The Online Video Forecasts claim that just over half (52.7 percent) of all video will be consumed on mobile devices in 2016, while Ooyala's latest Global Video Index demonstrated that 46 percent of all video plays in Q4 2015 were on mobile devices.And Statista predictions demonstrate that the number of people in the US who are consuming video on mobile devices is set to increase still further in the US alone, let alone the emerging markets:
Through partnerships with companies like Dataminr, Twitter has been informing the mainstream news cycle directly. Twitter has also informed the cycle indirectly by positioning itself as a place to see the news before it’s news, as was the case with the death of Osama Bin Laden.
Periscope has the potential to add live video content to Twitter, which could radically change breaking news. Mainstream sources already rely on Twitter for breaking news, and now they could begin to rely on what The Next Web calls “Next level Twitter.” Next Web reporter Owen Williams watched the aftermath of an explosion in New York City on Periscope:
It’s unprecedented to get this kind of footage seconds after an event occurs, even before first responders arrived. As I watched the drama unfold in New York, streamers were replying to questions about what they could see and were experiencing.
He notes that Periscope removes the friction associated with live video...
The Guardian has today launched ‘Watch Me Date’, a new weekly video series which will bring the Guardian’s hugely popular ‘Blind Date’ series to life.
The innovative new series follows a different couple each week as they go on a date, each wearing a pair of Google Glass. Filming begins the minute they meet and the resulting footage is presented along with interviews with each blind dater once the date is over. The videos will be hosted on the lifestyle section oftheguardian.com and will also have their own dedicated YouTube channel. A selection of the daters who appear in the videos will also feature in the Guardian’s ‘Blind Date’ column.
I wasn’t sticking my neck out far in a late December post predicting a boom year for non-broadcast video. Six weeks into 2015 plenty is happening: *Publications of all kinds (Fortune for instance) are announcing new services and upgrades. Reuters, traditionally a business-to-business provider, has made good on promises to launch a daring gamble — Reuters TV, a direct- to-consumer video app, targeting millennials and their smart phones and programmable into a customized 5 to 30 minute show...
But I also stand corrected on one bit of common wisdom — that video only works for big organizations and that even they are challenged to scale sufficiently...
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.Ciscoprojectsthat 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.
digiday reporting:
The Wall Street Journal firmly believes interactive video is the next
generational leap in the digital news business, so it’s rolling out a
new daily series to prove it.
On Wednesday morning, the Journal debuted its WSJ Interactive
video series. Using technology from TouchCast, an interactive video
platform, the Journal’s video producers can embed rich media elements
inside its proprietary video player. That means viewers can click on
elements inside each video to read relevant articles, watch other clips,
survey real-time market data and more, all without leaving the
full-screen experience of the original video.
“Everyone has been talking about bringing video to the Web,” said
Andy Regal, senior executive producer of WSJ video. “But now we’re
bringing the Web to video.”... http://digiday.com/publishers/wall-street-journal-interactive-video/
There’s a lot of power in these men’s hands. Photograph: Jeff Roberson / AP
In Ferguson, Missouri this week, the public has turned the notion of
“see something, say something” back on the state, via a digital tool of
enormous power: online pictures and video. Their efforts – which began
days before reporters descended when Twitter user @TheePharaoh
posted pictures immediately after a police officer killed an unarmed
black teenager, Michael Brown – have helped bring international
attention to both Brown’s death and law enforcement’s disproportionate
response to the ensuing protests. Antonio French, an
alderman in nearby St Louis, spent days posting to Twitter pictures and a
series of videos of the demonstrations and police actions that he
captured on his mobile phone – and was reportedly arrested and then
released on Wednesday evening. He is a citizen journalist of the best
kind: a credible witness who has helped inform the wider public about a
critical matter. Can anyone plausibly doubt that he and the two
professional journalists who were briefly taken into custody after police demanded they stop recording were targeted because they were documenting law enforcement actions?
Ferguson isn’t the first example of this kind of citizen journalism,
which has been going on for years in any number of other places
including Iran, Egypt, Occupy Wall Street and Syria. But the videos,
blog posts, tweets, and photos from French and others on the ground have
complemented the work of the traditional journalists on the scene – and
have reminded us of what is becoming a civic duty in today’s America. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/16/fergusons-citizen-journalists-video
Reuters Institute reporting:
Richard E, Picard:
There is a growing impetus toward paid digital content in print news
providers. Many newspapers are now starting to follow early movers into
paid services, with the Sun and Telegraph in UK following the path of the Financial Times and Times. In Germany, Bild
became the first large-scale tabloid to require payment, and the
majority of large dailies in Canada and Australia now require payments
for digital access. News and public affairs magazines are taking a mixed
approach, with some pursuing paid strategies and others trying more
open ones. News organisations that employ collaborative, networked
strategies relying on significant contributions from experts and the
public are tending to pursue open or mixed-access approaches.
These differing approaches are representative of distinctive shifts
in thinking about digital strategies and a growing sophistication of
strategy involving news content.
New strategies for paid content
Four major strategic approaches to the question whether or not
consumers should pay have emerged: (1) open sites for which consumers do
not pay for access (although many sites have been free for the past two
decades, the movement towards paid content is changing this from a
default strategy to a deliberate choice designed to serve specific
strategic functions), (2) a mixed approach, with some content available
without payment and some paid, (3) a soft paywall requiring paid access,
but with ability to share stories and limited access for search engines
and links, and (4) a hard paywall necessitating paid access but without
the ability to share and denial of access for search engines and
linkages.
The questions of which approach to use are multifaceted and
differential access pricing models are proliferating. Underlying this
trend is increasing acceptance of view that the digital platforms
provide different value and need to be conceived as different products.
Differences in visual and presentational styles, storytelling, and
experience are producing varying pay approaches as consumers show a
greater willingness to pay for tablet and smartphone news content.
BILDplus, for example, offers three different price packages
providing access via web, smartphone, and tablet apps for €4.99 monthly,
web, smartphone, tablet apps, and epaper editions for €9.99 monthly,
and BILDplus Komplett for €14.99 monthly that includes web, smartphone,
tablet apps, epaper editions, and the printed paper.
Elsewhere, digital channels are also being used to offer special content apps and editions. In Spain, El Mundo has introduced an evening app edition and a daily gossip app. O Globo and O Estado de S. Paulo in Brazil have also created special new evening products for tablets and mobiles.
A major emerging strategy is the acquisition of video rights to help
drive acceptance of paid tablet and smartphone services. The general
press are producing more distinctive video content using their own
journalists as well as offering news clips, while tabloids have focused
their attention on sports and soap opera highlights. http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/essays/2014/new-approaches-to-paid-digital-content/
Ad Age reporting:
Daily time spent on mobile devices is now outpacing TV in the U.S. for the first time, according a newly-released 2014 AdReaction study from Millward Brown.
Americans now spend 151 minutes per day on smartphones, next to 147
in front of TVs. But the numbers are even greater elsewhere. In China,
consumers spend a whopping 170 minutes a day buried in smartphones,
nearly double their TV watching time.
Users in Indonesia, the Philippines, Brazil and Vietnam also spend
more total screen minutes on average than the U.S., predominately on
mobile.
The firm surveyed more than 12,000 mobile users, between the ages of
16 and 44, in 30 different countries, polling consumption of ads over
TVs, laptops, smartphones and tablets. Primary screen
According to the findings, the smartphone has emerged as the primary
screen worldwide, but the firm also found users are watching multiple
screens simultaneously, a global trend that is most-pronounced in China.
The agency classifies simultaneous screen time into two key buckets:
"stacking," when the consumed content is unrelated (mindlessly surfacing
Facebook during a favorite show); and "meshing," when the content
synchs up (searching for an actress in the show).
Across the globe, particularly in Asia, consumers prove much more
willing to "mesh" than they do in the US. Only 30% of American screen
time is spent soaking in related content. The rates in China, Japan,
Indonesia and South Korea are all higher. Sixty percent of Thai users
spend their screen time "meshing." Ads not catching up
Outside the US, consumers are also much more amenable to ads on their
devices. Asian smartphone owners responded far more favorably to ads
than counterparts in the US; and they were more attentive to ads
splashing across their phones...
...Advertisers in the U.S., Ms. McGoldrick added, haven't just fallen short
in spending---they've proven unable to produce consistent, relevant
video content for phones, particularly content that exploits multiscreen
use. "As a result," she said of video advertising in the U.S., "it
feels more like an interruption." http://adage.com/article/digital/millward-brown-study-shows-mobile-outpacing-tv/292183/
Nieman Lab reporting:
Television networks are good at producing video for broadcast. They
haven’t always proven good at producing video for the web and mobile
devices. What works on a big screen at 6:30 p.m. isn’t the same as what
works on an iPhone.
NBC News is expanding its efforts in the original digital video arena
and trying to bridge that divide. “We wanted to build a site that
doesn’t feel like TV content chopped up for the web, but born for the
digital age,” said NBC News president Deborah Turness on a conference call on Tuesday.
The network relaunched its website
today with the goal of merging its television programming more fluidly
with digital production, while simultaneously creating content for a
digital-only audience. Design updates are meant to give the site a
cleaner, more elegant feel and encourage what NBCNews.com executive
editor Greg Gittrich called
“continuous consumption.” (It also looks like a site designed for small
screens first: It’s responsive, it features tablet-friendly large tap
targets, and it asks you to navigate via the increasingly ubiquitous hamburger button, even on desktop. Even though NBCNews.com is now separate from MSNBC.com,
you can detect some shared design DNA.) In addition, a new NBC app will
launch this week, running off the same API as the website, allowing for
what developers hope will be a more seamless user experience.
The “brands are publishers now” line has become so
ubiquitous in digital media that it risks becoming a cliche. While it is
often true that companies are increasingly creating their own content,
not all that’s published is created equal.
INMA reporting: ... As Earl Wilkinson, executive director and CEO of INMA, put it in his closing
presentation of the 2013 World Congress: “The mood of the news industry is
different than four years ago, when media leaders felt desperate and ready to hit rock
bottom. Today, they’re anxious and hungry.”
This was manifest by a breeze of fresh air and opportunity from the North, when
Anna Rastner, editor of digital content at Expressen in Sweden, and Espen Egil
Hansen, executive editor of Verdens Gang (VG) in Norway, took the stage.
The two major Scandinavian dailies each presented a strong case of how video is
being integrated as a core element of their news organisations. Rightfully so.
Video — online and mobile — is growing exponentially. In 2011, video
exceeded half (51%) of the global consumer Internet traffic for the first time. Just one
year later, by the end of 2012, mobile video reached 51% of mobile traffic.
You could say that it took roughly 15 years (from the mid-’90s) for online video to
become the major part of Internet traffic. Whereas it took a mere five years A.i.
(Anno iPhone) for mobile video to exceed 50%.
By 2017, two-thirds of mobile data traffic will be video, a 16-fold increase between
2012 and 2017. In a couple of years, 1.2 million minutes of video content will cross
the network — every second!
“We come from a tradition where we write articles, but this is changing now,” Espen
Egil Hansen said.
He stressed the importance of using video to develop stronger storytelling.
“Text and video, together, is more effective than text or video,” he concluded.
Anna Rastner, during her presentation, advocated to go all out: “Train all your
newspaper reporters and photographers to do video,” she said... http://www.inma.org/blogs/mobile-tablets/post.cfm/news-industry-revolution-must-begin-with-evolution?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nonmember
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
Nilesen Wire reporting:
According to the latest Nielsen Cross-Platform Report,
Americans spend nearly 35 hours per week watching video across screens,
and close to another five hours using the Internet on a computer.
Consumers are not turning off their devices, and there is no doubt that
they are faced with more choices in terms of how they watch video
content. Shifts in the distribution of time spent across all screens and
devices demonstrate that more consumers are taking advantage of their
increased ability to determine what, how and where they view content.
eMarketer reporting:
Spending on online video ads is growing quickly, and marketers are
finding the ads good for branding, typically sending viewers who show
interest to the brand’s owned media properties.
According to research from opt-in video platform Jun Group,
a visit to a brand’s Facebook page was the most common action taken
after watching an online video ad, at least for US viewers watching an
opt-in ad from a Fortune 500 brand. Clicking through to a site followed
close behind.
Overall, engagement rates with video ads hovered between just under
3% and 4.5%, with videos between 30 and 60 seconds long performing best.
Videos both shorter and longer than that sweet spot had lower
engagement rates, though the shortest videos had the highest completion
rates.
paidcontent reporting:
Tablet content aggregators like Flipboard and Zite have found favor by re-imagining modern web text as linear pages of ye olde magazines. But can the same paradigm work for other online content? Flipboard on Wednesday launched
what it is calling “TV” channels – curated sections of its Content
Guide sidebar that include only videos, no text, culled from popular
YouTube channels.
In one way, this is nothing new – articles read through Flipboard can
already contain videos. What is notable is that Flipboard is making a
specific play for audiovisual content inside its magazine-like
applications.
How well this will work remains to be seen. On my iPad 2, Flipboard
presents videos fractionally more sluggishly than outside; orientation
rotation is noticeably slower.
Most of all, will people associate video with the page-turning
paradigm of Flipboard’s retro-magazine aesthetic? Perhaps so – the swipe
and flip interaction is characteristic of tablets in their entirety,
not just magazine-like apps that run on them.
With its “TV” channels, Flipboard may get to do for video publishers
like Chow.com, TED Talks and Pitchfork TV what it is doing for web text
publishers. More importantly, it shows Flipboard beginning to mature and
diversify. http://paidcontent.org/2012/08/29/three-billion-flips-later-flipboard-turns-to-video/
Nieman Journalism Lab reporting:
The Wall Street Journal has been busy expanding its video offerings and experimenting with dedicated news streams in recent months. Today, the natural merger of the two debuts: a stream of reporter-generated videos called WorldStream.
WorldStream is a bit like what it would be like to follow a bunch of
WSJ reporters on Twitter — except if instead of posting 140 characters
of text, they were each filing in 30-second-video chunks. It’s a
reverse-chronological stream filled entirely by what reporters in the
field are capturing with their smartphones.
Because it’s a stream produced by many, narrative flow is replaced by
the dissonance of multiple stories, multiple voices, and multiple
styles. Here’s Grover Norquist doing a standard-issue interview on Mitt Romney (35 seconds). And here’s Liz Heron giving a quick tour of the Google presence at the GOP convention in Tampa (41 seconds). Here’s…wreckage in Syria (17 seconds). Here’s WSJ reporter Arian Campo-Flores doing a standup about Hurricane Isaac (41 seconds). Here’s a moment-of-zen watching golf carts pass silently by (12 seconds). And here’s a still shot of a bunch of chairs in an almost empty room (10 seconds). While
WorldStream aims to be a way for viewers to get a potpourri of fresh
video content, it is first and foremost an internal newsroom tool that
the Journal has opted to make public. Alan Murray, deputy managing
editor and executive editor for the newspaper online, says he had long
been looking for a way to, er, streamline the filing process for video.
Pew reporting:
The disaster in Japan was hardly a unique case. Worldwide YouTube is
becoming a major platform for viewing news. In 2011 and early 2012, the
most searched term of the month on YouTube was a news related event five
out of 15 months, according to the company's internal data.
What is the nature of news on YouTube? What types of events "go viral"
and attract the most viewers? How does this agenda differ from that of
the traditional news media? Do the most popular videos on YouTube tend
to be videos produced by professional news organizations, by citizens or
by political interest groups or governments? How long does people's
attention seem to last?
The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism examined
15 months' worth of the most popular news videos on the site (January
2011 to March 2012)[2]-some 260 different videos in all-by identifying and tracking the five most-viewed videos each week located in the "news & politics"
channel of YouTube, analyzing the nature of the video, the topics that
were viewed most often, who produced them and who posted them.[3]
The data reveal that a complex, symbiotic relationship has developed
between citizens and news organizations on YouTube, a relationship that
comes close to the continuous journalistic "dialogue" many observers
predicted would become the new journalism online. Citizens are creating
their own videos about news and posting them. They are also actively
sharing news videos produced by journalism professionals. And news
organizations are taking advantage of citizen content and incorporating
it into their journalism. Consumers, in turn, seem to be embracing the
interplay in what they watch and share, creating a new kind of
television news. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media/july-dec12/pewyoutube_07-16.html
AOL Video/HuffPost Media, has become a major player in video news,
passing both CBS News and Fox News in video views, according to February comScore numbers.
The company has achieved this heft by syndicating videos from outside
news sources through its platform. Demand for the videos have come
largely from the Huffington Post and hundreds of other publishing
partners who seek news videos on their pages.
Last week, as part of the introduction of a new video portal strategy, AOL Video, now known as AOL On, introduced 14 public-facing channels including one for news. The content partners include the the AP, BBC, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and several smaller video news producers (including Beet.TV).
While the these big news sources sufface videos on their own sites,
on YouTube and other places on the Web, AOl On has positioned itself as
sort of next generation news syndicator, a new kind "AP or Reuters" for
Web news, says Ran Harnevo, SVP, Video for AOL On, in this interview
with Beet.TV. http://www.beet.tv/2012/04/aolnewsvideo-harnevo.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BeetTV+%28Beet.TV%29
Can print publishers hold their own in the unfamiliar world of
high-quality TV? Hearst, one of the publishers that have signed on to
YouTube’s quality content push, will soon provide some answers with its
two forthcoming YouTube channels.
On April 15 Hearst is set to launch the Hello Style channel, a collaboration of five of its women’s titles including Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire and Harper’s Bazaar. It'll be followed May 1 by the Car and Driver TV channel, from Hearst’s auto-focused brands.
YouTube, which is spending $100 million to help a variety of media
companies develop the channels, is gambling that the higher-quality
content will help it attract advertisers who would have avoided the
amateur content the site is best known for. Magazine publishers, for
their part, are looking to video and other platforms to offset slower
print advertising growth.
“Video is going to become an increasingly important medium,” said John
Loughlin, evp and general manager of Hearst Magazines. “Our goal is not
to become flat-footed in this space.”
But producing high-quality shows with a plot is a leap for most
magazines, whose videos to date have largely consisted of how-to’s and
behind-the-scenes with celebrities. Loughlin revealed that YouTube gave
Hearst $10 million to kickstart production, and like other content
partners, Hearst will provide promotion for the channels. Still, there’s
been a learning curve.
“A lot of this is TV quality, but certainly, the budgets and the time
are not TV,” said Kimberly Lau, vp of business development for Hearst
Digital Media and one of the executives behind the channels initiative.
While YouTube provided funding, it was up to the content partners to
figure out how to program the channels. One question publishers had to
answer was how closely their shows should reflect the magazines
themselves.
In the case of Hearst, some of the Hello Style shows will be closely inspired by print features like Cosmo’s Sexy vs. Skanky and Marie Claire’s Big Girl in a Skinny World. Car and Driver TV, meanwhile, will mix service and reality shows like Battle of the Beaters, where two auto body shops will compete to fix up heaps; and Driver Rehab, which applies the What Not To Wear formula to bad drivers.
While
WorldStream aims to be a way for viewers to get a potpourri of fresh
video content, it is first and foremost an internal newsroom tool that
the Journal has opted to make public. Alan Murray, deputy managing
editor and executive editor for the newspaper online, says he had long
been looking for a way to, er, streamline the filing process for video.