Time Warner’s Video Blitz
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Written By Reprise Media | July 31, 2006 | Share This
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There’s no denying it: video is hot right now. By this time next month, your bowl of Wheaties might even have its own user-generated video content portal. For this week, though, we’ll have to settle for CNN.com and AOL, both of which are under the umbrella of Time Warner - coincidentally, their Q2 earnings come out Wednesday.
CNN’s play, called CNN Exchange, is an attempt to grab some of the handmade amateur news footage that’s been showing up on YouTube (and other video sharing sites) in recent months. But unlike those sites, says PaidContent, CNN will vet any clips it receives before posting them online as “I-reports.”
According to TechCrunch, Blip.tv is providing the nuts and bolts behind CNN Exchange. The site seems very similar to a project Yahoo! was rumored to be working on a couple of months back, except that Exchange will also accept pictures, audio and text. No word on whether CNN plans to offer, ahem, any incentives for citizens’ news.
Not quite deja vu As for AOL Video, well, you’ll be forgiven for thinking we’ve been down this road before. It isn’t exactly a rerun, although the company’s recent spate of very familiar-looking offerings might make it seem so.
The new-look AOL Video, reportedly launching Friday, will apparently incorporate AOL’s YouTube-esque UnCut Video, but the meat-and-potatoes will be commercial, buy-to-own (at $1.99) and free (ad-supported) video content. Says ClickZ, most of the videos - from the likes of Warner Bros., MTV Networks and A&E Television - will be subsidized by pre-roll, mid-roll and banner advertising. AOL hopes that creating this ‘one-stop shop’ for both traditional full-length shows and user-generated entertainment will solve a problem people didn’t even know they had, namely: having to switch windows from iTunes to YouTube.
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