Beachfront Media launched its Beachfront Builder in private beta last summer, initially focusing on Android and iOS apps based on a number of preformatted templates. Building apps is completely free, but publishers that want to monetize their apps need to become premium customers, which involves revenue share as well as a startup fee. Premium customers can elect to run their own ads against their content, have Beachfront sell inventory for them, or take advantage of both.

Monday’s announcement extends this model to connected TV platforms, which should help publishers who can’t afford to spend a ton of money to develop their own apps for a number of connected devices. But it looks like some bigger publishers are making use of Beachfront for their videos as well: A quick search on Google Play revealed that Beachfront Media also distributes College Humor’s Android apps.

Beachfront Media started out with a SEO-focused video portal called Mefeedia, but has been focusing on video distribution and monetization in recent months. The company announced earlier this month that it distributed three billion videos on various platforms in 2012.

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The app seeks to introduce viewers to new videos, which they can choose to watch, bookmark to watch later, “Like” or “Dislike.” Users can also share videos with friends and followers on Facebook or Twitter. Navigation is super-simple, as all one has to do to choose videos is swipe through them on a preview pane in the bottom third portion of the app.

Users can also specify which categories of videos will be shown to them through the settings tab, allowing them to choose between categories like news, comedy, tech, business and of course the most popular clips. And they can check out their own viewing stats in the stats tab. (I, for instance, have watched a total of 14 videos within the app, spending 33 minutes and 43 seconds doing so.)

The goal, according to MeFeedia CEO Frank Sinton, the app is meant to easily introduce users to snackable content — which is one reason that there’s no real search functionality. Instead, MeFeedia’s app encourage users not to find long-form content they know they want to watch, but to discover new short videos they might not have known about in the spare moments of the day.

Of course, there are plenty of apps out there for checking out new videos — but most of them are centered on surfacing videos that your friends have liked or shared from social networks. MeFeedia hopes to introduce viewers to new videos not by connecting them with things others have shared, but by learning what they like and trying to guess which videos they might enjoy. As a result, most videos first displayed are in the “popular” category and recommendations improve as you tell it what you like (or don’t like).

This is the first iteration of the app, so it’s a little rough around the edges. But MeFeedia hopes to update with more personalization in the future (as well as less purple). And, most importantly, it hopes to use the implicit viewing data that comes from the app — as well as the explicit likes and dislikes — to make more intelligent recommendations as it learns how to identify user affinities and viewing patterns.

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1. What’s the one big issue/law/attitude/restriction that you think is holding back the industry?

One big issue is a set of standard metrics for the industry. What constitutes a view? How is a video ad impression counted? We need a way to easily gauge and compare from one video site to the next, from one video ad network to the next so that advertisers know what they are getting and publishers with deep engagement reap more rewards.

Currently, HTML5 is moving the industry in the right direction… (it) enables a transparent, standards-based measurement system that still allows each publisher to customize the player’s user interface. However, it is only one piece to the metrics puzzle and is still a work-in-progress. I expect there to be a lot more movement in this area going forward.

2. What industry buzzword do you never want to hear again?

Buzzwords are a necessary way to categorize and think about new concepts. I try not to think about it too much as it is easy to get caught up on the buzzwords and lose focus on what is really important to your users.

Right now, “SEO is dead” — I could do without hearing that again. People will need search more in the future, not less. Without SEO, search would probably be much worse than it is today. Really, it’s bigger than search — Information Retrieval is still in its infancy.

3. If someone gave you $50 million to invest in a company in this space, which one would it be? (Mentioning your own doesn’t count.)

I would be looking at the team a company had and how well their ideas are executed – I think that matters more than growth nowadays.

In the video space, there are so many up and coming stars I couldn’t list them all: Vimeo, Boxee, Blip.tv, Clicker, Videosurf, Vodpod, Roku, Hulu and, of course, Apple TV and Google TV. All will continue to accelerate innovation for the industry.

But if I had to choose one, it would probably be a company that was not only opening doors for web video, but also helping existing enterprises transform into this new era of always-connected, real-time media. Clearleap is a good example — they are opening it up on both ends, helping web video publishers get to the TV screen while giving the cable industry a better way to deliver to more places seamlessly.

4. What was the last video (that you weren’t personally involved with) that you liked enough to spread to others?

Every day, I share videos (it is one of my favorite parts of the job, honestly). Lately, I have been “real-world” sharing a lot, passing around the family iPad to watch videos — the Dancing Merengue Dog was a recent one that my kids enjoyed.

5. WILD-CARD: One of MeFeedia’s features is a social network that allows users to share videos with each other — however, looking at the MeFeedia leaderboard, it doesn’t appear to be very active. How key do you think the social aspect is to MeFeedia as a site — and to search engines in general?

MeFeedia’s focus has been connecting users to video content -– fast. Improving the viewing experience, which included de-cluttering, removing ads, and making mefeedia.com the fastest loading video site possible, has been a main focus over the past 12 months. All of our user engagement metrics are way up. Features like the leaderboard are experiments to find better ways to surface content and measure network effect rather than a core component –- only a small proportion of our resources have been invested in that area so far (enough to save your choices and find them again, as well as make a few friends).

The way we see it, the video is the most important part on a video site. The main social aspects of MeFeedia are people adding videos they want to see and sharing on other sites (like Reddit, Facebook, Stumbleupon, and Twitter). The focus on viewing experience and enabling sharing on existing social sites appears to be working — people are watching more and sharing much more (even with fewer features).

How social affects search engines: Within search, there is indexing, sorting and delivery. Social sites and social data play important roles in all of those aspects.

The most noticeable change from ‘social’ is the sheer pace of content production. Take for a moment YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. Imagine indexing just those 3 sites. That takes intense resources and skills. To me, that is the biggest effect of social on search — explosive growth of content. In a moment, the “social web” can change and search engines have to reflect that.

Social has been a part of finding content for a long time, such as via the “water cooler” conversation before the web ever existed. Likewise, social data is important to video search. Social data provides clues for ranking and can help users find new videos. If online video is ever going to scale to the daily viewing times of TV (i.e. hours a day, not minutes), information retrieval must go much further than social recommendations. That is where search tools come into play – it unlocks the incredible amount of content available online today. We are just at the beginnings of informational retrieval and I expect a lot more innovation around this area in the future.

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MeFeedia is the same firm that reported in the first few days and weeks after the launch of the iPad that users of the Apple tablet watched significantly more video than comparable online viewers on PCs. With more iPads now in the hands of users, MeFeedia has turned its gaze to engagement rates not just for the iPad, but for HTML5 video in general.

And the numbers are pretty astonishing. Viewers that MeFeedia tracked watched about 25 percent more HTML5 video than Flash-based video. Perhaps more importantly, they were 70 percent less likely to abandon an HTML5 video than one delivered in Adobe Flash.

Those findings may be attributable largely to the device itself. Indeed, we’ve long argued that despite the lack of Flash video, the iPad is an ideal device for viewing video, and data from MeFeedia tends to support that theory. According to the firm, the average viewing duration was 2.75 times higher on an iPad than on a PC.

But MeFeedia suggests that other factors may be coming into play. For instance, the user experience of having a native video player available in the browser, without having to load a plugin, reduces the load time necessary to watch a video. MeFeedia also suggests that native HTML5 video players frequently have better performance than Flash on a number of platforms, including mobile devices and Mac- and Linux-based PCs.

Meanwhile, the average viewing time on Android mobile devices are 2.25 times higher than on a PC. As MeFeedia points out, mobile video is good for physically sharing with others, and typically requires more commitment by the user, so they’re more likely to stick around for the video. The iPad’s lack of multitasking capabilities helps prevent users of that device from abandoning video as well.

One explanation that seems to be missing from all this is the current lack of ads running against HTML5 video. Just the presence of a pre-roll ad is enough to make viewers click away, with research from audience measurement and video distribution firm TubeMogul showing that one in six viewers abandon a video before it begins when an ad plays.

Because HTML5 is a nascent web standard, the tools available for tracking and monetizing video have yet to be fully fleshed out. As a result, many of the videos that are being delivered via HTML5 today lack the same kind of 15- and 30-second interruption that comes before watching most premium Flash videos — which could explain the much lower bounce rate. That will change soon, however, as the tools for monetizing HTML5 video start to appear.

Regardless, MeFeedia sees the rate of HTML5 adoption growing due to the vast success of the iPad — with more than 3 million units sold in less than 80 days — as well as the release of the new iPhone 4 and the latest iOS mobile operating system, not to mention more robust support on Android devices for HTML5 video.

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This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com

The new offering sorts metrics into sections, including Summary, Recent, Popular, Devices, Videos and Channels, each of which allows users to either drill down for granular data of individual videos or view aggregate data for all the videos in a library. Data can also be broken out by web address so that publishers with multiple video sites can view them individually, and all graphs can be exported for easy sharing. And the entire interface is built on HTML5, so it can be viewed on the iPad or other devices that don’t support Adobe Flash.

MeFeedia’s HTML5 analytics are available through the company’s All Player video ad platform. The startup was one of the first to announce support for HTML5 video advertising when the Apple iPad was launched, and is now extending its capabilities to track key metrics for videos watched on the device, including view-through rates, time watched and video impressions. In addition to web and mobile devices, MeFeedia’s analytics are available for web TV platforms such as the upcoming Google TV devices.

As iPad users tend to watch much more video than typical web users, companies like CBS have aggressive plans to support HTML5 video to capture that audience. Bu publishers often lack the tools necessary to track or monetize those videos delivered via HTML5, a problem that MeFeedia hopes to solve.

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According to MeFeedia, the deal gives it access to shows and clips from CBS.com, CBS News, CBS Sports, The CW, Showtime, TV.com, The Insider, and Chow.

MeFeedia wouldn’t comment on the terms of the deal, but it appears that promotional clips from the broadcaster and its sites are embeddable and stream through MeFeedia, while full-length episodes — like this episode of Survivor — link back to CBS’s own TV.com. This differs somewhat from Hulu’s approach, where full-length episodes are embedded and playable on the MeFeedia page.

MeFeedia aggregates and has indexed more than 170,000 video feeds from more than 30,000 sources, and as a result gets about 4 million to 5 million uniques a month. In addition to the broadcast content that MeFeedia has amassed, it also has relationships with independent web video producers and distributors such as Blip.tv, Howcast, Next New Networks, Revision3 and Vimeo.

With all that content, MeFeedia hopes to be a one-stop shop for online video content, providing a place where its users can search for new videos. That way, fans of Fox’s Family Guy that also enjoy CBS’s How I Met Your Mother can view content from both broadcast networks in a single place. They can also set up feeds for their favorite shows, enabling them to use MeFeedia like a personalized online video DVR.

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Well, it’s now a few weeks into the iPad’s existence, and it turns out that, as early adopters get used to the device and more mainstream users begin buying the tablet, they’re using it for video even more than originally thought. According to new data from MeFeedia, the iPad is now the fifth most popular mobile device for viewing video, surpassing BlackBerry devices. Now the iPad, nearly a million units of which have been sold in less than three weeks, according to some estimates, trails only the iPhone, iPod touch, SymbianOS and Android devices in terms of videos viewed.

iPad video viewership has grown even more when compared to that of typical web video. iPad users now consume three times as many videos as web users, and watch video on the device four times longer. Video viewership on the iPad has increased even more relative to that of iPhone users, with iPad users consuming five times as many videos as iPhone users, up from three times as many in the earlier study.

As before, it’s worth noting that MeFeedia’s internal stats come from a relatively small sample of iPad owners that use MeFeedia and its video search engine to view video on the device. In addition, those numbers only include a limited number of videos that are HTML5-enabled, since the device doesn’t support Flash. Nor do they include viewership data from dedicated iPad apps from companies like ABC and Netflix.

Even so, the numbers from MeFeedia are impressive, especially as they represent a growing number of mainstream users on the device. And they validate our earlier hypothesis (and Apple’s) — that the iPad will change the way that users consume video.

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Despite a limited number of iPads on the market, the device is already coming up big in MeFeedia’s internal stats. Less than a week after launch, the iPad ranks sixth among mobile devices for accessing video through the site and its search engine, behind the iPhone, iPod touch, SymbianOS, Android, and Blackberry. But the actual viewing numbers are the interesting part: according to MeFeedia, iPad users consume two and a half times as many videos as the typical web user and three times as many videos as iPhone users. More importantly, those users spend three times as much time watching video as the typical web user, lending credence to our theory that the device’s form factor hits a sweet spot for personal media consumption.

It’s important to note that these stats are only for videos that are viewed through MeFeedia and its search engine, and therefore represent a small sample size of users. Also, since Adobe Flash isn’t supported by the iPad, those stats only include videos available through web pages that are HTML5-enabled. Considering the limited amount of web video content actually available on the iPad in these early days for the device, however, those numbers are pretty impressive.

Not just that, but there’s reason to believe that video viewing through iPad apps might be even more pervasive on the device. Apps from Netflix and ABC were listed among the top three most-downloaded in the iPad store yesterday. In an email, Netflix vice president of corporate communications Steve Swasey told NewTeeVee that the Netflix app was the Number 1 third-party application over the weekend, based on number of downloads.

We think this is just the tip of the iceberg, and that users will continue to embrace the iPad for video consumption, particularly as more publishers ready HTML5-compliant web sites and more premium app offerings from video sites like Hulu become available. As HTML5 publishing and monetization tools mature, expect the quantity and quality of video available through the iPad to get richer, and the interest in watching video on the device to grow.

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MeFeedia Adds HTML5 Ad Support; the All Player for HTML5 is designed to deliver consistent, high-quality video ads across any screen –- including Web, Internet-connected TV platforms and mobile devices. (MeFeedia blog)

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BBC Online Video News Views Up 25 Percent in Four Months; the BBC has found a growing audience for online news in the U.K., with some 5 million unique visitors watching 28 million videos in January, according to the latest numbers from comScore. (Beet.TV)

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The biggest losers of this trend were not other video hosters, but the producers’ own websites. About 57 percent simply uploaded their clips onto their own sites in 2007. In 2010, that number has fallen to 18 percent. Blip actually grew from 11.6 percent to 14 percent, and Vimeo was able to capture a respectable 9 percent.

Mefeedia also gathered some interesting data about the consumption side of online video: The report identified the Playstation 3 as the most popular platform for TV viewing, followed by Nintendo’s Wii. On the PC side, 40 percent of all video viewers continue to watch on screens with a resolution of 1024×768 as the most popular screen resolution, with 20 percent having their screens set to 1280×800 and only 10 percent to 1280×1024.

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