Why go out when you can stay in and catch the electronic, rock, punk and heavy metal grooves (if that’s your thing) from DUB TRIO’S new album, “Another Sound is Dying.” WoozyFly.com will present exclusive online video of Dub Trio’s show at New York City’s Luna Lounge, as the band gets ready to launch its new album “Another Sound is Dying” on January 29th. The concert can be viewed at www.woozyfly.com/dubtrio.

NYC locals can catch Dub Trio’s next Luna Lounge gig live for their record release party next Thursday, Jan 31.

Ask someone to stop picking on you, and they only pile it on more. From FunnyOrDie.com, Jerry O’Connell does his best Tom Cruise impersonation, lampooning the scientology online video making rounds.

AlwaysOn, “The Insider’s Network,” announced their AlwaysOn OnMedia 100 Top Companies earlier this week. Next week they kick off their AlwaysOn OnMedia Conference.

The OnMedia 100 is a list of top private companies, chosen by AlwaysOn’s editors and a panel of industry experts. The companies are selected for being a new generation of game-changing players in the marketing, branding, advertising, and public relations industries. Plenty of winners from the online video space including ScanScout, VideoEgg, EyeWonder, Adap.tv, Tremor Media, imeem, and Vuze to name a few.

I know plenty of people from most of the video players, and they are certainly deserving companies. Congrats to all the winners!

While our stock ticker looks generally positive today, the AP called it a bad day for web video stocks.

Interesting who they look at for web video indicators.

On Monday (sorry, been busy), Daisy Whitney dove into a new ad strategy for online video producers - product placement.

Ad revenue is in short supply for content producers without the scale of portals, premium brand websites and ad networks. Its been no secret that producing your own online web show doesn’t mean you can quit your day job, even if you do earn some popularity. So savvy producers have begun to explore higher paying alternatives than pre-roll, overlays and standard partner programs. Product placement and show sponsorships can ring up the cash register for shows that have a reasonably sized - but consistent - following.

Product placement ensures an ad is married to the video. Recent examples include YouTube star Tay Zonday’s “Cherry Chocolate Rain” video, produced in conjunction with Cherry Chocolate Diet Dr. Pepper; Hayden Black’s “Abigail’s X-Rated Teen Diary,” which featured a Warner Home Video DVD; and comedy duo Rhett and Link’s “Cornhole Song,” sponsored by AJJ Cornhole, maker of the Cornhole backyard game.

Read the article or watch Daisy’s latest New Media Minute.

Full Disclosure: My company, Tremor Media, represents product placement opportunities for content mentioned in Daisy’s article. However, Tremor Media was not contacted for the story.

Billionaire mogul Sam Zell, new owner of Tribune has removed the content filter blocking newsroom writers from the “dangers of YouTube and Facebook.” At least there’s still a few management folks left in the newspaper business with some common sense.

From: Talk to Sam Sent: Tuesday, January 22, 2008 11:03 AM Subject: Censorship, the First Amendment and the Fourth Estate

Everyone,
I learned on the first leg of our tour of Tribune’s business units that some of them were filtering Internet content. I do not see how a member of the Fourth Estate, dedicated to protecting the First Amendment, can censor what its own employees and partners can see. I have instructed that all content filters be removed. You are now exposed to the dangers of You Tube and Facebook. Please use your best judgment.

via LB’s Rambles

Startup FreeWheel launched its ad syndication management service today, partnering with Joost, Next New Networks and Jumpstart Automotive Media to streamline advertising on video syndication sites.

The company which is made up from the top down almost entirely of former DoubleClick employees aims to solve a critical problem for content producers: selling, serving and optimizing ad inventory “across the potentially huge numbers of videos, partnerships and agreements that content owners and distributors may have in place.”

FreeWheel calls its technology Monetization Rights Management™ and is designed to facilitate real-time decision making across all parties involved in online advertising, eliminating many of the complexities involved in serving ads and sharing revenue on syndication sites.

Co-CEO Doug Knopper suggested this technology could solve some of the contentious issues behind the writers strike:

“Using our system, billion dollar lawsuits and contentious revenue accounting strikes are eliminated…Our MRM solution empowers all partners involved in building audience and selling ads in a widely syndicated ecosystem to achieve maximum revenue.”

I’d give them about six months before they’re acquired; WPP perhaps?

On the off chance you haven’t already seen this, here’s a great clip making the rounds on the Web. Its David Lynch ranting on why watching movies on an iPhone (or any other portable phone or device) just isn’t the same as being in the theaters. He’s right, of course, but you can’t take a movie theater onto a plane with you.

I’m guessing the mobile industry disagrees.

Today, ad network Burst Media put out their latest issue of their newsletter, and in it, they bashed pre-roll with some pretty nasty looking data.

Once again, we’re presented with a bunch of charts and graphs and data points on why pre-roll sucks. But once again, we have no idea about the content that was used in the study.

Bad News: Most Stop Watching Video Content If An Ad Shows, Or Worse
Among respondents, one-half (50.7%) stop watching an online video once they encounter an in-stream advertisement.

Why is this even remotely interesting when you don’t know what kind of content the user was looking to watch? Answer - it isn’t. Users that abandon watching a “user initiated” video clip because they see the start of an ad simply don’t care about watching that video.

Would it have been worth it if they knew it was only a 5-second ad? I bet it would be. What if it were exclusive video? What if you desperately needed to hear about that breaking news story?

I am, again, on yet another rant about unmonetizable content. If the success of your business depends on running a pre-roll ad in front of “Man Lights Fart on Fire,” then you need to reconsider your business model. Fun to watch? Sure. Good business? Not even close.

Can we please stop bashing pre-roll? Can we please stop pumping out research that tells us that people don’t like advertising? Can we please talk about this powerful, exciting and effective medium like the complicated and layered business that it is? Size of the video player, quality of content, type of content, length of content — all factors that are continuously left out of research, but desperately need to be factored in to media planning. There are no simple answers, so lets stop looking for them. Lets start working on some in-depth analysis that (gasp) may be over the head of a 24 year old media planner.

Yes, it is hard to measure so many factors in any one study. But without it, we will continuously discover the same thing. Kids like music and entertainment, news is the most popular video category, and nobody likes ads.

B.F.D.

There are a lot of challenges to delivering content online, but measurement is an often overlooked problem. Last year, the IAB challenged ComScore and Nielsen NetRatings to submit to a third party audit, and competition in the online video market continues to prompt debates about the best way to measure internet usage.

On a FutureTV panel today, Veoh President Dimitry Shapiro lashed out at what he sees as major inaccuracies, saying bluntly “ComScore measurements suck” and citing ComScore traffic numbers that he said were far below those of Veoh’s server logs, a discrepancy Veoh has been fighting since June.

ComScore, which relies on panels to judge online viewership insists that its numbers are at least as reliable as other forms of measurement due to issues like cookie deletion.

As more content moves online and the value of the digital media market grows, the importance of accurate metrics and industry-wide measurement standards will continue to increase.