• iTunes RSS tags
• iTunes album/cover art
• upload new iTunes/RSS cover art
• Ping iTunes
• Media size detection
• Duration detection (mp3 only)
• 3rd party statistics integration

Powerpress Limitations:

• Blubrry Powerpress does not allow you to include multiple enclosures in one blog post. This is because each podcatcher handles multiple enclosures differently. iTunes will download the first enclosure that it sees in the feed ignoring the rest. Other podcatchers and podcasting directories either pick up the first enclosure or the last in each post item. This inconsistency and combined with the fact that Dave Winer does not recommend multiple enclosures is why the Blubrry Powerpress does not support them.
• Blubrry Powerpress does not include media statistics. This is not because Blubrry has its own statistics service, although that’s a good reason by itself. Maintaining and calculating statistics is a resource and server intensive task that would add bloat to an otherwise lightweight wordpress podcasting plugin. We recommend you use your media hosting’s statistics and you’re more than welcome to use the Blubrry Statistics service as well.

New media is dramatically more efficient than old media at creating Internet content and getting page views, if numbers published by Gawker Media are any example.

According to Gawker publisher Nick Denton, July 2008 traffic to Gawker sites set a record for the organization of 254 million monthly pageviews. Denton goes on to note that Gawker is pulling in about twice the page views of the LA Times‘ site.

July 2008 Gawker Media traffic, by title:

• Gizmodo 73.5m
• Kotaku 44.3m
• Lifehacker 25.6m
• Gawker 18.9m
• Fleshbot 17.4m
• Jezebel 15.5m
• Consumerist 13.7m
• Jalopnik 13.4m
• Deadspin 12.6m
• io9 8.8m
• Defamer 6.4m
• Valleywag 3.3m

To put this in perspective, Gawker generated 2x more traffic than the country’s fourth-largest newspaper, with about a tenth of LA Times’ newsroom staff. (80 at Gawker Media, vs 700 in the newsroom at the LA Times).

TASCAM has announced three recording bundles designed to offer everything you need, besides your computer, to record high-quality audio.

TASCAM’s hitting several different price points, to appeal to different budgets and meet different requirements:

• The Track Pack T1 combines the US-122L audio interface with a dynamic microphone, headphones and Cubase LE4 recording software. Track Pack T1 sells for $299 MSRP/$179 street.
• The Track Pack T2 matches the US-144 interface with TASCAM’s new TM-78 condenser microphone. Track Pack T2 sells for $369 MSRP/ $199 street.
• The Field Pack pairs TASCAM’s DR-1 portable recorder with the TM-ST1 stereo microphone. Field Pack sells for $498 MSRP/$349 street.

“The Track Pack and Field Pack bundles give musicians everything they’ll need, even cables and stands, so they can start making music right away,” according to TASCAM’s Paul Jenkins. The bundles are scheduled to ship this month.

via Synthtopia

Internet video producers are making money and averaging more than $12 per 1,000 views, according to a Web Video Study (pdf) by video distribution platform TubeMogul.

Here are some of the highlights of the survey:

• More than half (51.1%) of those surveyed are making money with their videos.
• Of those that are monetizing their videos, they are making an average of $12.39 per 1,000 views.
• Most video producers (68.8%) are not selling their own ads.
• Overlays are the most common type of ads used, followed by post-roll and pre-roll ads.

TubeMogul surveyed over 10,000 Internet video producers, so these results demonstrate that there’s already significant opportunity to make money with Internet video.

Here’s their breakdown of the most commonly used ad options:

While these numbers paint a fairly rosy picture of the opportunities for video producers, the survey is skewed towards more serious content producers. TubeMogul’s service automates distribution to multiple video hosting sites, a service which appeals to people producing lots of videos and distributing them to multiple places.

via SiliconAlleyInsider