In much the same way that Reuters made Web portals Yahoo! and AOL into news platforms by providing its newswire feeds some 10 years ago, the London-based information behemoth is set to make the Web video-news-rich by providing thousands of clips to publishers.
Some 13,000 clips Reuters-produced videos, with 125 new clips added daily, will be available to Web publishers who license the videos for 30-day use. The videos will be both edited pieces and unedited, natural sound segments.
The scope of the content is breaking news, human interest, sports and entertainment news with reporting from Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and the Americas.
Publishers pay according to traffic to their site, a senior Reuters executive told Beet.TV
The videos will be available in Flash, Window Media and Real Player. Videos will be offered in 300K and 700K resolution. Full resolution MPEG2 files will also be provided.
The video service is being managed by Newscom.com, a content management and distribution company that provides distribution services for Reuters photos and graphics.
While online video is a growing revenue opportunity for publishers, it is costly to produce — and syndication sources are limited. So, getting quality, timely video could be a a big development for publishers, who are free to sell ads around the video.
Mochila, a content syndication service/ad platform, provides some Reuters videos along with advertising and a revenue split for for publishers. We reported on Mochila last year.
As we first reported last month, Reuters is now providing free embed codes on the videos on its public-facing web site. This is a limited selection of current and recent videos. We’ve posted a news story below here about the crisis in Kenya.
Update: 1/22 Above is my interview with Mitch Koppelman, Reuters Vice President for Broadcast Services in the Americas. I interviewed him earlier this afternoon. You can find the file for this interview here.
— Andy Plesser
