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Video Aggregation Done Right - Newsy Relaunches on iPad

We spent a good deal of time at yesterday's MediaPost event ,Tablet Revolution, focusing on video. Early-in advertisers love embedding clips into their ad units, and the first iAds for iPad are just rich with streaming media.

In many respects, the iPad feels like a portable DVR. I myself use it every day to watch Netflix, HBO, and the morning's cup of MSNBC's Morning Joe (usually ready for download by 9:30 each weekday. But the iPad is an interactive device, after all, and advancing the possibilities of the platform beyond time-shifted TV takes more careful thought. Video news aggregator Newsy has deservedly risen to be among the most popular news apps on the iPad because it very effectively multi-sources the day's news into a series of digestible and flexible video clips. The app just greatly enhanced its power with an upgraded version that is excellent.

Users can choose from a wall of video thumbnails for major stories. Newsy has its own team of newscasters who deliver the usual talking head stylings, but the material quotes directly from a range of video and text news sources. Bubble quotes pop out from images and some video clips are strung together with a voiceover that packages the story in much the same way that The Week news magazine does in print or Slate used to do with the morning newspapers.

The app empowers the news junkie in a number of cool ways. You can assemble your own playlist of clips (although the dragging and dropping maneuver in the app is weak). Even better are the tools that share the screen with the currently running video story. You can see the full transcript of the story, see the sources and tap into the original item from the third party source, share and move laterally into other videos - all as the main video plays.

In addition to giving a more global view of the news, this method of aggregation also overcomes some of the pitfalls of current news video online. The video itself is information-packed and efficient. There is no dross or lead-ins that may work better on TV than in the more compressed viewing cycles of Web or app access. Even better, the news reader can access the information in multiple ways. Too often in online news, it is an either/or proposition - video or text. There are way too many stories on news sites that click straight to video, subjecting me to 15-20 seconds of pre-roll and then a lean back experience. What I really wanted was a quick scan of the story. While Newsy starts with a video experience, its content is always compact and quick to deliver the details.  Better still, the direct links to source material let me drop into a deeper dive at will.

As video becomes a ubiquitous part of the media experience it also has to become more flexible and treated less as a discrete, somehow special experience. Embedding video into pages was a start, but the next stages involve cross-linking more effectively and treating video much as we treat images and text now - as way stations and jump off points to a wide range of experiences.
1 comment about "Video Aggregation Done Right - Newsy Relaunches on iPad".
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  1. Ed Docnoc from Work From Home Dad, June 8, 2011 at 9:22 a.m.

    Wow,

    These gaming video, are so real life like. So impressed with the technology and the making of these videos. I see big things coming from this industry...

    Love it.

    Libertyed :)

    P.S.

    I got to blog this !

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