Beet.TV Transcripts

Hearst is Transforming Online Video and Itself with Smart Investing in MobiTV, Slingbox, Brightcove and the NewsMarket

Michael Dunn, Vice President, Hearst Interactive Media

Click here to view video and read post from Beet.TV

[Start  of Audio]

Michael Dunn: My interest dates way back pre-blogging, just from an online, rich media perspective. The thing that really resonated with me is when RSS2.0 with enclosures became capable, and then publicized through Adam Curry and Dave Winer and blossomed into early stage podcasting.

I created my blog, which is nomadicaudio.com, within a few days of hearing the first – what weren’t even called podcasts at that point.

Andy Plesser: So, Michael, there’s a lot of emerging forms of video blogging coming up. What do you think is the best form to you? Is there one form? How should video be distributed?

Michael Dunn: I think you need to put it out in every format. If you look at what Andrew’s doing at Rocketboom; he makes sure he puts out everything from HD to just view it on his website in flash.

Andy Plesser: Hurst is both a very old media company and a new media company. How does – how does the company evolve and where might it be going, and what’s happening on the division level?

Michael Dunn: Sure. Hurst is made up of a newspaper division, magazine division, broadcast division – that’s Hurst-Argyle – it’s a public company, and business media division, digital media, focused; probably the earliest group that was focused on digital media because their asset was digital, and entertainment, as you mentioned, so ownership and ESPN, AME and so on.

Each of our core divisions has been looking at digital media strategies for a while, and so each of them is entering into it. Newspapers has a very big initiative underway; so does magazines, and from a venture side, which is a group I work in; I work in a venture and technology group that’s at a corporate level.

We look to make investments in companies that can do two things, provide economic return on the investment and also provide new knowledge that we bring into the company, so by investing in an innovative startup company like a Brightcove, we’re going to hopefully both gain economically, but also gain from a perspective of understanding.

Andy Plesser: How do you figure out what to invest in, and what kind of companies are you investing in now?

Michael Dunn: They tend to be companies that don’t fit into one of our traditional divisions, so we’re not gonna get involved in buying a new newspaper or a new TV station or acquisition of a magazine property. We already have businesses that do that naturally.

We look at areas that are on the edge of those divisions, so they’re media-related. We look at them for two basic reasons; financial return to the company and key learning from being involved with those companies, especially early companies as they’re looking at emerging business models.

Andy Plesser: Yeah, why don’t you give us a little bit of rundown on some of the portfolio companies and who they are?

Michael Dunn: Gather is a social network site. Sphere is a blogsphere servicing company. The NewsMarket is a video services company. MobiTV is a mobile TV offering. Brightcove is a digital or Internet TV offering. Sling Media is a different way to consume TV through the network. Pandora’s an online music-sharing site, and Light Orbit is a broadcasting industry services company.

[End of Audio]

Hearst Interactive Media, Micheal Dunn, Wireless Video, Mobile Video, Online Video

GigaOM's NewTeeVee Relaunched with Expandable Video Players -- Traffic Is Doubling Monthly at the Essential Industry Blog

Om Malik, Founder, GigaOM; NewTeeVee and Liz Gannes, NewTeeVee

Click here to view video and read post from Beet.TV

[Start  of Audio]

David Kavanaugh: Hi. So we’re here in San Francisco, a place that many would say is the mecca for the online media revolution. Today we have the privilege of meeting with some of the minds behind newteevee which is an exciting new blog about online video.

Om Malik: So we basically had started the site in December and initially it mimicked the look and feel of GigaOM and the reason for that was that we weren’t very sure if it was going to stick.

Three months into the new site, we realized that it was a different audience, right? It wasn’t my classic GigaOM audience. It was very different from what my typical readers were.

Liz Gannes: Maybe ____ for changing the design of our site was to better reflect our subject matter and also just to be attention grabbing and catchy and make you actually want to click through to our site where a lot of the action happens hopefully in the comments and in the video surrounding the posts.

David Kavanaugh: Liz is the creative force behind the web page’s new look.

Liz Gannes: We had a really great designer come in and turn this into something visual. And if you go to the top of the page, over in our new video bar, I’ll show you this video, a special episode of Ask a Ninja in which the ninja sneaks on to some kind of press junket for Blades of Glory, the new Will Ferrell movie and interviews Will Ferrell and his costar, in character as the ninja. Well, of course, the ninja’s always in character. And they have a pretty funny discussion which includes, as usual, the ninja telling them that he looked forward to killing them.

David Kavanaugh: What sort of model do you guys use to find out who’s looking at your site?

Liz Gannes: We get emails. We get comments. Sometimes we specifically solicit feedback. We definitely try to respond and foster some kind of a community on the site rather than just an audience.

David Kavanaugh: So, yeah. I think that the online publications, they really have an upper hand over the other formats because you can get really good feedback from your viewers?

Liz Gannes: Yeah. So it’s a particular skill to foster feedback, I think, and one that I’m striving to have. But to be open and engaging and approachable in a way that people feel like they’re invited to offer their opinion. And it’s been fun to see that develop as the site goes on because when someone comes to a site and say last December, there are no archives, there’s very little kind of site identity, it probably took a lot more to step in and say here’s what I think. But now we have kind of a regular gang of commenter’s. Schlo-mo’s always ready to step up and criticize someone for self-promoting in the comments which is really nice so we don’t have to go do that ourselves.

And this guy, Nat, is always ready to jump in with some kind of insider view on the P to P industry and keep us in check if we forget to mention something. So it’s nice to have an idea of who’s out there and who’s contributing and include them as members of the site.

Om Malik: I mean, that’s the beauty of the Web is like you can walk with your audience and our readers are basically the reason this Web site redesign happened. And I hope people are liking it, you know?

Liz Gannes: Om was just telling me inside that he was just looking over our traffic stats and we’ve doubled our number of visitors every month that we’ve existed.

[End of Audio]

Om Malik, Liz Gannes, Online Video, NewTeeVee

As Newspapers Gear up with Online Video Reporting: the Wall Street Journal is Set

Bob Leverone, WSJ.com

Click here to view video and read post from Beet.TV

[Start of Audio]

Bob Leverone: Let’s take a look around a little bit of our video facility here. We came down to this space here, eeew, almost a year ago and the whole point here – well, a little over a year ago actually, and – was to go into the Dow Jones newsroom here, in this case the online newsroom, and really become a part of the whole online process here at Dow Jones. What we have in here is an editing suite. In this case we have both an avid editing facility, also a Macintosh Suite with Final Cut Pro on it. Again, you see the Macintosh computers. We’ve really adopted that as a standard in our editing, so we can have a number of people working with desktop editing, and we’ve found it to be very effective, particularly in the broadband area.

The Wall Street Journal reporter is now being gradually equipped with cameras, and those cameras, some are mini DV’s and sometimes they’ll send us the tape. Other times they will do FTP, yes. If you’ve seen any of Walt Mossberg’s videos, which have been very effective for us, he does those directly through his Macintosh, the camera on his Macintosh computer, and he FTP’s them to us. This is a – actually a very highly equipped television studio. It’s all completely digital through and through. It was custom designed for this space. And this is particularly interesting, these small Sony cameras, which are really becoming state of the art now in a lot of broadband situations, because they are small.

They can be controlled through a normal control unit, remote control, and they have a – really a full range of operation with 3CCD technology, which enables you to do what you had to do with a $50,000.00 broadcast camera even just a couple years ago. And that’s our video production facility. I’m Bob Leverone, Dow Jones Online appearing here on Beat TV.

[End of Audio]

Dow Jones , Bob Leverone,  The Wall Street Journal, Online Video Journalism, Bill Grueskin

YouTube to Present Video Awards as More Producers Use YouTube as Distribution Platform Including Trailblazing TurnHere...Beet.TV Holds First Networking Shindig in NYC on Weds!

Brad Inman, TurnHere

Click here to view video and read post from Beet.TV

[Start of Audio]

Brad Inman: I started out as a freelance writer and I remember I got my first important gig that was semi-permanent as an independent contractor or freelance writer was with the L.A. Times to write a column four times a month, $200.00 a week, and that was the difference between me getting by and not getting by.

So my experience professionally for 20 years has been organizing freelancers and so from a business standpoint what I saw was this incredible network of very talented filmmakers who were waiting in line for the next big shoot on television and in between were waiting tables or they were being told upload your stuff for free and maybe you’ll make some money, and having been a freelancer, we said, “No, we’re gonna pay filmmakers. We’re gonna pay them the going wage and we’re gonna try to keep them regularly busy with more and more work.”

Andy Plesser: So, Brad, since the last time you appeared on Beat TV, you’ve taken on some new corporate clients. My question is, “Have you adapted the Turn Here style to the realm of industrial corporate videos?”

Brad Inman: Our corporate work is not a big part of our work but as an example, Intercontinental Hotel. They came to the conclusion that, you know, one big major television ad that says the same thing over and over again, shooting at us, you know, through the television waves over and over and over again was work but the Internet was about search, useful information. At the same time, they wanted to extend their brand into this new medium.

So they came to us and said, “We’d like to shoot some videos, we think, of our hotels in locations around the world.” They have 140 of them. And we said, you know, “What if we use the Turn Here style and took your concierge in the cities – whether it’s Singapore or Berlin or Santiago, Chile – let’s take them and have them give us a tour of not the hotel – everyone’s got thousand-count sheets but, you know, where’s the good places to eat? Where’s the good places to go out? What are some things you gotta see around the city where the hotel is located?”

So we used the concierge to be the narrator, again, local trustworthy, you know, character to give that kind of authentic experience. So it’s not like we’re shooting corporate video as much as we created for them these stories, these micro-media that are searchable on the Web, that people can find and find useful information.

Andy Plesser: So what’s next for Turn Here? I understand you’re experimenting with some new publishing platforms. If I’m not mistaken, you just opened a You Tube channel.

Brad Inman: Yeah, we created – we realized You Tube was a search engine for video. I’ve always contended that Google bought You Tube not because of its video or even because it was user generated. It was a search engine for the next, you know, wave of content which is video and so we looked at You Tube as this powerful search engine. So as the early days of search generally, if you had a Web page, you’d want to get it indexed and get it up there quickly.  So we created a channel on You Tube. We created a real estate play list. We created a travel play list, a local merchant play list.
We have all our videos up there, you know, very searchable and accessible and there’s a lot of user-generated tools on You Tube that make it powerful where people can register for your play lists. They can store it. They can send email messages. They can comment. They can rate them and we just began to do this and we’re – you know, already – take the small merchant videos or the neighborhood videos. They’re getting a lot more streams than if we’d just, you know, done it from our own destination site.

[End of Audio]

YouTube, TurnHere, Brad Inman

Associated Press Explores Videoblogs with "Reel City Tales"

Ilana Arazie, Associated Press

Click here to view video and read post from Beet.TV

[Start of Audio]

Ilana Donna Arazie: At the AP, I work at the online v­ideo net – I work in the online video network department, but on the side you know that – I was more on the business side of online video, but on my own personal time I was creating my own videos, doing the storytelling online. So I distributed on different sites like Network2 and YouTube and put some videos together and I sent it over to the editors at asap. And I said take a look, this is what I’ve been doing, and they really – they liked the idea and they said, “Would you expose yourself out to our affiliates and tell your stories for us and do a video blog?”

Andy Plesser: So tell us about the blog here at the Associated Press, sort of what role it has within the company.

Ilana Donna Arazie: Well, it’s separate. It’s for the asap service.

Andy Plesser: What is that?

Ilana Donna Arazie: Asap is an AP service that started about a year or two ago. It’s a youth driven AP service. They wanted – were able to start something like this ’cause it’s younger and hipper and they could experiment a bit more.

Andy Plesser: So we’re experimenting right now. How do you see success – what do you think a success of a video blog is? How do you gauge that?

Ilana Donna Arazie: Success is – you know I’ve had some newspapers email me and put it up on their home page. I mean that’s a really big deal for newspapers to feature a blog, a video blog, so success is getting feedback from newspaper sites and TV sites saying, “This is great. We’d like to feature it.”

Andy Plesser: You’re observing the scene. What do you think some of the interesting trends that’re emerging in video blogging?

Ilana Donna Arazie: Well, I mean it’s just really exploding. I mean it’s amazing how many people are just getting involved and creating their own programming. People from grandmothers I’ve seen to regular housewives, so I’m just seeing a lot of every day people starting their own video blogs and doing their own storytelling, or having something to say or share.

 Andy Plesser: Well tell us about the segment about – you called deal breakers. We saw that recently. Tell us how that idea came to be and a little bit how you organized that and what went into producing that spot.

Ilana Donna Arazie: Well, I did a story on deal breakers in the city because I just felt meeting so many people here that we’re a very fast-paced society, and we’re also fast about our relationships and how quickly we go through them. So I really wanted to get into and find out what people thought about what their biggest deal breakers are. It just seems like we are so quick to just move on to the next person in our love lives and relationships. So I just went out on the street and talked to people about their deal breakers and it’d be – it’s really interesting to find out why someone would end a relationship and I got a bunch of people to open up about that.

[End of Audio]

Associated Press, Ilana Arazie, Real City Tales

Podzinger Crawls YouTube and Creates a New Contextual Ad Environment, a Demonstration from Alex Laats

Alex Laats, PodZinger

Click here to view video and read post from Beet.TV

[Start of Audio]

Alex Laats: What I’m gonna show you is how on PodZinger content, we are creating channels of media that enhance the search into the media for the user. I’m gonna show that not only with respect to podcast content, but also with respect to user-generated content. With respect to podcast content, what we’ve done is we’ve started to organize and create more and more channels of media so that within the collection of podcast content, there’s a whole section of content that’s related to baseball, and I can create more micro searches, which are related to individual players, like an Alex Rodriguez.

When I click on something like that, I bring up content that relates specifically to discussion of Alex Rodriguez. Since it’s RSS based, a user can save as an RSS link on their site, and we have more and more people that are saving their RSS searches on their site, or post on their blog or whatever it may be. Now, one of the things that we’ve done is to expand beyond the world of podcasts into the world of user-generated content starting with YouTube. And so for now, as I mentioned before, this is kind of almost like a capability demonstration where we’re showing how you can search for specific amounts of content throughout the world of YouTube, and even more powerfully, search for content in YouTube according to channels of media.

And so we have some very broad channels, like sports entertainment, and we have others that we’re exposing that’re more micro, like magic tricks or poker. And let’s stick for a moment with the sports category. Let’s explore something like snowboarding where I can search solely in the YouTube sports category around snowboarding content and bring up – what I’ve done there is I’ve narrowed the world that I’m searching into content that’s only associated with sports, and then within that searching content that is snowboarding content. And when we search for it, we search for it not only in the metadata associated with the content, but also into the content itself.

What this does is it provides for a better experience because I can navigate into the world of sports, and then I can specifically search for what I care about. We imbed the video player from YouTube. We show where in the content snowboarding is discussed, and you can see in this particular piece of content there’s quite a rich discussion at several points in the video. And we – and then we bring in other related content that is about snowboarding. So what we’ve done here is we’ve made it possible for a consumer to much more effectively find what they wanna find by two parts. One is navigating the world according to media channels, which is sports, and then searching more specifically on what they care about, which is snowboarding.

And then once they’re into this environment, now they’re in a world of consumption about content that’s relevant to them, and in this world is opportunities to bring in very targeted advertising targeting someone who’s interested in advertising to a snowboarding or perhaps action sports demographic.

[End of Audio]

video search, YouTube, PodZinger, Alex Laats

Exclusive: Defense Contractor has Analyzed, Transcribed and Organized 1.5 Millon YouTube Clips

Alex Laats, PodZinger

Click here to view video and read post from Beet.TV

[Start of Audio]

Alex Laats: When it comes to a search for audio and video content, the key is that you actually have to have access into the words that are spoken inside of the video or audio content. In the absence of that, all you’re searching are titles and maybe a summary, information that the author of the content created, such as show notes. Or user generated tags.

Andy Plesser: Alex, tell us a little bit about PodZinger and what you guys do up there and how the technology works.

Alex Laats: We operate a farm of servers that run speech to text technology that come from PodZinger’s parent company, BDN. That farm of servers is – basically ingests audio and video. It runs it through by, in essence, watching it once, and takes every word spoken in an audio or video segment and tags it with the identification of that word. We call it a rough transcript, or what I really call it is a text index. So think of it as – much as sites – web ______ _______ sites are very much about tagging media in order to be able to create additional value and access to that media. This is about trying to tag every word with the identity of that word and the location of that word as it occurs in the video.

And so, of course, much like humans, more than humans, computers are imperfect. They’re just not perfect, so they’re not going to get a perfect transcript. So – however, they create so much more metadata about video and audio so that a user can actually find content that’s relevant to them that would otherwise be black space to Google or Yahoo.

Andy Plesser: I understood that you folks really index podcasts or files that’re sent to you by RSS. Now you’re doing user-generated content and you’re indexing and organizing YouTube files? Can you explain that a little bit?

Alex Laats: We literally take every file that’s produced on YouTube, and we’ve done this since the beginning of December so now we’re at somewhere around 1-1/2 million videos in just over three months. Okay, so it’s massive amounts of video that’s being created, and we run that through our farm of servers, and we take all the metadata that’s associated with the content on the YouTube page and then add a whole lot more starting with things like is it music or is it not music? Then we say okay, and how much of it is rich in word – kind of word density? For that content, we run it through our speech detection engine and create a rich text index of that piece of media.

So what that does then is it creates a much richer set of metadata and tags associated with each video. On top of that, we add topic classification. So what we do is – we think we help make that – turn what is kind of a hard to access, hard to consume, hard to advertise collection – massive collection of media, and we turn that into an easy to consume, easy to search, easy to advertise collection of media.

[End of Audio]

video search, YouTube, PodZinger, Alex Laats

 

Wal-Mart Blog Gets 600,000 Monthly Views, Richard Edelman Tells Beet.TV -- PR Pros Gather at PRWeek's Annual Awards Gala as New Media Changes the Biz

Select interviews from the 2007 PRWeek Awards

Click here to view video and read post from Beet.TV

[Start of Audio]

Julia Hood: This is the PRWeek Awards, our annual celebration of the best campaigns, companies and individuals in the industry. I think we had about 800 campaigns this year and campaigns that have entries this year. And nobody knows, and nobody knows except PRWeek staff, who the winners are until tonight. So the excitement is actually real.

Andy Plesser: I have very, very, very simple rules. Say who you are. Say what company you’re representing. Tell ’em why you’re there, what your interest is. Are you being paid? Is there a third party, and is that person being paid? Just say why you’re participating, and if that’s the case you have every bit as much of a right to be there as anybody else. Tell us about some of the new media that you guys are using and what’s been successful for you now?

Richard Edelman: Well, I think partnership with social networks has been very positive. The time with MySpace and Trojan, MySpace again with Unilever and Ax, Ax promotion at 80,000 friends for a Gamekillers promotion. That’s been great. I think also the outreach to bloggers for companies like Nissan when they’re introducing new products, been very positive. Also for some of our tech clients, Adobe, Microsoft, others, and also on corporate reputation for companies like GE, when they had a big trade show on innovation, we talked to technology bloggers and that worked very well.

Andy Plesser: So are you sort of joining the conversation or are you really creating new media?

Richard Edelman: I think we’re creating new media, but we’re also looking at what environmental bloggers and others are talking about and trying to join the conversation, and I would say in terms of my own blog this last year, the thing that has interested me is that when we have issues that are relevant in the world, for instance, I just blogged the other day about Senator Obama and compared him to a CEO, I think people really want PR people now to participate in this discussion. We’re no longer on the outside looking in.

Andy Plesser: Tell us a little bit about the Wal Mart situation. You guys have done a great job. You’ve taken some knocks. It’s been sort of an interesting year. Tell us sort of the ______ for your – you and how you see that.

Aedhmar Hynes: I think that our work on Wal Mart has been terrific. I think that we had 150,000 people going to Wal MartFacts.com every week. It’s a serious central source of information that’s credible. It’s constantly updated. Also, I think that the blogger outreach that we’ve done on environmental issues has been very important. The CFL bulb, for instance, also on the $4.00 prescription. Social media is just part of Wal Mart being in this horizontal conversation and I’m very proud of what we do for that client.

Julia Hood: Companies are under fire and under more scrutiny now than they have been in the past. Every single misstep that any one company has, it’s a direct implication for other companies, so we’re all being looked at in the same light. So certainly the challenge for PR is to keep putting the good news out there about what their company is doing to benefit the greater society, and so the challenge for us is to keep telling those very good, very positive stories, in an environment of criticism, scrutiny and distrust. Certainly there is the opportunity nowadays to use all of the different media vehicles and tools available to you to tell your story in ways that you’ve never been able to tell it before.

And the interesting thing is that audiences are there to hear it. So you don’t – you’re not forced to only work with the traditional media sources, with newspapers, with broadcast outlets, but you really can use all of the tools available to you from an online perspective to get your story out there, and we are definitely doing that as much as possible.

Mary Stutts: What I tell clients is the fundamentals of communications and public relations does not change. So you go back to the basics of saying what’s your objective? What do you want to achieve? What do you want to communicate, and who do you want to communicate with? And that – so that sounds really simple and basic, but I think that’s possibly one of the mistakes that can be made right now is the leaping into these different forms of communications without truly taking the time to understand what it is you want to achieve, because a viral video may be the perfect thing for you to do.

But on the other hand, it may be a disaster, and unless you’ve actually figured out what it is you’re trying to achieve, who you’re trying to communicate with, then once you’ve established that, which is the fundamentals of communications anyway, then you back up and say, “Well, is a viral video, is a corporate blog, or is an entrance into second life, a way of doing that?” If it’s not, then don’t do it. Don’t lose sight of why we communicate in the first place, and don’t lose sight of the fact that these are just new forms of tools and new ways to get to your audience, unless you understand why you’re getting to your audience and what you want to communicate with them, then actually you may waste an awful lot of time and resource doing things that will never be effective.

[End of Audio]

Wal-Mart, Richard Edelman, Edelman , PRWeek, Julia Hood, Genentech, Text 100

The Payoff for Online Video Uploaders is "Reputation," Not "Beer Money" Says WIRED's Chris Anderson

Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief, Wired

Click here to view video and read post from Beet.TV

[Start of Audio]

Andy Plesser: Do you think there’s an opportunity for a business of a long tail of individual video creators to make money in addition to sort of having their image seen or searching –

Chris Anderson: Yeah –

Andy Plesser: Or visible, which is sort of the democratization of media, but how about the business model –

Chris Anderson: Yeah –

Andy Plesser: Would emerge?

Chris Anderson: It’s interesting. Two things become very obvious in long tail marketers. The first is the aggregators have the big obvious business, so Google can make money off the web in the way that the individual participants might not be able to. ITunes can make money off music in a way the individual artist may not be able to, and that – the role of the aggregator makes perfect sense. So clearly, the role of aggregating web video, long tail video, is a big opportunity, but you asked a more interesting question, which is what about the creators themselves, and I’ll give you two answers. The first is that we measure return on investment. We measure reward usually in terms of money, but clearly the fact that there are 55 million bloggers out there blogging for free, the fact that Wikipedia exists for like people creating it for free, suggests that people can be motivated by more than money.

There is another economy out there, the economy of reputation, the economy of attention, the economy of even expression, that people can be motivated by just getting a readership, by being noticed. This is enough, because it’s so cheap and easy to produce these days, the tools. Everyone has a camcorder. Everyone has video editing software. Everyone has access to distribution. It’s so cheap and easy to do it; they don’t need to be paid. They’re clearly doing it anyway.

However – so there is a reward, and the reward is more psychic than it is economic. However, there is a possibility for some of them to make money as well, and we’re gonna figure out how that is. So right now, in the text world it’s pretty easy. If you wanna make money off your blog, if you have enough traffic, you can put a couple lines of HTML and you’ve got AdSense. School AdSense. You can have an Amazon Associates links, etc. Is it – again, it’s beer money for most of us, not much more. What would the equivalent be for video?

Well, text links don’t work for video. Running AdSense against video doesn’t work, ’cause the targeting doesn’t work. Amazon Associates probably isn’t gonna be very much money either. Would there be a sort of a marketplace of web video ads that you could run post-roll against web video content in a way that scales to the long tail of video producers? Don’t know. Doesn’t exist yet. Clearly a big opportunity going forward if someone can figure that out. I think you then have not just a sort of psychic award, but actually a monetary award for long tail video producers.

Andy Plesser: What do you think about the opportunities for traditional print publications with a big online presence including Wired, or the New York Times or other media to have – become multimedia and to incorporate video?

Chris Anderson: That would – I mean they’re obviously huge. I mean so let’s start with this. People want video and it’s easy to do it. So those are the two necessary – supply and demand. The question is what’s right for us, and the answer is we’ve thought of some things. We’re gonna think of many more things going forward. Let me give you some examples of what we are doing. So right now when we do a photo shoot, we obviously – there’s the pictures we use in the magazine.

There’s the other pictures we didn’t use in the magazine we make available online, and now, increasingly, there’s the video of the shoot. So for the Lonely Girl cover that we have here, that we have in the current issue, there’s the photos we used in the magazine on the cover, the extra photos on the sort of the photo foot book online, and then you can see a video of the shoot. And for something like this, which is kind of a celebrity – it’s kinda cool to be there on the set, it’s actually quite a compelling thing. So that was easy. We were doing it anyway. We already had our people there.

Just take out a camcorder in the shoot and to take this sort of – bring this new dimension to the experience and make it available online was easy. Another thing that we’re doing is when we have events, the old model for events would be that we would hire some video crew to come and video the event and we would edit it, etc. The new model is you invite the participants to video them. You have permission. Anyway can video it. Go for it. Go crazy. Bring your camcorder. Bring your camera phones, whatever.

We can then identify the ones that we like the best and then we can – and it’ll all get uploaded, of course, to YouTube – and that we can just link to the user generated videos that were created around our events that are out there anyway. So in a sense we’ve crowd sourced the work of recording our events and bringing them to a broader audience. So those are two examples. Other examples would be things like where you have television show coming up, which is Wired Science gonna be coming on PBS in February.

Clearly, that’s – now that we have a video side already as part of what we – our editorial mission and our work, we have an opportunity to bring video from that and video out – around and outside of that outtakes, extra shots, etc., onto our site to bring this new sort of video dimension to – out there anyway so in a sense –

[End of Audio]

Chris Anderson, The Long Tail

Exclusive: Microsoft and the Associated Press Teaming with Thousands of Newspapers and Broadcasters in New Online Video Network

Jim Kathman, Associated Press

Click here to view video and read post from Beet.TV

[Start of Audio]

Andy Plesser: I’m at the Associated Press, the world’s largest news organization, that’s embarking on a very ambitious plan to syndicate video, not only video that the AP creates but also that’s created by the affiliated newspapers – hundreds of newspapers, TVs and radio stations around the country. It’s a very exciting new program and we’re gonna spend some time looking into that today. Jim, tell me about the online video network and your association with Microsoft. How does that work and tell us a little bit about the progress over the last 12 months.

Jim Kathman: Absolutely. It is – March 1 is actually our one-year anniversary. We launched March 1, 2006 and we’ve grown really exponentially since we launched. The basic premise for it is that AP provides content and distribution network, all of the affiliates that are AP members and subscribers, and we partnered with MSN to do this because, to a large degree, we didn’t necessarily have technology and ad sales capability in-house and most of our members didn’t have that capability in-house either.

So as they were looking to launch and get into the online video business, there was some real concern from some initial conversations with them on we’re not really sure exactly how the technology needs to work and what the hosting and streaming and all of that, so there was a concern on – you know, with their capabilities in that area, at least initially, and there were concerns that even if they were able to drive traffic to their site, how do they monetize it.

So we’ve taken care of that by partnering with MSN and MSN does a great job selling national brand advertising, which they sell for MSNBC and all the MSN properties, so they are really a leader in that space relative to the amount – the brand advertisers they have in their network and the amount of inventory they’re selling and the CPMs that they’re able to get for that inventory.

Andy Plesser: Right now, you guys are basically syndicating content from APTN, from the material that the AP creates. When will you start actually integrating and syndicating content from your affiliates?

Jim Kathman: Yeah, that’s actually where the real value proposition, we think, comes into play and in the first year we’ve been out there, all of the video in the video network, those 40 clips a day, have really been AP video clips that we’ve either gathered ourselves or we’ve partnered with others to get access to that content and the rights to that content.

As we get into what we’re calling Phase 2 – and we’re in beta right now – and we’re in February and we’re in beta and what that’s gonna enable is for our affiliates to upload their own local content. They can upload anything they want – if they have their top beat reporters on the local crime scene going out and interviewing the police commissioner on a major story; they’re able to talk the mayor; or they’re able – they’re interested in having people upload video of local football games or other local events of interest.

So really we’re providing them with the tools and the infrastructure to upload any video that they think is of interest to their audience and use AP’s online video network and that infrastructure to play out and make that video available to their membership.

Andy Plesser: Your affiliates who are uploading video, are those newspapers? Are there radio stations? Are there TV stations?

Jim Kathman: It’s a combination of newspapers and broadcasters, at least a couple of radio stations, a couple of television stations and a wide variety of newspapers in kinda size and scale and strategic interests in video, and they’ve uploaded a wide variety of things from what you would consider to be a more traditional hard news or breaking news story to, like I said, local sports video or a couple of how-to and I think there were some things on gardening and other things that would be of significant interest to a variety of their audience.

[End of Audio]

Associated Press, Microsoft, Newspapers