Hyperlocal Video Finally Comes of Age

Street Fight reporting:
Hyperlocal video has, until now, been basically an oxymoron. The local television stations push out a decent amount of video but it has a metro rather than a hyperlocal focus. Patch.com and other hyperlocal news networks have done a bit of video, but it remains expensive to produce and comparatively hard to monetize at lower traffic levels. Even as small businesses increasingly embrace social media marketing and, to a lesser degree, online text and display ads, you don’t see a lot of mom-and-pop stores doing DIY video ad placements. Likewise, there are a wide variety of video ad networks but those have largely failed to penetrate down to the hyperlocal level — except for wide-scale networks that primarily dump remnant ads on less-trafficked hyperlocal videos.Which is why a platform like Glocal looks really, really interesting. The Ann Arbor, Michigan video scraping and curation startup has some pretty nifty technology that allows users to drill down to find video content close to where they live. The U.S. map allows users to quickly zoom in and out of local and regional video collections. At this point, there really isn’t enough truly hyperlocal video content to make a platform like Glocal interesting. A drill-down into the San Francisco area reveals only a handful of videos on offer and none that are truly hyperlocal. But the company is skating to the opportunity space ahead of the puck.
http://streetfightmag.com/2012/11/21/hyperlocal-video-finally-coming-of-age/#.UKzt1oXXrRs