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CNN Freeing Up Some News Videos
from the one-step-forward dept
A few years ago, all of the major television news stations started locking up their online video behind a paid wall. At the time, they made the legitimate claim that the bandwidth involved in offering up all that video was simply too costly to let it go for free. However, it appears things are changing a bit. CNN has said that it's now become cheap enough that they can free up all the video that used to be paid-only -- though, they're working on a different premium package. Of course, with the sudden focus on new business models for video content, it makes you wonder if news organizations like CNN and others wouldn't be better off offering up all of their video online for free, and using screen real estate for advertising. They could even use something like BitTorrent to drastically cut down on the bandwidth costs. In an age where competing for viewers is important, this could give them a leg up on other cable news stations.
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Catching Up, I See
Since video news from American sources is rare, I've been watching a lot more video clips from BBC and NHK (Japan's version of BBC). The non-profit news organizations, with secure government funding, do have a distinct advantage here. American news feels so profit-oriented and sleazy.
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One of my friends used to work for an all news station in Houston. It posted a lot of video online making it nice to watch since I live in a different state. It went under last year. But I blame that more on it being a badly run AOL/TW venture than the costs of having video online.
I thought that the best model was to offer higher resolution video only to paid subscribers, while still offering low res streams for everyone.
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Not that too many people care about this. I stopped going to cnn.com when they stopped the free video feeds.
They got the point now that not too many people are interested in signing up for their service because the value/price is not that high. You can get the same info for free from somewhere else.
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