Check it out. I knew the Times Union was starting to shoot its own video for their website, but I just discovered they're using YouTube to host that video.
Which means, if you see a story you're interested in, you can go ahead and embed their video on your blog.
It's a win-win. Good for you and your blog. Good publicity for the Times Union.
Below is a video that goes with a recent feature story on the cup stacking craze (which my kids aren't into yet). But they're shooting video for "harder" news stories too...
Mike Sussman points out in comments below that the TU is missing the boat to an extent by not doing a good job of branding their videos, and he's right. At first glance, it's not obvious that's a TU video (unless you click through to its YouTube page where you'll see its creator is "tualbany").
I'm sure eventually they'll more sophisticated with their video editing and figure how to incorporate graphics. If they're smart, all of their videos will carry some sort of Times Union bug in the corner.
But I still think they're on the right track.
RELATED NEWS: Rejoice! Embedded video is now showing up in Blogger feeds. Thank you, Blogger folks, for getting that fixed!
It's great that TU is doing this but they're really missing a huge opportunity here. With no branding of any sort, I would've had no clue it came from the Times Union if you hadn't told me. The clean video is great for bloggers but they need to add some sort of identification to see any benefit back.
ReplyDeleteAgreed. Ideally they should be putting some sort of bug on the video in the corner. That's what I would do anyway.
ReplyDeleteThey are a newspaper after all. So all of this is probably pretty new to them. As they get more sophisticated with editing video, supers and bugs will probably come.
But this is a step in the right direction.