 - Chapter 6 -
ONLINE VIDEO BREAKS THE PRINT MOLDINTRODUCTION In its early days, television was predicted to be the death knell for newspapers as people’s eyes shifted from black and white news articles to black and white screens. Nevertheless, newspapers flourished. Today, eyes are shifting again, this time to colorful, interactive screens where video is called up on demand. Once again, the demise of newspapers is forecasted. These predictions are unfounded. Unlike the rise of television, the rise of Internet video is a media revolution that can bolster newspaper journalism. As broadband access spreads around the world and bandwidth improves, newspapers must heed the changing habits of their audience and complement the print journalism they do best with video.
According to a July 2007 Ball State University study, over 100 US television stations have newspaper partners. “Some relationships are cross-promotion and not a whole lot more, but others have genuine journalistic cross-pollination,” explained Bruce Northcott of TV-consulting firm Crawford, Johnson & Northcott. The latter, according to Northcott, have more value. “Journalistic cross-pollination” can combine resources and reach new consumers at a time when advertising revenue and circulation are both dwindling. iPlayer: viewing the BBC in a new way Developing a sound approach to online video isn’t limited to print news outlets. In December 2007, the BBC relaunched the iPlayer on-demand video service, making it available to Mac users for the first time. The new generation iPlayer also offered both streaming and downloading of content, as well an embedding feature to make clips more exportable. “2008 will be the year when we start to find out how (TV over the internet) gets into the living room,” said Eric Huggers, controller of BBC Future Media and Technology, “and how users can access these services from their couch.” CONCLUSION Video lessons from Nouvel Obs: do in-house production studios work? The website of the French weekly, Nouvel Observateur, was one of the first national news sites to regularly feature video, beginning soon after its launch in 1999. As bandwidth has improved and multimedia becomes more prominent online, the analytical paper, distributed every Thursday, decided to invest seriously in video. Now, Nouvel Obs links to video at other sites, embeds video from social platforms such as YouTube and Daily Motion, and has signed deals with video content producers. But perhaps most significantly, www.nouvelobs.com has built its own in-house studio, a dedicated video centre dubbed Canal Obs.  |
