How to produce value and revenue with digital video

API reporting:

Digital video has become a market imperative — something every publisher must understand and do well, regardless of one’s history.

Consider three statistics:More than 62 billion videos were viewed online in December 2014, according to data measurement company comScore.Digital video advertising continues to skyrocket, up 56% in 2014 to reach $5.96 billion, according to eMarketer.Cisco projects that video will account for 79 percent of all consumer internet traffic in 2018, up from 66 percent in 2013....Like every new medium that’s come before, digital video is unique and evolving. It shapes technology and is shaped by technology. We’re learning as we go.

This Strategy Study collects the thoughts of some of the best journalists and executives working in digital video today. It is the result of dozens of interviews and hundreds of hours of research culminating with a day-long Thought Leader Summit hosted by the American Press Institute. 

http://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/strategy-studies/digital-video-value-revenue/single-page/

ime for publishers to make tablet advertising “the project”

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Garcia media reporting:
...
Refreshing to read this, as I am a strong believer that publishers are still too centered on subscription models, and, in my experience, not many are contemplating more aggressive ways of attracting advertising.
The catch 22 of the tablet and advertising revenue story, however, is a little more complicated than just deciding to go for the ads.
A majority of the newspaper tablet apps out there are still using advertising in a primitive way: either an imitation of how ads are presented online, or, worse, as they would be presented in a printed edition.
Until we at media houses begin to make Tablet Advertising “the project”, we will not turn the corner.  Let’s get our own ad departments create tablet specific ads, that we can take to specific advertising clients and say: This is how your ad could look if designed for the tablet. We have done it. Here you are. How would you like to appear in our tablet edition?...
...
The ads you are showing will be anything but static. There will be action, pop up moments, and storytelling.
As a publisher of a major European daily told me recently:

Indeed, we understand that this is the way to go, Mario, but we just don’t have the resources to do what you are proposing.

Every publishing house MUST find those resources, and learn from The Guardian’s story:  subscriptions to our tablet editions are nice, and they will trickle in, one at a time, but the bigger revenue potential is in the ads.
The writing of this tablet advertising chapter has not even started.  Ironically, this is the one way publishers will hear their cash registers ringing.
http://garciamedia.com/blog/articles/time_for_publishers_to_make_tablet_advertising_the_project/%EF%BB%BF

Soundtracked ebooks launch in UK

The Telegraph reporting:

Publishers are capitalising on the popularity of electronic books, or ebooks, by releasing versions of literally classics with orchestral scores and sound effects such as crunching gravel added in.

Using technology to monitor how fast a person is reading on their portable device, the ebooks play a soundtrack that matches the storyline and adds the correct noises as the action unfolds.

The first so-called “enhanced ebook” was released in the UK last Friday. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Adventures of the Speckled Band is soundtracked with driving rain, thunderclaps and blood-curdling screams.

Books by Oscar Wilde and Rudyard Kipling are also available, with Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare to follow.

The new technology has been launched in the UK by Booktrack, which was co-founded by Peter Thiel, who is a board director of Facebook and the man behind PayPal, the successful online payment company.

Booktrack claims to add “movie-quality sound” to books. According to its website it is a “totally immersive experience that pulls the reader into the author’s world and allows the real world to melt away”.
The soundtracked ebooks run on tablet computers such as Apple’s iPad. At present they are thought not to play on e-readers such as Kindle.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/8728105/Soundtracked-ebooks-launch-in-UK.html

Games, Pop-Ups, 3D, and More – The iPad is Changing Books Forever

Singularity Hub reporting:
I grew up on a healthy regimen of Choose-Your-Own Adventure books, Nintendo, and role playing games, but even I am intimidated by the new brand of interactive storytelling that is flooding the iPad. More designers are exploring how the frenzy around Apple’s tablet computer is evolving e-books into something new. Sure, you can find traditional children’s picture books directly translated onto the iPad that simply let you flip through on a touchscreen, but there’s so much more the medium allows. Embedded games, interactive backgrounds, responsive audio, non-linear stories – “books” on the iPad have become something much better: immersive experiences. I’ve got a host of videos to show you what I mean, check them out below. Combining games, books, music, and voices in compelling ways, these early attempts to revolutionize storytelling on the iPad are exciting…but they’re just the beginning. Give it a few years and the lines between these different ways of telling stories will blur so far we’ll have to come up with a new name. ‘Books’ just doesn’t cut it anymore.
First on our list of the kind of interactive stories is Hogworld by Snowcastle Studios in Norway. Hogworld has the look of a classic children’s story book, with a lovable pig-bunny hybrid named Gnart taking a trip to the dentist with his bee friend Bibi. Snowcastle let me play the beta, and I can tell you that from the beginning this is clearly not a simple text translation brought to the iPad. You must guide Gnart through a world, exploring everything around you to find the clues needed to proceed to the next stage in the story. Yet it’s not simply a video game either. Hogworld is clearly aimed at engaging the listener, guiding them loosely through a very well crafted tale. Here’s a look at Hogworld, with narration still in Norwegian (don’t worry, the beta was in English, and the story will be coming to the iPad in Q3 2011):
http://singularityhub.com/2011/08/27/games-pop-ups-3d-and-more-the-ipad-is-changing-books-forever/?utm_source=Singularity+Hub+Daily+Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=7973ed79d2-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN

Guardian aims to double digital audience with multimedia development

nma reporting:
Steve Folwell, former Guardian Media Group strategy chief, was drafted into the newly-created role of business director, multimedia and brand extensions in May, to explore product development and commercial opportunities around multimedia propositions, with expediency. He’s leading a 30-strong multimedia team, while pulling together commercial and product development resources across the business.
“Multimedia means different things to different people,” said Folwell. “In our case it means we want to be on any platform, at any given time, telling our audiences stories in the best possible way for that platform. But it also means interaction between data, video and audio, enlarging our existing audience and enhancing our storytelling through news, investigation, music and arts.”
Guardian News & Media has identified an audience of 7m with which its content and brand would resonate across a variety of products and platforms, but with whom Guardian News & Media is not currently connecting.
This target would more than double its current 3m daily web audience. The target is a result of work undertaken last year to identify opportunities around brand extensions, multi-media and product development, both on- and offsite, Folwell said.
Within guardian.co.uk, there is still 90% of the audience that are not viewing video, while offsite, Guardian News & Media is exploring content syndication across Youtube, video networks, social media platforms, webTV and tablets. It’s a partner for UK webTV venture Youview, and is exploring GoogleTV for its US audience, according to Folwell.
http://www.nma.co.uk/3028441.article?cmpid=NMAE01&cmptype=newsletter&email=true

Wall Street Journal Deploying iPhone 4 Globally for News Gathering and Live Streaming

BeetTV reporting:
The Wall Street Journal is training its print reporters to use the iPhone 4 for video news gathering and live streaming via Skype Video, says Kevin Delaney, Managing Editor of the WSJ.com
After deploying Sony camcorders and Kodak pocket cameras, the Journal has settled on the iPhone 4 as the device of choice for field reporting, he says in this interview with Beet.TV.  Some reporters are using an external mics, he told me.
The iPhone is in the hands of about two dozen reporters with more to be provided to many of 2000 Journal and Dow Jones newswire staffers around the world, he says.
In February, we reported that The New York Times had begun to use the iPhone 4 for video reporting.
http://www.beet.tv/2011/05/wsjiphone.html