Archive for March 13th, 2008
Internet Broadcasting has rolled out a new video player for Hearst-Argyle, Meredith and McGraw-Hill sites, and I have to say, it’s the best I’ve seen so far for local TV sites.
The player is both Flash and Silverlight for on demand, and Silverlight for live. And at 640 pixels wide as the standard 16×9 display, it may be the largest local TV player out there. (Not that size is everything, right?) But we’re still waiting for a local TV group to offer embeddable players, like MSNBC.com. Who… will… be… first?
Update: I missed this. Inergize sites, with video powered by Dayport, has the embed feature. Click “menu” on this clip for the embed code. (Thanks, Brent!)
By the way, you have to wonder how many views MSNBC.com has racked up on Keith Olbermann’s special comment on Hillary Clinton, which has been embedded all over the place. I remember six months or so ago, I heard a YouTube stat that as much as 60 percent of its traffic originates from embedded players. Free your video!
March 13th, 2008
Has anyone seen this before?
Search within search. Pretty cool feature. Anyone know how to add this?
Update: The feature is about a week old, according to this Google post, which explains it’s fully automated: “This feature will now occur when we detect a high probability that a user wants more refined search results within a specific site. Like the rest of our snippets, the sites that display the site search box are chosen algorithmically based on metrics that measure how useful the search box is to users.” Thanks Amanda for solving the mystery!
March 13th, 2008
ABC News President David Westin hits the nail on the head with his remarks (watch video from Blip.TV here) at the McGraw-Hill Media Summit when talking about the commoditization of news. “There’s a certain amount of news information that’s a commodity. It just is,” he said, explaining that many stories are available everywhere on the web. He used the Minneapolis bridge collapse as an example. “We’re not going to win in our coverage of the bridge collapse,” he said. “Where we will win is the Representative Foley story.” Westin said you have to cover the big stories to stay in the game, but “if you have an exclusive, say an investigative story, that is worth its weight in gold.” So he tells his ABC News staff that “news may be a commodity, but reporting is not.”
Right on. This is especially interesting given my comments earlier this week asking that the Associated Press and affiliate feed services develop new models that compensate local stations and newspapers for their most popular exclusive stories. Because these stories are worth their weight in gold, but only in the narrowing “window of exclusivity” before they’re mass distributed to the online world. I believe this window is a greater benefit for the bigger national media brands, because readers still tend to gravitate to the original source despite the fact the AP version of the story has appeared everywhere else. While this is generally true inside a particular local market, TV station sites are not known beyond the confines of a particular DMA. So the window may just be few hours before traffic on the story drops off the map — and millions read and/or watch the story somewhere else.
Meanwhile, Westin’s remarks should be taken to heart by local TV news managers who are fascinated with “me too” journalism: copying stories from the newspapers and chasing their TV competition. Because if you just do the same stories as everyone else, you have no original value on the web. None. You were already beat online, and that’s where most people will soon get their local news. Getting beat on everything, day in and day out, is not a sustainable model, to say the least.
Adds Greg Miller from Kovsky & Miller Research in comments: “David Westin’s observation is on target. In countless studies of local TV newscasts we conduct, it’s obvious that enterprise journalism is one of only two distinguishing features between stations. The other being the anchors. However, with the growing interest of the public to obtain their news online, the value of anchors will diminish.”
March 13th, 2008
Speaking of competition in TV news, here’s something you don’t see every day. Broadcasting & Cable’s Mike Malone explains what happened next.
March 13th, 2008
The third-most visited social networking site, Bebo, which has a large UK audience, has been acquired by AOL for $850 million. (For reference, News Corp. bought MySpace back in 2005 for $580 million.) AOL CEO Randy Falco calls the acquisition a “game-changing move,” especially when you consider the applications when Bebo merges with AOL instant messager.
For plenty of analysis, PaidContent has blanket coverage of the story.
March 13th, 2008
Uh oh, another huge traditional advertiser is bypassing TV and print.
March 13th, 2008
