Category Archives: Multimedia

View TV Group plans to bring local TV to 660 UK towns

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A company specialising in video on demand and TV production has set up a platform that allow towns to buy a licence and broadcast content online.

View TV Group is currently working with 78 towns and aims for a total of 660 to sign up to use its “View TV Local”, a BBC iPlayer-style site compatible with iPhone and iPad.

The proposition is that each town will provide half its content and View TV Group will supply the rest, with the same programming, such as motoring reviews and national programmes, being rolled out to all areas.

The company plans to “up sell” the local content created to the TV stations which are planned as part of culture secretary Jeremy Hunt’s planned local TV network.

Earlier this week, Hunt backtracked on plans to create a centralised service and instead confirmed he favours individual TV stations.

Chairman and founder of View TV Group Jamie Branson told Journalism.co.uk the company’s proposals offered something different.

“Think of View TV Local as more like a hyperlocal and Hunt’s plans as regional TV,” he explained.

View TV Group is now selling licences for towns with costs starting at around £10,000, which pays for the technology, support and unlimited video upload.

After paying for a licence the local TV channels can bring in revenue by selling local advertising, a cut of which goes to the View TV Group. The company believes it has devised a revenue model that will work and “where the only risk is the initial licence fee”, Branson explained.

Branson did not want to reveal company names but said his firm is in talks with a newspaper group, plus several magazines and online publishers interested in local TV and video content.

Channel 4 News to launch iPhone and iPad app

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Channel 4 News is to launch a new iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch app on Friday. Developers are currently working on an Android version.

The free app allows users to watch catch-up videos for seven days. Content can be accessed via a 3G or wifi connection and can be viewed when devices are offline.

You can see Jon Snow promoting the app in this video:

According to a release, the new app will carry the most popular website features – including Jon Snow’s daily Snowblog.

The app will allow users to access the latest top domestic and international news stories, plus the most important news from the worlds of politics, science and technology, business and culture from the Channel 4 News team of correspondents and reporters; all the Channel 4 News blogs, including Cathy Newman’s FactCheck and the World News Blog; special reports and galleries (iPad only); and to watch video of the last seven days from the Channel 4 News at 7pm and noon programmes.

The app will allow users to share all of this content through social media and email.

Guardian launches Kindle edition and outlines new mobile plans

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The Guardian has launched its Kindle edition of the Guardian and Observer, which is said to carry content from the day’s newspaper and will be available to download seven days a week in the UK, US and more than 100 other countries.

In a post outlining the launch the Guardian says the edition is available to download from Amazon for a 14-day free trial, after which it will be priced at £9.99 a month in the UK, or £0.99 per issue.

The post also outlines two launches on the horizon for iPad and Android.

We’ve been working on iPad over the past few months and we’re currently testing it with some of our readers. Our objective has been to produce the most accessible, elegant interpretation of the Guardian newspaper for iPad and we hope we’re close to achieving that aim.

According to the Guardian, which recently announced a digital-first strategy, the new app will see the newspaper redesigned “exclusively in tablet form”.

The app will deliver a single daily edition of content, specifically curated for iPad. Like Kindle, it will be a subscription product, though we will be releasing it with a free trial period from launch.

The Guardian’s first Android app is due to launch in autumn and a new product for the HP TouchPad called Guardian Zeitgeist is also in the pipeline.

#su2011: iPad creates new demand for evening news

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Apple’s iPad has created a new appetite among readers for fresh news content in the evening, according to AFP’s head of editorial research and development.

Speaking at the WAN-IFRA summer university in Paris, Denis Teyssou quoted research from comScore which found the iPad was changing the game regarding news consumption towards the end of the day.

While computers are the dominant device for news during the working day, and smartphone use is relatively constant throughout the day, tablets overtook both of them to become the number one device in the evening.

However, Teyssou said some existing news products tailored for the iPad – notably Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily – did not necessarily cater for this evening boost in audience.

Teyssou is the head of editorial for AFP’s research and development division, Medialab, which is responsible for developing iPhone and iPad apps, user-generated content, data tools and mash-ups.

He presented an overview of how the tablet publishing market is developing, one year after Apple launched its iPad.

Before the launch, analysts were cautious about how many units would ship. ABI Research had estimated four million sales in 2010. The actual figure was four times the size.

The figure is now expected to grow rapidly in the next few years. Infinite Research expects that 147.2 million tablet computers will ship in 2015.

Analysis from Gartner, also for 2015, estimates Apple will have achieved total cumulative tablet sales of 138 million worldwide by then. Another 113 million tablets will have shipped that use Android as the operating system.

Out of the apps in Apple’s iPad Hall of Fame, news apps are the second biggest category, behind games. Traditional players dominate, with CNN, NPR and the Wall Street Journal occupying the top three positions.

However, the next four positions are occupied by newcomers:  content aggregator Flipboard, customisable news reader Pulse, Instapaper, and RSS app Reeder for iPad.

Other news apps that Teyssou thinks will grow in popularity include personalised magazine Zite, News.me and news aggregator Ongo.

Related content:

FT looks to bypass Apple charges with new web-based iPad app

Economist reveals download numbers for iPhone and iPad apps

Sky News launches free iPad app but commits to adding monthly fee

Reuters: Athletes can tweet at 2012 as long as not in manner of journalists

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According to Reuters, athletes due to perform at the 2012 Olympics in London, have been told they can blog and tweet about their experiences of competing in the games, as long as it is “not done for commercial purposes”.

The decision comes from the International Olympic Committee, Reuters reports, which was said to actively encourage and supports athletes “to take part in ‘social media’ and to post, blog and tweet their experiences”.

Bloggers and tweeters must, however, restrict themselves to “first-person, diary-type formats”, must not report on events in the manner of journalists and must ensure their posts do not contain “vulgar or obscene words or images”.

According to the report, broadcasting of video and audio taken inside the venues remains banned but athletes may post videos taken outside the venues.

The IOC gets much of its revenue from the sale of television and online media rights and is therefore highly protective of their intellectual property in that regard.

Related content:

Figures suggest falling cost of media centre for Olympics

Times named sports newspaper of the year

University professor aims to create citizen social media network to cover Olympics

Beet.TV: Vook on working with ABC News to produce video books

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In this video interview on Beet.TV Matthew Cavnar, head of product at Vook, a company which creates video books, talks about its collaboration with ABC News to produce a ‘vook’ which combines its text and video reporting of significant events.

Recent publications produced by Vook and ABC News, which Cavner claims offers the “360 degree experience of a news story”, includes the capture of Osama Bin Laden and the royal wedding in London.

Cavner added that while the company is looking at extending the platform out to partners, for now it is concentrating on its uses in-house.

Right now we’re really focused on going to a media company, going to a publisher, and saying we’ve got the platform … come work with us and create 50, 100, 1,000 titles because we’ve got the ability to do it.

… We think we’re basically cornering that market of scalable quality.

Related content:

OWNI.eu publishes Wikileaks ebook

How to: Make online video storytelling work

Media Trust calls on young citizen journalists for London scheme

 

Media release: BBC announces launch of web-connected TV product

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Today the BBC announced the launch of a new product for connected TVs which, according to a release will see BBC News video news clips brought to television via the internet.

The BBC News product for connected TV combines existing video and text content from BBC News Online and will initially be made available on Samsung’s range of Smart TVs. It will subsequently be made available on a range of connected devices over time.

This is part of a “value for money” strategy to re-purpose BBC Online products for a wide range of devices. Editorial teams in the BBC’s newsrooms will work to curate clips to complement the 24 news channel and to run alongside text-based news from BBC News Online. And the control of what content the user views will be in their hands, with navigation via the remote.

BBC Worldwide is also said to be launching an international version which will be supported by advertising. In a blog post BBC Online editor Steve Herrmann said in time the product will also be rolled out to other devices in the UK.

News sites can remove YouTube logo for embedded video

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News sites and blogs no longer have to display YouTube’s logo on embedded videos.

YouTube announced the change on its blog, where it has published a full list of player parameters.

To remove the YouTube logo from the player when displaying a video on your site just add the code ?modestbranding=1 to  the end of the URL. For example:

<iframe width=”425″ height=”349″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/IytNBm8WA1c?modestbranding=1” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>

A small YouTube text label will still show up in the upper-right corner of a paused video when you hover over the player.

The video-sharing site has also introduced ‘As Seen On’ YouTube pages. These pages bring together videos from news sites which regularly display YouTube videos, such as the Guardian, which now has its own As Seen On page.

A YouTube blog post explains how it does this:

By crawling web feeds of sites that have embedded videos, we’ve built dedicated pages that highlight your embedded videos. This means that there is now a place on YouTube to find videos mentioned on your favorite blogs & sites. We think these pages provide a way to find new and interesting content while helping you dive deeper into the conversation around a video.

A third recent development is HD preview, the option to add a high-quality placeholder image to a YouTube video in the hope of encouraging more viewers to be tempted to click play.

TechCrunch: YouTube launches creative commons licence option

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It is being widely reported that YouTube has now launched the ability for users to choose how they licence their content through its video editor platform.

The new Creative Commons option will give other people permission to use footage, including for commercial purposes, with attribution, according to TechCrunch.

It is also reported that initially YouTube is working with content partners including C-SPAN and Al Jazeera to offer a starting batch of 10,000 videos under the creative commons license. Al Jazeera already makes some of its content available under a creative commons licence, shown in this repository. TechCrunch reports that it will not take long for YouTube’s 10,000 video store to grow.

That library will rapidly increase as more people switch their content over to Creative Commons, and there’s even a tool that will let you swap the license for a bunch of videos at once.

A request for more information from YouTube has not yet been answered, but details of YouTube’s creative commons policy can be found here.

New York Times media desk gets the Hollywood treatment (sort of)

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A new documentary on the New York Times is to hit the silver screen soon.

According to the blurb, director Andrew Rossi “deftly gains unprecedented access to the New York Times newsroom and the inner workings of the Media Desk”.

Going by the trailer, media reporters David Carr and Brian Stelter feature a fair bit, with media desk editor Bruce Headlam and media reporter Tim Arango also getting a look in the short promo.

“I still can’t get over the feeling that Brian Stelter was a robot assembled to destroy me,” says Carr.