Sorry, Yahoo!, but you are being called out on this one. In one of the worst examples of poor targeting and pre-roll abuse, I just received a :30 second pre-roll ad before a 1:22 news clip. But what makes this blog worthy is that it was an ad for Dove body wash. Worse, the clip was an AP News story where Donald Trump slaps WWE owner Vince McMahon ahead of the “battle of the billionaires” wrestling match.

At least some of the other ads that followed were a :09 second ad for Nissan (kudos, Nissan) and a :15 second ad, also for Dove.

But tell me, Yahoo!, why are you showing ads after every two news clips? And why are half of those ads :30 seconds long?

I’m currently watching Vandy vs. Washington State on the CBS Sposrtsline streaming player. Not much has changed since the last version of the player I’ve posted earlier. Same advertisers, too.

But the quality is what its all about. CBS’s doubling of their bandwidth seems to have paid off. I’m curious how many concurrent streams they’re delivering right now, because they appear to be holding up. Despite a few frames being dropped here and there, its a huge improvement.

There is a full screen option when using IE, but not in the official player when using Firefox. But you can get to full screen by right-clicking over the video and selecting the full screen option directly from the Windows Media Player. The pixelation is a bit distracting and creates a ghosting or halo effect around the players. But if you can get past the fuzziness, its watchable.

If your face is painted, it very watchable.

The broadcast commercials in full screen look quite good, except for the Nike ad, which is essentially the same as watching the real game. Not their fault.

Ah, user generated media. Finally a creative example of how people can use the medium.

Thanks to “FantasticBabblings,” for demonstrating how to properly marry the medium and the message.

Too bad it is so fundamentally misguided. A generation of people who have come to expect that all content should be free.

How hard is it to click over to The Daily Show’s website and watch it there?

It was bound to happen. The brush-up between Viacom and YouTube was bound to come to blows, and today it did.

Enough was apparently enough for Viacom, and they brought out the legal big dogs.

Is there anyone who didn’t see something like this coming? Rumors of Google setting aside some cash reserves for a long, drawn out legal battle may prove to be more than rumors. Or at least look like some good foresight.

For other copyright holders around the world, Google is becoming a big target. Belgium newspapers claimed that Google violates copyright law by linking to their news articles without permission to reprint excerpts, and the Belgian courts agreed. The Google Book project has also created concern among book publishers.

But doing business in a global economy isn’t easy. Apple is under attack in France. Microsoft still hasn’t resolved all of their anti-trust issues in the EU.

Did-It’s Mark Simon wrote an excellent piece in Mediapost addressing the shift in power away from the search companies and back to the media companies. Once again, content is king.

Amen. Watching the NCAA tourney last year online was just play lousy. It was like listening to the radio, with a slide show. Just didn’t live up the expectations.

This year CBS is doing something about it. Should be an improvement, but we’ll have to wait and see.

I did get a nice chuckle out of this last year:

Within the industry, Brightcove is sometimes seen as trying to be all things to all people. They’ve struck some huge deals and have a tremendous amount of funding. But they also have a little known “personal” product aimed at regular people.

Over the past few years, I’ve experimented with a number of video solutions, trying to find the easiest way to incorporate video into my blog. Today I am crowning Brightcove the champion. It couldn’t get an easier to put a video like this into your Wordpress blog.

The good folks at Fox are expanding their Fox on Demand program, providing digital downloads to their local affiliates.

Now individual episodes or entire seasons of “24″ and other Fox programs will be made available for purchase through the local affiliate sites, instead of just streamed from Fox.com.

That said, Fox on Demand still offers the best quality of any of the major networks when it comes to streaming their shows online. For individual episodes, you are very good to go with their streaming platform utilizing Move Networks technology.

I know I’ve blogged a bit about Joost lately, and I can’t seem to have a conversation in my real job without their name coming up. But I was finally given access to the Joost beta, and I’ll be sure to keep you posted on my experiences.

A fellow journalist recently was briefed by the Joost PR folks and was unable to get the Beta demo to work, but that’s why its called Beta.

It will be interesting to see, as Joost scales, how the local ISPs feel about the sudden onslaught of bandwidth being used by these P2P backed video networks. As a small time file sharer (bt.Tree.org for live concerts) I have had my bandwidth capped a number of times by Cablevision. If they are concerned about one guy sharing one live concert, they will be in for a rude awakening when everyone leaves their connections on - and uploading - 24/7/365.