Round-Up: ITN Games Show, Manc Mag, Bragster Appoints, BBC Stats

ITN Games: The UK newsgatherer’s ITN On multimedia division is now doing contract online news production on a web-and-mobile video show for Cranberry Publishing’s Gamerzines.com, a host of free digital-edition mags. Shows will be 90 seconds on mobile and three minutes on desktop (here’s an example). Distribution is via the inevitable Joost, Blinkx and Orange’s new Zap! mobile video portal.

Manchester mag: US B2B publisher NxtBook plans to publish a monthly digital magazine covering media, business development, property, hospitality and investment in the north west, How-Do reports. The Pennsylvania company has opened a European HQ at Salford Quays and plans to cater to the growing media base in the city, which is to attract several BBC departments to its mediacity:uk.

Bragster: This year-old site encouraging users to pay to make bets (“brags”) between themselves has added former BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) broadcasting GM Bruce Steinberg to its board as non-executive chairman. Steinberg was until recently CEO of Bob The Builder maker HIT Entertainment and is an alum of NTV and Jetix. Bragster is trying to include celebrity brags and sponsored brags.

BBC: Ashley Highfield’s last act is a stats round-up in the broadcaster’s annual reportBBC.co.uk gets 33 million weekly users and 3.6 billion monthly page views. Podcast downloads reached 7.7 million from the UK in March (16.4 million overall) while on-demand radio shows got 4.3 million hours (another three million globally).