The Social

Video might've killed the radio star, but the Web sure hasn't killed music videos. Less than a week after News Corp.-owned social site MySpace announced its MySpace Music Videos portal, video search engine Blinkx announced the debut Tuesday of "Blinkx Music," a search tool specifically designed to trawl through music videos across the Web.

"There are hundreds of thousands of music videos available on the Web today which makes it nearly impossible to navigate and find what you are looking for," Blinkx founder and CEO Suranga Chandratillake explained in a release. "Based on the success of blinkx Remote, our online TV guide, we recognized there was a need to help organize music videos and make them easily searchable on the Web. By leveraging our award-winning video search index, we built Blinkx Music to help our users find their favorite music videos quickly, easily and in one place."

Blinkx says that its search engine has thus far indexed more than 33,000 hours of music videos from about 10,000 artists. While it says that Blinkx Music will let users "post comments and interact with other fans, and also offers background information about bands and their work," the release doesn't say whether it will provide links to streaming or download partners, from which it could potentially rake in revenues shares.

But this is a tight space, and MySpace's music video portal won't be Blinkx Music's only competitor. Universal Music Group is still putting together Vevo, a Hulu-like portal for music videos that aims to bring artists and labels the revenues they might not be getting from YouTube (though the Google-owned video platform is providing Vevo's technology).

Also looming in the background is Google's forthcoming music offering, which the company plans to formally unveil in a press event on Wednesday in Los Angeles. This could instantly run away with a huge market share in music video (and music download) search.

Some background on Blinkx: it's a publicly traded company based in the U.K. It merged with a search engine called Autonomy and then was spun off from it when it went public in May 2007. When rumors started to swirl last year that Google and News Corp. (which, coincidentally, owns MySpace) were interested in acquiring it, shares of Blinkx stock soared.

A correction was made at 11:31 a.m. PT on November 2: Blinkx has been de-merged from Autonomy.

NEW YORK--Broadcast network CBS will be advertising its fall TV season with a video-chip ad embedded in an issue of Entertainment Weekly.

The September 18 issue of the Time Inc.-owned magazine will feature the first video ad to appear in print, George Schweitzer, CBS marketing president, said Wednesday at a press conference at the company's headquarters here.

The ad with embedded video.

(Credit: Caroline McCarthy/CNET)

The ad will be launched in partnership with PepsiCo to promote Pepsi Max soda and the TV network's Monday prime-time lineup. Not everyone will be seeing it: the ad will appear in a magazine insert sent to subscribers in the New York and Los Angeles areas--an edition without the video chip will be sent to subscribers elsewhere and show up on newsstands.

The technology for the battery-powered ads was manufactured by a Los Angeles-based company called Americhip, and each ad can handle about 40 minutes of video.

Here are some more details about the Americhip technology: the screen, which is 2.7 millimeters thick, has a 320x240 resolution. The battery lasts for about 65 to 70 minutes, and can be recharged, believe it or not, with a mini USB cord--there's a jack on the back of it. The screen, which uses thin film transistor liquid crystal display (TFT LCD) technology, is enforced by protective polycarbonate. It's a product that has been in development at Americhip for about two years, spokesman Tim Clegg told CNET News via e-mail.

"It's leadership in innovation, which we really stress at CBS in every part of our company," Schweitzer said of the ads, which were developed with the collaboration of the Ignition Factory, a division of the Omnicom Group's OMD media agency.

PepsiCo has been experimenting with edgy, experimental ads for some time now, distributing millions of 3D glasses for its SoBe LifeWater Super Bowl ad earlier this year. It more recently launched a new Mountain Dew flavor by inviting prominent Twitter users to a party at a trendy Brooklyn venue.

Pepsi Max is the company's new diet soda geared toward men, advertised earlier this summer with bold print ads that declared, "Save the calories for bacon."

"The evolution of marketing television in the fall--it used to be as simple as this," Schweitzer said, holding up a vintage copy of TV Guide. "It was axiomatic in those days. If you took an ad in TV Guide, people watched your program. Not anymore."

Disclosure: CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.

This post was updated at 1:38 p.m. PT with more details about Americhip's technology.

Boxee, a New York-based start-up that makes "media center" software, announced Wednesday that it has raised $6 million in a Series B financing round led by General Catalyst Partners. Existing investors Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital also participated in the round.

Boxee raised its series A round, to the tune of $4 million, last November. With the new financing the company hopes to ink more deals with media companies and set-top box manufacturers, as well as hire more employees to keep building out its technology (which includes a developer platform). Currently in an alpha test phase, Boxee hopes to expand to a beta test in October.

More deals will also help Boxee gain some industry cred. It has still been unable to convince Hulu, now the big name in premium online video, to reverse a ban on Boxee's access to its content--which includes a huge library from NBC Universal, News Corp., and Disney's ABC Entertainment.

"I think that the best thing that we could do in order to become partners with Hulu is, on one end, work with other media companies so they see that Boxee is overall a friendly company to content owners," CEO Avner Ronen told CNET News. "And the second is that we need to grow our footprint, we need to grow our user base, we need to get on more digital devices, and I think if we do those things it will open the opportunity up for us to partner with Hulu."

"Our belief is that, eventually, content owners need to follow the users," Ronen said.

A preview of how Blip.tv content will be displayed on the Roku Digital Video Player

(Credit: Roku)

NEW YORK--Online video start-up Blip.tv on Tuesday unveiled an wide range of infrastructure and partnership announcements that, according to chief operating officer Dina Kaplan, explains why "for the past year we have been very quiet."

Part of Tuesday's announcement, made in conjunction with a breakfast event at Blip.tv's downtown offices here, was a new set of syndication partnerships with hosting platforms YouTube and Vimeo, local TV station NBC Local Media New York (which acquired video production company LX.TV last year), and set-top box manufacturer Roku. It's also expanded existing partnerships with TiVo, Sony, and Verizon Fios. Blip.tv, geared toward video producers and creators who want a hosting, distribution, and marketing platform for episodic programs rather than standalone videos, has existing partnerships in place with iTunes, AOL Video, MSN Video, and a number of others.

"Before today we used to say that Blip reaches half of the video Internet," CEO Mike Hudack said at the press conference. "Today I'm really happy to announce that we probably reach about 80 percent of the video Internet."

Blip.tv, which Hudack says was designed "to make independent Web shows sustainable," runs its own hosting platform but also distributes to partner sites--basically, letting members upload to many platforms at once--and runs an optional advertising program that it splits 50-50 with show creators.

Additionally, Blip.tv unveiled on Tuesday an upgraded "dashboard" for members to manage the shows they've uploaded: new features include batch-editing of episodes, statistics and analytics from new partner TubeMogul, enhanced advertising capabilities from FreeWheel Media, and cross-platform comment and friend request management.

With the dashboard, members can use a series of check boxes to choose the platforms to which they want to upload their videos, track views and revenue earned on a series of graphs, and opt to integrate advertising.

"We started Blip about four years ago with five friends, and the idea was really simple," Hudack said. "There were all these people making Web shows and we figured they needed help with hosting and distribution and all this stuff." At launch, the start-up was effectively a YouTube competitor that was only differentiated by its appeal to the independent video blogger community, but Blip.tv has since been crafting itself into more of a distribution platform rather than yet another place to upload and watch videos.

Now, only four percent of Blip.tv users' 72 million monthly total views are on the Blip.tv platform.

The differentiation is enough so that Blip now considers the Google-owned YouTube to be a partner, not a (significantly larger) competitor. "One of the things that we really believe in is an open Web, and we believe in data, and we believe in supporting content partners and independent show creators," YouTube content partner manager George Strompolous said at the event on Tuesday.

But the announcement also had an old-media angle: thanks to the partnership with the NBC affiliate, some Blip.tv creators' shows will air on New York Nonstop, an NBC-owned station in New York that specializes in short-form digital content like the shows it acquired with LX.TV, and possibly even on the main WNBC channel.

Blip.tv raised its most recent round of funding last October in a round led by Bain Capital Ventures, and soon after moved to a new office space in the downtown SoHo neighborhood that has become a social fixture for the local tech community in part because of its built-in beer taps.

The company has not yet provided a roadmap regarding revenues and profitability.

This post was updated at 7:22 a.m. PT.

There's a lot to love about silly Internet memes and fads, and one reason is that they can dig up something old and make it cool again. Music is no exception: anything from a '70s rock anthem to a '90s one-hit wonder can be given new life if the YouTube or 4chan hordes get their hands on it.

The complication is that, thanks to the rise of user-generated content, a song can suddenly become in-demand again without any kind of official marketing push (like placement on a movie soundtrack, for example). And that's an interesting issue for the music industry: When a song from decades ago starts to hit the ears of a generation that might not have been exposed to it before thanks to a grainy video of a tone-deaf guy eviscerating it at an open mic night, does the record label with the rights to the song embrace it as free publicity or flag it as unauthorized content?

One thing's for sure. The sheer amount of content on the Web makes it tough for anything to break through from obscurity into the mainstream. But when something hits it big, it gets really big. You can go ask the guy we put at the top of this list.

10. "Say It Ain't So," Weezer

Weezer, which was doing the nerd-rock thing way before it was cool, is no stranger to revivals: considered by much of the mainstream to be a '90s novelty act after its hit single "Buddy Holly," the alternative-rock band bounced back in the early '00s with songs like "Island in the Sun" and "Beverly Hills." More recently, the band enlisted YouTube stars to star in its video for last year's single "Pork and Beans."

But Weezer got an additional push of digital buzz when its songs proved to be some of the most popular on video games "Guitar Hero" and "Rock Band." The 1994 song "Say It Ain't So," in particular, has seen a resurgence in party playlists all over. On one hand, it really is one of Weezer's best tracks. On the other, a dark and painful song about addiction and domestic abuse has officially made the leap to drunk frat-boy karaoke staple. So it goes.

9. "Take On Me," A-Ha

Speaking of karaoke, "Take On Me" will always have a place in pop culture as the song that's impossible to sing at a karaoke bar without botching it beyond belief--even a decent singing voice will make those high notes of the chorus sound like fingernails on a chalkboard.

But it hit the viral video circuit when some enterprising online comedian rewrote the lyrics so that they say exactly what's going on in A-Ha's odd music video for the song. The "Take On Me: Literal Version" video has been a moderate hit, and thankfully, the singer manages to hit the high notes without too much trouble.

8. "(Don't Fear) The Reaper," Blue Oyster Cult

To be fair, this 1976 song never really disappeared from the classic-rock airwaves, and the reason that it's on this list technically has to do with television, not the Web. A 2000 "Saturday Night Live" sketch starred Will Ferrell as a fictional member of Blue Oyster Cult (the cowbell player) and guest Christopher Walken as a record producer who seemed to think Ferrell's instrumentals weren't forceful enough.

But thanks to the proliferation of the aforementioned "SNL" clip online several years later, it's now almost impossible to extricate "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" from Walken's insistence on "I gotta have more cowbell!" and the phenomenon has gone from forgotten TV catchphrase to full-out Internet meme.

"SNL" network NBC has been notoriously protective when it comes to unauthorized clips of the Walken sketch (and anything else it's aired) circulating around the Web, and an ambitious project to make the entire comedy show's archives available online hasn't yet gotten off the ground. Until then, scattered pirated versions are available--as well as hilarious high school talent show re-enactments, coming from a generation that probably never knew of Blue Oyster Cult before it was associated with "more cowbell."

7. "Heartbeats," The Knife

This one's sort of cheating, since "Heartbeats" wasn't a huge hit to begin with. But it's a fascinating story about the way media can make its way all over the Web: Late in 2006, The Knife was a little-known Swedish indie band that had been around since the late '90s when another artist's recording of their 2004 song "Heartbeats" became a viral hit. Acoustic singer Jose Gonzales had covered the track for his album "Veneer," and it rose to popularity as the soundtrack of a commercial for Sony Bravia televisions. The Bravia ad, which depicted hundreds of colorful bouncy balls descending on San Francisco, was never televised in the U.S., and therefore received most of its buzz from clips on YouTube and elsewhere across the Web.

Fans of the Gonzalez song soon learned that it was actually a cover; the Knife started getting extra momentum, and now the band is a favorite of edgy music bloggers and DJs all over.

6. "Flagpole Sitta," Harvey Danger

This Seattle-based band put out several well-received albums but only hit the mainstream with "Flagpole Sitta." Almost a decade later, digital comedy powerhouse CollegeHumor taped a video in which the entire office (mostly a bunch of twentysomething hipsters) lip-synced to the song in a single take.

The wildly popular video also spurred a fad of other "lip dub" videos among the Web's young and camera-happy. As for CollegeHumor, the beer-pong-friendly office became the subject of a fictionalized miniseries on MTV earlier this year.

5. "YYZ," Rush

This instrumental track, originally released in 1981, is one of the most difficult songs to play in "Guitar Hero" and now "Rock Band," so it's become a sort of a geek milestone. That was only enhanced when a video of a really, really, really enthusiastic guy nailing the song in "expert" mode became a huge hit on YouTube.

Called "How Guitar Hero Was Meant To Be Played," the video has chalked up more than 6 million views and features a guy named "Freddie" getting off a motorcycle, stripping off a leather jacket, introducing himself with "What's up, Internet?" and having a friend equip him with the guitar console. If that's how "Guitar Hero" was meant to be played, I know lots of people who are doing it wrong.

4. "Don't Stop Believin'," Journey

This song is a classic, no matter what. And its use in the final episode of "The Sopranos" only solidified that. But it deserves a spot on this list because of an embarrassing incident that (at least temporarily) associated it with the dissolution of happy-go-lucky Web 2.0 mania in the aftermath of last fall's financial collapse.

Here's what happened: A bunch of young dot-com entrepreneurs all went on vacation together to an estate in Cyprus, and filmed a poolside "lip dub" video much like the one orchestrated several years earlier by the CollegeHumor team behind the "Flagpole Sitta" video. The single-take video of twentysomethings cavorting in bathing suits to "Don't Stop Believin'" was clever and well-done, if a little silly. Unfortunately, this happened to be October 2008, right when things were getting really bad on Wall Street. Gossip blogs lambasted the creators, and the video was eventually pulled.

About a month later, MySpace enlisted L.A. nightclub regular DJ AM to work the turntables at its party at the Web 2.0 Summit confab--a large-scale party that had undoubtedly been put together pre-recession. When he played a remix of "Don't Stop Believin'," there were more than a couple of sheepish looks on the dance floor.

3. "You Make My Dreams," Daryl Hall & John Oates

There aren't a whole lot of bells and whistles in the music video for this 1980 pop song by Philadelphia duo Hall & Oates: it's pretty much just the two of them bouncing around against a black background with their backup band. Which, of course, made it the perfect video in which to embed "Keyboard Cat," a ubiquitous Internet clip of an orange tabby cat jamming away on a keyboard. Bonus: the cat is wearing the same color T-shirt that John Oates sports in the "You Make My Dreams" video.

The digital revival of "You Make My Dreams" may have been stunted, however, as YouTube pulled the audio from the clip due to the fact that it doesn't have the proper licensing agreement in place with Warner Music Group, which owns the rights to the song. It's a testament to the complications that can arise when a unauthorized use of a decades-old song suddenly thrusts it back into mainstream pop culture.

"You Make My Dreams" might've just gotten an extra kick from outside the Web, though: the song has a notable role in the romantic comedy "500 Days of Summer," which was released this month.

P.S.: The Keyboard Cat video is still up on Funny or Die.

2. "The Final Countdown," Europe

This 1986 song by Swedish rock band Europe has always been notorious for its corniness, making the cut on lists as varied as "Most Awesomely Bad Songs Ever" and "Run For Your Life! The 50 Worst Songs Ever (as well as, to its credit, VH1's "Top 100 Hard Rock Songs" list). It also had a regular role in cult sitcom "Arrested Development" as the theme song used by Gob (Will Arnett) for his magic show.

But "The Final Countdown" achieved new notoriety on the Web when a video of an abysmally bad cover version by a band called Deep Sunshine started to circulate on YouTube. Geek community site Fark co-opted the song as a sort of in-joke, and it's racked up well over a million views.

Comments on the video range from "LOL can someone please tell them that they suck?" to "my ears are bleeding" to "I'd do anything to see them live."

1. "Never Gonna Give You Up," Rick Astley

Of course this was No. 1--really, what else could we have picked? The only thing sillier than the lyrics of this 1988 song is the music video for it, in which British pop singer Astley spends a good deal of time wiggling his hips in a trench coat. For some reason or another, the video became central to an online prank called "Rickrolling," in which mischievous Web users in forums, blogs, Twitter posts, and instant messages would send over a link to something they claimed was a highly anticipated video (usually a movie or video game trailer) but linked to the Astley video instead.

The prank grew so mainstream that at the annual Macy's Thanksgiving parade last year, Astley was enlisted to surprise spectators and TV viewers by coming out of a float singing (OK, lip-syncing) "Never Gonna Give You Up," effectively Rickrolling the entire country. Around that time, many people concluded that the Astley revival had more or less worn out its welcome. (It should be said that one of the co-writers of "Never Gonna Give You Up" wasn't too thrilled that he wasn't making much money off the YouTube fame.)

But the Rickroll really hasn't gone away: recently, a German DJ posted a "mashup" video that proves just how eerily the lyrics of "Never Gonna Give You Up" synchronize with Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Ladies and gentlemen, the miracles of digital media.

This is sort of interesting. MTV Networks, which certainly has a lot of video content out there on the Web, on Wednesday released the results of an internal study to determine what kinds of advertisements are most effective and online-friendly matches for short-form online videos.

The conclusion? "Project Inform," the MTV survey, found that a five-second-long "pre-roll" ad in advance of the clip, combined with ten seconds of a semi-transparent ad unit that takes up the lower third of the video (and starts about ten seconds in), makes up "both the most effective and the most audience-friendly ad product for short-form online video," according to a release.

MTVN calls this the "lower one-third product suite." It was tested against two other ad packages, the "sideloader," which combines the five-second pre-roll with an ad that rolls out of the side of the video window; and a traditional 30-second pre-roll before the ad.

So, obviously, that's a limited number of options and certainly doesn't reflect the full range of possibilities for online ads. But it was thorough: Project Inform ran consumer survey tests across about 50 million video streams on the Web properties for media brands like MTV, Comedy Central, and Nickelodeon.

"Short-form online video consumption is exploding, but there's still a lot of confusion among marketers over which ad formats deliver for brands without compromising the user experience," Nada Stirratt, executive vice president of digital advertising at the Viacom-owned MTV Networks, said in the release. "By exploring the viability of new ad products around short-form online video, Project Inform provides the type of insights crucial to creating the innovative, custom solutions that this marketplace needs."

The catch is whether even the highest-performing varieties of online video ads still really rake in the dollars. Online video has been notoriously difficult for companies to monetize, but that's in part because the first variety of video to gain traction on the Web was amateur, user-created content (do top-notch advertisers really want their message next to a video of a squirrel on water skis?) and also because traditional, TV-style ads don't have the same impact alongside shorter Web clips.

There have been some promising signs, though. Video portal Hulu has investigated a couple of experimental video ad formats since launching last year, and has had good news to report on the advertising front--like that its inventory sold out a month after its public debut.

Viacom isn't a member of the Hulu joint venture, which now consists of NBC Universal, Disney's ABC Entertainment, and News Corp. But a limited number of episodes from Comedy Central talk shows "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and "The Colbert Report" started playing on Hulu last year.

It's here, sort of. Several months after the big announcement that content from Disney's ABC Entertainment division would be coming to Hulu, the entertainment conglomerate's shows have started arriving.

The primetime drama "Grey's Anatomy" debuted on the video hub Monday, and more shows will roll out over the next two weeks.

These include, according to Hulu, consistent hits like "Desperate Housewives" and "Scrubs," along with more recent additions to the network such as "I Survived A Japanese Game Show."

Disney joined Hulu in April, giving it a joint stake in the company alongside NBC Universal, News Corp., and investor Providence Equity Partners. Shows from ABC as well as ABC-owned cable channels like SoapNet and ABC Family are on the way, along with movies from Disney (though no titles have been made available yet).

Would-be Hulu rival Joost closed its consumer video service last month after its peer-to-peer technology failed to make up for its tepid content offering.

My big question: When will we see episodes of my favorite ABC show, "Lost," on Hulu? I've e-mailed a company representative to find out.

Geek humor abounds.

Parody singer "Weird Al" Yankovic poked fun at Segway riders three years ago with his rap song "White and Nerdy."

His latest single "Craigslist" skewers the people who can be found swapping wares and scoring dates on the classifieds ads site. (While there's a verse about the popular "missed connections" feature on Craigslist, there isn't otherwise mention of the current prostitution controversy that the site's been dealing with.)

The video and song are a professed homage to The Doors. Ray Manzarek, the former band's keyboardist, was enlisted to play on the track. And while the music itself will sound unmistakably familiar to Doors fans, Yankovic asserts it isn't a takeoff on a specific song,

The lyrics, by contrast, are unlike anything Jim Morrison would have dreamed up:

Got a trash can of Styrofoam peanuts, you can have em for free
You can drop by on the weekend and pick em up from me
But the trash can ain't part of the deal
Only givin' you the peanuts, get real

"Craigslist" is available for sale as a single now and will appear on an album that comes out next year.

The Doors parodying is spot-on. But the video and lyrics unfortunately aren't as funny as the over-the-top "White and Nerdy," which became a mild viral sensation on YouTube in 2006.

More importantly: I've e-mailed Craigslist founder Craig Newmark to gauge his reaction. He responded: "The thing's pretty funny!"

This post was updated at 11:48 a.m. PT with comment from Craig Newmark.

Want to feel old? This album came out 15 years ago.

Hulu will live-stream a concert for the first time: Dave Matthews Band at New York's Beacon Theater on June 1.

The online video hub, which announced the event Thursday, will be the only place streaming the concert live, at least legally.

Pop culture brush-up: the Dave Matthews Band was really, really, really huge in the '90s, known for lengthy live jams, for a Phish-like cult following that skewed more preppy than hippie, and for "Ants Marching," which was inescapable if you ever got anywhere near a frat house between 1994 and 1997. People generally loved them or hated them back then, due in no small part to the fact that they were the soundtrack of choice for the jocks rather than the indie kids or nerds.

It's a good fit for Hulu's first live concert broadcast--the site's first live streaming event was a presidential debate last October. The Dave Matthews Band's original Gen-X and Gen-Y fan base is exactly the demographic of 20- and 30-somethings--though not necessarily tech-savvy ones--who would tune into a concert stream online. And conveniently, the date of the show is the day before the band's long-anticipated new album, "Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King," hits stores online and offline.

Frontman Dave Matthews was, on an unrelated note, one of the first mainstream musicians to use Twitter actively.

Hulu, meanwhile, is riding the wave of mainstream success in the wake of an edgy TV ad campaign and the big news that Disney would be joining News Corp. and NBC Universal as a partner in the joint venture.