April 22, 2007

Videoclips, especially those devoted to news coverage, continue their domination over our Internet viewing habits. Only a year or two ago, it seems, the Web watch-words were wiki and citizen journalism, blog indexing (Technorati, Snap, Blogdex) and social networking (MySpace, Facebook). But today, as YouTube reaches its terrible twos (the company was founded in hoary old February 2005!), it is evident that the public’s ravenous thirst for short-form video files continues unslaked. Like an amputee with phantom-leg syndrome, I still find myself aching for a television set every weeknight at 6:30 p.m., so accustomed am I to having spent three decades religiously tuning in to the old, reliable news anchors as they delivered the day’s headline stories. Nowadays, I’ve managed to cut my weekly intake down to one or two nights, tops. My wife, in contrast, never watches the evening news. She merely logs onto AOL or ABC News and hits the play button on the news-summary videoclips. Then she trawls the gossip blogs for celebrity updates, often delivered as video files.

I was reminded of this relatively newfound clamor for the clip when reading photographer-cum-videographer-cum-Web-editor Dirck Halstead’s quote from the new issue of The Digital Journalist. Canon’s Dave Metz, Halstead said, had presciently predicted that “the shift from still to video photojournalism would come five times faster than the shift from film to digital.” And so it has – especially on the Web. The explosion of videotaped news content, proliferating over the Internet, on cellular phones and hand-held devices, on network, cable, and satellite television, was everywhere in evidence in the past week or two, most dramatically in the saturation coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre. Yet I was unaware of the sheer number of news feeds available at any one time until I read a short piece in the current edition of the British journal Television, (a publication of the Royal Television Society), by Stephen Claypole, a BBC veteran and eminence in the international video news business, whom I interviewed extensively for Watching the World Change.

Claypole, focusing on the two largest video news agencies in Great Britain, hints at the tip of the iceberg in terms of the glut of content available from professional TV news teams, worldwide, at any given instant:

“[Reuters TV (formerly Visnews) and APTN (Associated Press Television news)] claim to be the biggest and the best [news services in Britain]. Each has between 75 and 80 bureaux, deploying between 500 and 600 staff or stringers every day. They jointly supply a ‘universe’ of about 500 broadcasting companies that in turn transmit about a 1,000 channels. Agency activity grows literally week-by-week. Reuters says that it distributes from its Canary Wharf HQ 7,500 news stories a month and streams one million video clips of its images over the internet. APTN’s master control room at Camden Lock handles 6,000 satellite transmissions and 900 ‘feeds’ monthly via the internet. It too is putting enormous emphasis on streaming.

“In the USA, the homeland of the AP co-operative’s ‘membership,’ the agency uses its video content to provide a tailored news service on a video player to 1,500 newspaper, radio and TV websites in a joint venture with Microsoft.

“There are many people who now believe that moving images will dominate the internet and existing and emerging multi-media platforms. ‘Last year saw the “tipping point” when video finally caught on as the vital medium of the internet,’ said Nigel Baker [executive director of APTN]. The world’s news agencies began to scramble to have a credible video component – and looked at envy to AP and Reuters whose earlier investment had paid off. ‘While broadcasters are still the main customers of the TV news agencies, the digital revolution means that portals, newspaper websites and wireless networks are hungry for their pictures.’

“Tony Donovan [COO of Reuters Telvesion] confirms the trend: ‘It’s a fascinating time for video news. Newspapers are competing with TV channels, broadcasters are becoming agencies and selling their content to others including newspaper websites they compete with, broadcasters want to sell their content and the agency content that sits within it and the agencies want to protect themselves from cannibalisation. It is a video jungle out there.’”