Video Killed the Radio Star, But Might Save Newspapers: Tech News « What comes to mind when you think of newspapers? Whatever it is, it’s probably not streaming video. Yet one of the interesting facts in a new survey of the online video market (PDF link) from video-hosting platform Brightcove and analytics provider TubeMogul is that newspapers overtook broadcasters in terms of the total number of video minutes streamed in the third quarter of 2010. As news publishers of all kinds try to move their operations online, more and more seem to be getting the message that the future includes video.
The Brightcove and TubeMogul report shows that the number of video titles uploaded by newspapers climbed by more than 50 percent in the quarter to almost half a million, and that was more than double the number of videos that newspaper sites uploaded in the same quarter of 2009. The total number of minutes streamed rose to 313 million in the most recent quarter, the report says, compared with 290 million for broadcasters. Related GigaOM Pro content (sub req’d): O'Reilly Media: RT @timoreilly Excellent... View the iPad as a magazine opportunity, not a container. As more magazines take advantage of the iPad’s popularity, one thing thus far has been clear: most publishers are simply reproducing their print products on the digital screen.
In a recent interview, Matthew Carlson, principal of experience strategy and design at Hot Studio Inc., said established magazines are thus far missing the boat by producing iPad editions weighed down by bloated files, slow downloads and locked content: Magazines have traditionally thought of themselves as kind of a locked book, of a complete, discreet object.
Ideally, something that is going to be really interactive or live out on the web needs to be more like an open book — like if you took the cover of the magazine and turned it outside in so that people could discover and access the stories more effectively. A screenshot from the Flipboard iPad app. Who’s doing it right? The magazines that are doing the best job right now wouldn’t be considered traditional magazines at all. Related: The journo-programmer. For Newspapers, the Future Is Now: Digital Must Be First: Tech News « As newspapers everywhere struggle to stay afloat and remake themselves for a web-based world, many continue to debate how much emphasis they should put on digital vs. their traditional print operations. John Paton, CEO of the Journal Register group of newspapers, says the time for debate is over. Newspapers need to be digital first in everything they do, he says, and more than that, they need to take the same approach to their businesses that many web-based startups have, and that means being transparent, crowdsourced, collaborative and flat.
There’s no question; it’s an inspiring message, but will anyone listen? In a speech he delivered Thursday at the Transformation of News Summit in Cambridge, Mass. We are getting out of anything that does not fall into our core competencies of content creation and the selling of our audience to advertisers. Digital ad growth is 2 times better than the industry. The solution, according to Paton? Stop listening to newspaper people. Ebook pricing power is undermined by perceived value. Much discussion (and some dismay) surrounds the current upheaval in the ebook pricing model. As $0.99 ebooks sit “shelved” next to $19.99 ebooks (whose print counterparts might be discounted to $11.99), one of the larger issues surrounding the pricing problem is the perception of value from customers.
Jane Litte at Dear Author argued in a recent post that value is based on the reader’s “willingness and ability to pay”: Every reader has a different price they are willing and able to pay for a book. I believe that price represents the value a reader places on a book at the time of purchase. However, value can vary over the course of time from when the reader first becomes aware of the book to after the book is read, increasing and decreasing based on different variables. I asked Todd Sattersten, author and owner of BizBookLab, to chime in on the pricing issue. How are customer perceptions of ebook value influenced? Are ebooks destined to be priced at $0.99? Related: