Our political conventions remind us that this is not the summer of love. But it may be the season we’ll remember as the summer of video.
Certainly, video’s — news video’s — growth has been noteworthy for awhile. But now there’s a bursting of new news video forms, a hothouse of experimentation that is both refreshing and intriguing. The blossoming has implications far and wide, not just for “news,” but for tech companies like Facebook and television brands from Ellen to Piers to The View. Within it, we see the capability of non-TV companies to leapfrog the TV people.
Just Monday, both The Wall Street Journal (“The Wall Street Journal wants its reporters filing microvideo updates for its new WorldStream”) and The New York Times made video announcements. A couple of weeks ago, the ambitious Huffington Post Live launched, hiring the almost unbelievable number of 104 staffers. In these three forays, and in the thinking in and around them, we see the boundaries of old media being slowly broken. We’re on the edge, finally, of new ways to both create and present news — and how to talk about the news.
It’s funny: “Video,” as a term, as a category, barely defines what we’re seeing. All video means is moving pictures, and we’ve had those since George Méliès (as Martin Scorcese reinterpreted in Hugo). We’ve known broadcast news and then cable news, witnessed their triumphs and now the declines of both. Because of twin technologies — all the iGadgets reintroducing us to the world as we know it and the behind-the-scenes digital pipes making content creation and distribution increasingly seamless — we’re seeing what creative people can do with moving pictures.
While this week’s Journal’s announcement focused on WorldStream, that semi-raw feed (all staff contributions are okayed one-by-one for public view) is but one of the full handful of Journal experiments with video.
Watch video now better embedded into stories (as the Times also has done with QuickLinks). Get appointment programs on WSJ Live (“The newsonomics of WSJ Live”). Watch on demand, in a variety of formats. Go directly to a video page, where all of the video output is categorized. And now, WorldStream, that rawish feed the Journal is doing, because it can — and because such video becomes great bait for the social web. Pick up the url, tweet it, and the Journal has happened on a social video strategy that is curiously akin to Upworthy’s.
It’s a multi-point access world for video producers. The Times will tell you that its viewing is roughly divided in thirds among its video center, its homepage video player and embedded-within-stories video. The Journal says more than half its views are now coming from embedded videos, with less than five percent of its views come from its video page. It makes sense that “video center” usage will decrease over time; these are transitional pages. Convergence is now becoming real, and we expect to see the content, text, voice, and pictures delivered in context. Finally. We don’t go to a place on sites called “Words.”
What’s most important about we’re seeing flickering before our eyes? Try these, as we look at the newsonomics of leapfrog news video.
- It’s about money. Video advertising rates are holding up far better than display-around-text rates. “Give me inventory” is a cry heard from the salespeople, who find agencies and top advertisers’ pre-roll appetites nowhere near satiated. For top premium brands, $45-60 CPM (cost per thousand views) are still available, as display rates fetch as little as a tenth and as much as one-half of those numbers. In addition, companies are selling video packages and sponsored tile ads in addition to pre-rolls to sweeten their take. So production of video makes financial sense — even as news companies cut back, lay off, and pinch, pinch, pinch. The smarter companies are investing in video — staffers, training, technologies — even as they make those cuts, while other companies find themselves just stuck. Video is the second-fastest growing ad category in the U.S., according to IAB, up 29 percent year-over-year. It will be worth about $2 billion this year.
- It’s about platforms. The Journal’s Alan Murray, who heads digital news efforts, says the company’s video traffic has doubled in six months. Why? It’s not mainly because of more use on Journal platforms, even though it’s been an innovator on the tablet. Most of that growth comes from the deals the Journal has done with an astonishing 26 “platforms.” They range from the ubiquitous iPad and Kindle to lesser known 5Min and LiveStation. By way of comparison, The New York Times is currently using three (Hulu, Google TV, YouTube).
- It’s about technologies. The Times and the Washington Post have been using Google + Hangout, to facilitate conversation, and we’ve seen the fruits this week at the Republican Convention. As well-described by The Daily Beast’s Lauren Ashburn, Google Hangouts are a major, disruptive force; “no longer needed are satellite trucks or underground cables to beam talking heads to people’s living rooms. A simple Internet connection and a camera are rendering expensive gadgets obsolete.” The Journal is touting Tout, a Silicon Valley start-up that has taken much of the “friction” out of the business of video production. “Make it drop dead simple,” CEO Michael Downing says is his goal. That means taking the background tasks of uploading smartphone video from the field, “transcoding” it and then translating it to work in all the various formats (devices, screen sizes, operating sizes). That removes the work from media companies, and lets them focus on content and audience. In addition to the Journal, broadcasters including CNN, CBS, and ESPN have become customers.
- It’s apparently not about appointment TV. HuffPo’s Live is the most interesting here. While it has 10 telegenic anchor/producer/hosts, those hosts don’t have standard daily program times. Segments will last between 12 and 35 minutes (most average 20-25), HuffPost Live president Roy Sekoff told me this week. Yet, they are fluid, with segment length adjustable on the fly. Readers pick topics — before, during, and after “Live” — from a reader-activated conveyor belt at the top of the page. “It’s the Internet,” says Sekoff pointedly, meaning it’s a flow, not a TV Guide-like grid in how readers/viewers use it. The Journal agrees. Even with on-the-hour blocks of News Hub programs, the majority of its viewing is on demand. Even for HuffPo, all of that live programming is then chunked into segments, and Sekoff estimates that he’ll have about 10,000 of them archived and ready for long-tail viewing by year’s end. We want what we want when we want it — and expect it to be there. Thus, findability becomes the issue, and the multiple points of access now being offered are very much a live test of consumer behavior and want.
- It’s about simplicity. The Times’ announcement basically said this: You’ve proven you like video. Now we’re cleaning it up and making it more pleasurable to watch and easier to find. In the cleanup, the Times moved to 11 “navigation items” from 25, says Peter Anderson, director of video product. We see that translation in more uniform positioning of video panels on NYTimes.com pages, and a more elegant 16 × 9 video player format, replacing the oh-so-20th century 4 × 3.
- It’s about the news — and talk about the news. In the approaches of the Times and the Journal on the one hand, and of HuffPo on the other, we see two quite different philosophies and strategies, but ones that may find meeting points. Both the Journal and the Times see their reporters as the foundation of the video process; Murray calls Dow Jones’ 2,000 journalists “the core asset.” So both are putting cameras into the hands of journalists, or enabling them to better use smartphones, thereby creating more impactful, multi-dimensional, multi-platform journalism. HuffPo, from its early days of being mainly a curator/aggregator, has had its pulse on what its progressive audience is wondering and talking about. Those topics, mostly off the news (Marissa Mayer’s pregnancy, veterans and poverty), are the ones front and center in its Live pages. Some, of course, derive from its journalists’ work, and now staffers like Howard Fineman are suggesting video segments as they prepare stories. By and large, though, the talk-about-news drives the 12-hours-a-day site (5 days a week), with actual news supplementing. Sekoff says some 1,300 HuffPo community members have “raised their hands” and been featured as talking contributors on its segments. They’re unpolished and a far more diverse (for all the good and bad that implies) lot than we see among the too familiar faces of cable TV. For the Journal and the Times, traditional stories drive the video, and then, as Peter Anderson describes it, “The New York Times starts the conversation.” (Here, the Times brings civilians more prominently into its Opinion pages.) How these somewhat opposite approaches come together will be something to watch.
Maybe, most intriguingly, this video revolution may be morphing into a social revolution.
Watch a few of the HuffPost Live segments. Call them semi-slick. The technology works. The production values are okay, even if blogger/contributors faces seem a bit low-def, as TV itself moves moves from HD to Ultra. Some raise interesting, unorthodox issues and views; some are deadly boring. They are not, though, the lookalike programming of traditional news outlets. In their socialness, they cross lines.
Here’s what I find fascinating as I watch those, and smaller steps toward engagement taken by the Times, Journal, and others. As we all watch more video, where will the minutes come from? They may come from other news, text news. They may also come from Facebook. Compare HuffPost Live to Facebook and we see lots of social/sharing commonalities — but in picture form. Discussions — less in linear words than with in-motion video. They may come from morning talk shows like “Ellen” or “The View,” or compete with The Young Turks.The minutes will come from somewhere, as these technologies are more universally adopted and the world of competition only gets more complicated. This is the world in which news companies now compete.
For the news industry specifically, we see that legacy lines are written in disappearing ink, as the Journal, for instance, out-innovates ABC. One dirty little secret of broadcasting is being revealed, as technologies like Google+ Hangouts even the playing field for the print guys: it’s a game of numbers. The number of journalists in newspaper newsrooms still far outnumber those in broadcast ones. In addition, traditional TV has demanded many staffers to do the technical work of creating the broadcast. So, newspapers — if they can rapidly connect their workforces with the new technologies — have a chance to do what seems illogical: leapfrog broadcast and outflank them in the move to fully available, multi-platform news video.
