Video QuickTips

I’ve been thinking about this lately, in light of recent events.

Yes, the broadcast industry is having some difficulty with the new technology, some have been quick to adopt, others taking more of a wait and see attitude. But it is not having as bad a time as those in print. I know many say that “news by appointment” is dead, but I think its demise has been greatly exaggerated. Many viewers still take solace in the fact that when they snap on the TV after a long day at work, the 6 oclock news is still there. Whether the content is what they want can be debated, but there are still many that can set aside that 30-60 minutes to get their fix of tv news. They are the ones that don’t want to be surfing the web to find out what is going on, they want to be a bit more passive about it. They don’t know the city councilman was caught with his hand in the till, or whatever his/her hand was in, so they don’t know to look for it.

Television news has to deliver a good product and put it out there in the various media outlets, whether it’s simply converting the newscast to flash, or putting value added content on their website, i.e. longer versions of the stories, with more detail and background the time limits of broadcast won’t permit.

Television news coverage has to be more than crime. My thoughts are in needs to be more of the “news you can use” type of information. The news they need to know, the news they want to know and the news they would want to know about if they knew about it.

The real key is this is a business, and to stay in business it must make money. Monetizing web content has always been the moving target. Do you go subscription, or ads? If you go ads, how do you accurately report to your advertisers how many eyeballs are seeing their ads?

Subscriptions are tricky. I recently heard a number of callers on talk radio saying how they didn’t feel they should pay to access content on newspaper websites because they already pay for access. What they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) seem to understand was that they were paying for access to the internet, not the newspaper’s content.

But even then newspaper subscriptions have never been the major revenue generator for papers, it’s been the ads. The number of subscribers (or ratings in TV) were an easy way of justifying the advertising rates, which was the real money maker. And that gets back to what I mentioned earlier, the accurate reporting of eyeballs on the on-line ads.

So, do you think TV news is dead? Do you still watch or do you get your news online? What percentage of your news comes from online sources (that are not newspaper or TV station sites)?