Online Video Keeps Growing...

NYTimes.com said Friday it has launched a new platform that will bring more video to more sections of the site. Videos will be presented in hi-def and made available to the home page, articles, blogs, and the site's video library in an effort to make video a central part of The New York Times' (overall) strategy of moving more digital.

The Grey Lady’s site’s new vid platform will display videos in 16x9 widescreen (woot for letterbox!) format, and more robust search so users can more easily find the videos they’re looking for. More importantly (for survival, and social media geeks like myself), each video will now feature share tools (!), which will allow viewers to share the videos on sites like Digg, Facebook, Twitter, etc. This is another extension of the Times’ digital social media strategy like TimesPeople, which rolled out recently.

NYTimes.com already produces about a good deal of videos from journalists like David Pogue (Personal Tech) and Mark Bittman (Dining), which happen to be my favorite sections. With the announcement of the enhancement of its video offerings, it appears that video will become an integral part of its new strategy to keep current. I'm sure additional mainstream media outlets will be following suit.

Interestingly enough, the topic of online video has been popping up (not pop-ups – I hate those) all over the place lately. Ipsos Media released a study on Monday that found that the popularity of online video is moving beyond the early adopters/geeks and growing significantly among women and older consumers. As Anchorman Ron Burgundy once said, that’s kind of a big deal. The study found that about 54% of female Internet users ages 12+ have viewed streaming video online in the past 30 days, up from 45% a year ago -- nearly equal to the 58% of men who have streamed online video in the same time period. In the grown-up category, Ipsos reports that 60% of adults 35-54 have recently streamed online video, up from 49% in 2007.

In addition, I had lunch last week with Eric Wright (SVP, Marketing & Business Development) from DS Simon Productions, whose firm conducted a survey of some 200 “web influencers” about this very subject just recently. They're poised to make aggressive moves in this area, and I can see why.

According to the survey, a full 65% of online media sites now use video, and 77% of online media sites project the use of video to increase over the next year. I believe that this will be an ongoing trend, as broadband use becomes more prevalent, both nation- and worldwide.

About 45% of TV stations use outside video for their Web sites, while two-thirds of radio stations, newspapers, magazines and bloggers use outside video on their Web sites. Of course, the strongest interest in sourced video content comes from ‘web media’, which I imagine like a ‘hyper-local’ television affiliate, with limited resources to create their own video content. However, they all have broadband access, and can download from an FTP site (or otherwise). The advancing usage of digital editing works for both parties: online outlets can produce professional-quality video packages at their desktops, and traditional media has regular access to the technology to download video directly to edit bays -- this was a problem back when I was in the TV biz, actually.

New York Times