Showing posts with label TV. Show all posts
Showing posts with label TV. Show all posts
Monday, May 10, 2010
YouTube For Traders - Searchable News Video Streams
One reason why local TV can start packing its bags. Video will be big and dominate the landscape, but it will be video streamed via the Internet as NYT media writer David Carr points out in this column. Journalism schools need to start training students for this market. -MT
New York Times -For half an hour last Thursday afternoon, CNBC was the most exciting place on television. Watching Erin Burnett and Jim Cramer try not to freak out — they acquitted themselves nicely — while the market tumbled like a drunken rag doll down a long staircase was amazing television, David Carr writes in The New York Times.
The rest of the time, as when the market is not suffering the largest drop within a single day of trading? Um, not so much. Even if you are an avowed business bobble-head, most of the time, CNBC and other financial channels are a kind of wallpaper. Business people mostly live in narrow verticals. If you follow and trade in uranium, it’s not going to pop up all that often on the linear channels of television.
So Thomson Reuters is trying to change television. Its new product, Reuters Insider, is a Web-based video service that captures myriad streams of information produced by the company’s reporters and 150 partners. The service, which will begin Tuesday, is something like a You Tube for the financially interested, albeit one that is available only to Reuters subscribers, who pay as much as $2,000 a month.
Using the main window of the service, called Channel One, subscribers can navigate by sector, date, markets or region, or apply filters to create their own personalized channels.
Thomson Reuters, which was formed in a merger in 2008, creating a $30 billion behemoth in financial news and information, is making a big bet on Insider, about $100 million. While its chief competitor, Bloomberg, is making inroads into consumer media with its purchase of Businessweek, Thomson Reuters is going in the opposite direction.
Why try to sell advertisers on a broad television network when you can get subscribers — investment banks, analysts, market players — to pay and pay dearly for the information ginned up by 2,800 reporters from 200 bureaus around the world, not to mention lots of other technical business intelligence from a curated group of partners?
The effort also tells us something about the place online video now occupies. “The trend that we are seeing in professional information is not all that different than consumer media,” said Devin Wenig, chief executive for the markets division of Thomson Reuters. “People are increasingly visual, and they expect to access information in that way. They want to be able to look at a chief executive and see the expression on the analyst’s face.”
Of course, just about anybody could go out on the Web and find gobs of people spouting off about financial matters. But Reuters Insider also produces almost real-time transcripts through voice recognition technology — the renderings are pretty rough, but useful — and then humans come behind and clean up some of those transcripts, while adding additional tags, links and other relevant information.
New York Times -For half an hour last Thursday afternoon, CNBC was the most exciting place on television. Watching Erin Burnett and Jim Cramer try not to freak out — they acquitted themselves nicely — while the market tumbled like a drunken rag doll down a long staircase was amazing television, David Carr writes in The New York Times.
The rest of the time, as when the market is not suffering the largest drop within a single day of trading? Um, not so much. Even if you are an avowed business bobble-head, most of the time, CNBC and other financial channels are a kind of wallpaper. Business people mostly live in narrow verticals. If you follow and trade in uranium, it’s not going to pop up all that often on the linear channels of television.
So Thomson Reuters is trying to change television. Its new product, Reuters Insider, is a Web-based video service that captures myriad streams of information produced by the company’s reporters and 150 partners. The service, which will begin Tuesday, is something like a You Tube for the financially interested, albeit one that is available only to Reuters subscribers, who pay as much as $2,000 a month.
Using the main window of the service, called Channel One, subscribers can navigate by sector, date, markets or region, or apply filters to create their own personalized channels.
Thomson Reuters, which was formed in a merger in 2008, creating a $30 billion behemoth in financial news and information, is making a big bet on Insider, about $100 million. While its chief competitor, Bloomberg, is making inroads into consumer media with its purchase of Businessweek, Thomson Reuters is going in the opposite direction.
Why try to sell advertisers on a broad television network when you can get subscribers — investment banks, analysts, market players — to pay and pay dearly for the information ginned up by 2,800 reporters from 200 bureaus around the world, not to mention lots of other technical business intelligence from a curated group of partners?
The effort also tells us something about the place online video now occupies. “The trend that we are seeing in professional information is not all that different than consumer media,” said Devin Wenig, chief executive for the markets division of Thomson Reuters. “People are increasingly visual, and they expect to access information in that way. They want to be able to look at a chief executive and see the expression on the analyst’s face.”
Of course, just about anybody could go out on the Web and find gobs of people spouting off about financial matters. But Reuters Insider also produces almost real-time transcripts through voice recognition technology — the renderings are pretty rough, but useful — and then humans come behind and clean up some of those transcripts, while adding additional tags, links and other relevant information.
Friday, March 6, 2009
Business News Tops Among TV Viewers
Post courtesy of Mary Rogus, OU Faculty.
By David F. Carr -- Broadcasting & Cable, 3/4/2009 2:05:07 PM MT
Amid all the worries about the health of the TV news business, dozens of local newscasts have managed to achieve year-over-year ratings growth of more than 20 percent, according to an analysis by Nielsen and Broadcasting & Cable.
In November, the Associated Press reported that tough economic news is good for evening newscasts, noting that in January the CBS, ABC, and NBC newscasts each captured their highest ratings in years as viewers tuned in for the start of a new presidency and to get the latest on the state of the economy.
We asked whether local newscasts were sharing in that ratings boost, and Nielsen produced a custom ratings report comparing newscasts in 56 metered markets for the “early fringe” time of the evening during November. The chart below is limited to stations that achieved a rating of at least 5 (5% of the total viewing “universe” for their market).http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/189476-Growing_Ratings_Despite_Because_Of_Down_Economy.php
By David F. Carr -- Broadcasting & Cable, 3/4/2009 2:05:07 PM MT
Amid all the worries about the health of the TV news business, dozens of local newscasts have managed to achieve year-over-year ratings growth of more than 20 percent, according to an analysis by Nielsen and Broadcasting & Cable.
In November, the Associated Press reported that tough economic news is good for evening newscasts, noting that in January the CBS, ABC, and NBC newscasts each captured their highest ratings in years as viewers tuned in for the start of a new presidency and to get the latest on the state of the economy.
We asked whether local newscasts were sharing in that ratings boost, and Nielsen produced a custom ratings report comparing newscasts in 56 metered markets for the “early fringe” time of the evening during November. The chart below is limited to stations that achieved a rating of at least 5 (5% of the total viewing “universe” for their market).http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/189476-Growing_Ratings_Despite_Because_Of_Down_Economy.php
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
The Death of Local TV Stations
LAS VEGAS -- Lisa Howfield, general manager of KVBC, the NBC affiliate here, watched last year as the broadcast-television business began to shrink. She started cutting. She combined departments. She made do with old equipment, and did away with luxuries like yearly sales getaways.
In December and January, she laid off 15 employees, or 6% of her staff. After the weatherman left last month, one of the morning news anchors took on both jobs. "It's like a bad roller-coaster ride," says Ms. Howfield. Her station's full-day viewership is down 7.7% this TV season from the same period last year, according to Nielsen Co., and Ms. Howfield expects her ad revenue in 2009 will be down 30% from 2008.
Local television stations like Ms. Howfield's dominated the TV business for more than half a century. They inspired the term "network": a web of Channel 7s and 11s that delivered shows from ABC, CBS, NBC -- and later, Fox -- plus local news, syndicated reruns and talk shows. Because the stations owned the licenses to the airwaves that broadcast TV signals, big networks couldn't distribute content without them. In turn, local stations became the vehicles for the greatest mass-market advertising blitz in history.
Now, with their viewership in decline and ad revenue on a downward spiral, many local TV stations face the prospect of being cut out of the picture. Executives at some major networks are beginning to talk about an option that once would have been unthinkable: eventually taking shows straight to cable, where networks can take in a steady stream of subscriber fees even in an advertising slump.
In December, CBS Corp.'s chief executive, Leslie Moonves, told an investor conference that moving the CBS network to cable would be "a very interesting proposition." Two days earlier, Jeff Zucker, chief executive of General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal, warned more broadly that the entire broadcast-TV model must change. "Otherwise it will be like the newspaper business or the car business," he told investors.
[Tv stations revenue]
Many local stations -- once treated like royalty by broadcast networks -- are scaling back their original programming, cutting down on weekend news shows and trimming staff. Nationwide, 2009 TV-station ad revenue is projected to fall 20% to 30%, according to Bernstein Research.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123422910357065971.html#printMode
In December and January, she laid off 15 employees, or 6% of her staff. After the weatherman left last month, one of the morning news anchors took on both jobs. "It's like a bad roller-coaster ride," says Ms. Howfield. Her station's full-day viewership is down 7.7% this TV season from the same period last year, according to Nielsen Co., and Ms. Howfield expects her ad revenue in 2009 will be down 30% from 2008.
Local television stations like Ms. Howfield's dominated the TV business for more than half a century. They inspired the term "network": a web of Channel 7s and 11s that delivered shows from ABC, CBS, NBC -- and later, Fox -- plus local news, syndicated reruns and talk shows. Because the stations owned the licenses to the airwaves that broadcast TV signals, big networks couldn't distribute content without them. In turn, local stations became the vehicles for the greatest mass-market advertising blitz in history.
Now, with their viewership in decline and ad revenue on a downward spiral, many local TV stations face the prospect of being cut out of the picture. Executives at some major networks are beginning to talk about an option that once would have been unthinkable: eventually taking shows straight to cable, where networks can take in a steady stream of subscriber fees even in an advertising slump.
In December, CBS Corp.'s chief executive, Leslie Moonves, told an investor conference that moving the CBS network to cable would be "a very interesting proposition." Two days earlier, Jeff Zucker, chief executive of General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal, warned more broadly that the entire broadcast-TV model must change. "Otherwise it will be like the newspaper business or the car business," he told investors.
[Tv stations revenue]
Many local stations -- once treated like royalty by broadcast networks -- are scaling back their original programming, cutting down on weekend news shows and trimming staff. Nationwide, 2009 TV-station ad revenue is projected to fall 20% to 30%, according to Bernstein Research.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123422910357065971.html#printMode
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)