The New York Times has been publishing an increasing number of video clips in the past year. The videos have included reporter commentary, TV news-style highly-edited pieces and spunky videoblog pieces by tech columnist David Pogue, media critic David Carr and others.
We understand that the Times has been successful in selling high-priced video advertising around its clips. It’s certainly a growth area for the venerable publisher.
The Times has recently begun to make a number of clips downloadable through Apple’s iTunes. To see this, go to iTunes and search Podcasts with the term ‘New York Times’. You can also open up the iTunes page directly by clicking on the "RSS/Podcast" button from many Times video pages.
We have also learned that video clips are now available through the newTivo Cast.
This is a very interesting development for mainstream media. We learned late last year that CNET is providing downloadable files. Most mainstream media distribute videos by streaming Flash files, which cannot be saved.
Whether consumers will download news and commentary, it’s difficult to say, but I believe that consumers will increasingly want to create video libraries, and newspapers can provide a great deal of valued video material from news to service information on everything from food to cars to health.
Speaking of David Carr, I had a great time interviewing him in Times Square last night. Stay tuned for the Carpetbagger himself on Beet.TV!
Here’s the subscription page for the Times’ Carpetbagger page on iTunes. You can download all of David’s video’s for free. They are very good!
