New York Times Signs Up for Next-Stage Video
First published at Outsell, March 19, 2010
Important Details: It seemed like an odd pairing, with first reading of the press release: the New York Times has partnered with Thought Equity Motion, a company specializing in “motion content solutions.” The Times is the first newspaper company to sign up with seven-year-old, Denver-based Thought Equity, which counts among its clients CBS, NBC, the BBC and NHK, Japan’s national broadcasting corporation.
For the Times, Thought Equity Motion will take about two years of news video, from the time when the company started to produce video in earnest, and enable their greater re-use. The Times hopes that digitization will open the door to wider web usage and greater monetization. Certainly, broadcasters have an advantage here, producing moving pictures as part of their legacies, yet most have been slow to understand the translation of that advantage to the web, as text-based competitors like the Times, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, the Telegraph, the Guardian and Times Online ramp up their embrace of video.
Thought Equity CEO and Founder Kevin Schaff told Outsell that much of the work is foundational, with the company having 10.5 million hours under contract, but has only digitized 10% of it so far.
Its services are straightforward: it provides transcoding and digitization (turning tape to video), some speech-to-text categorization and is building out a marketplace to help syndicate news video, in addition to leveraging its existing sales staff. The addition of metadata and rights management completes what is intended to be a fully outsourced video management system for news media.
In addition to syndication monetization, media companies gain access to the video for usage on their own websites, in context with text stories, based on matching of metadata.
Its business model is a simple, if nuanced one. Media companies can pay the cost of the technology processing and then keep all licensing revenues, or Thought Equity Motion can pay the costs and gain a larger revenue share of licensing, or the parties may meet somewhere between. Schaff says that over the last year, media companies have increasingly opted to pay more and bet on greater rewards down the road.
Key content areas of focus for the company are sports, number one, and news, number two.
“We’re going after speed to context,” says Schaff. “They [media] used to have 24 hours to break a story. Now they have seven minutes. And then there’s social media,” which virally spreads video near and far instantaneously.
As college basketball’s March Madness starts its run this week, Thought Equity Motion has co-produced NCAA Vault with CBS, having digitized “every play, every stat for the last 10 years.”
Implications: It’s noteworthy that the New York Times is the first newspaper company to sign with Thought Equity Motion. If we look out over the next couple of years, as broadband becomes increasingly dominant, web video becomes an everyday experience for the masses and mobile video quickly loses the sense of being exotic, we can see the great value in instantly accessible digital video — and the ability to link it automatically to related text content.
It’s ironic that broadcasters have been slow to move on their archives and their daily production, but they are now moving quickly, and regional broadcasters are, in fits and starts, joining them. Text-based publishers started delving into news video a couple of years ago, with many pulling back in the recession.
So far, we see a large divide among the top nationally and globally focused companies’ recognition of the opportunity and related investment, and local media.
Outsell believes the Times announcement is a wake-up call for all news media. The future is arriving sooner than some companies have planned.
