Reuters video to get mass distribution
International news agency Reuters is launching a pilot program on Tuesday that will allow blogs, news organizations and other online publishers to show Reuters news video on their Web sites. — The video affiliate network program will enable Web site operators …
Context & Ripple Effects
With no broadcaster intermediary in the picture, Reuters is extending its core syndication business down the publishing long tail: the video affiliate network pilot announced December 20, 2005 lets blogs, news organizations and other site operators run Reuters news video directly on their pages. For an agency whose video had historically reached audiences through licensed TV deals, the web becomes a distribution channel Reuters controls end-to-end.
The strategic logic is reach over fees — trading tight licensing control for maximum embed footprint at the moment online video consumption is scaling, and positioning Reuters as the default professional video source for publishers who could never produce footage themselves.
First-order effects
- Participating blogs and small news organizations gain immediate access to professional international news video they have no capability to shoot, upgrading their editorial offering at near-zero production cost.
- Reuters converts its video archive into a distributed audience network, gaining placement data and web reach that traditional broadcast licensing deals never surfaced.
Second-order effects
- Publishers that already take Reuters text deepen their reliance on the agency by adding its video, raising switching costs against rival wire services competing for the same newsroom contracts.
- Agencies and broadcasters selling news footage under conventional licenses face pressure to open comparable embed programs or concede the emerging publisher-video layer entirely to Reuters.
Third-order effects
- If embed networks become the standard way video reaches the web, wire services shift from charging per-license fees to competing on network size and the advertising inventory attached to their players — a structural move from content vendor to platform operator.
The trend: News agencies are moving from selling footage to a few broadcasters toward mass-distribution embed networks that trade licensing control for scale across the open web.