With the television rerun season kicking into full gear, kids breaking out of school for summer and Hollywood's dream factory potentially weeks away from a labour shutdown, it's a perfect storm for launching our FanTrust video contest, "I Know What TV Did This Summer." We're encouraging television fans from around the world to riff on their favorite TV shows, by submitting videos that creatively interpret shows past and present -- and answer that age-old fan question: "What the %&*! did these characters do all summer?" Here fans can celebrate TV, make great stuff that other fans want ...

After a whirlwind month of speaking on the future of digital entertainment and online video at the Vancouver International Game Summit, VIDFEST, Cossette Convergence Day, and nextMEDIA - I've decided to take a break and let someone else do the pontificating. Ninja, of viral video "Ask a Ninja" fame, shares his thoughts on online video audiences, content and monetization below. Enjoy! [youtube bSZg927QP_0]

I’m fascinated by the way some people become fiercely loyal to certain entertainment properties. Their dedication is cult-like. The marketing guru Douglas Atkin, in his book The Culting of Brands, has a similar fascination with brand loyalists. He thought, why not study real cults? It turns out that people become addicted to cult brands for more or less the same reasons that people become committed to cults like the Moonies. And that companies cultivate unshakable allegiance through the same basic techniques as those used by, say, Hare Krishna. Asks The ...

YouTube recently announced that it would continue testing to determine the best embedded advertising model for its site. According to the Wall Street Journal, “You Tube has spent months testing different ad formats to figure out which models don’t alienate viewers. It found that viewers abandon videos that include pre-roll ads at a rate of more than 70%, so it ditched pre-roll commercials.” YouTube’s next phase of testing: overlaid advertisements – semi-transparent ads that run on the bottom 20% of the video window. Ads appear 15 seconds into the clip and remain present, ...