Earlier this month, Mashable readers named HuffPost Live the most innovative media product to emerge in 2012. The web-only video news service beat out five other contenders nominated by Sree Sreenivasan, chief digital officer of Columbia University, including Dark Sky, Flipboard, Timehop and RebelMouse.
HuffPost Live launched in mid-August, and immediately began serving up 12 hours of live video, from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. EST, every weekday. Most of the programming is done in a daytime talk show format. Guests -- a mix of Huffington Post writers, third-party experts and viewers -- are brought into HuffPost Live's studios in New York and Los Angeles, but more often are welcomed via Google Hangout or Skype.
Segments aren't divided into shows, and there's no set programming schedule. Rather, programming develops alongside the day's news, often taking inspiration from stories published to huffingtonpost.com's 60+ sections. Viewers are encouraged to explore content produced earlier in the day, and to chime in with text and video comments via a chat dialogue posted prominently on the home page. Viewer comments are frequently cited by hosts.
In its first month, HuffPost Live welcomed 2,000 guests and generated 1,200 clips -- ranging from minute-long highlights to 25-minute segments -- that were redistributed on huffingtonpost.com and AOL's other web properties, a portfolio that includes TechCrunch, Engadget and DailyFinance.
"That's really where the business lies," Roy Sekoff, HuffPost president and founding editor of The Huffington Post, told Mashable in an earlier interview. "Creating all that content and being able to put it in places where the eyeballs are."
Some have speculated that HuffPost Live has ambitions to "kill" cable news, but Sekoff says he and his team are trying to create a new medium altogether -- what he has previously described as "CNN meets YouTube."
"We don't do shows," he told Mashable, explaining that web viewers don't tune in to shows at set times the way TV viewers do. And the web gives HuffPost Live the opportunity to be more social than TV. "People don't want to be talked at anymore, they want to be talked with -- part of the conversation. That's the big difference between cable news and us," Sekoff said.
HuffPost Live isn't the only entity aiming to define the future of online news video. Last year, YouTube provided a year's worth of funding to a handful of news organizations, including The Wall Street Journal and Reuters, to build out their video offerings. This has led to the development of online-only shows, like Tech Tonic with Reuters' Anthony de Rosa, as well as special reports on a variety of topics. These videos are often short, typically lasting between two-and-a-half and six minutes.
Upstarts like NowThisNews and Ora.tv are likewise trying to set the stage for video's future. NowThisNews produces between 12 and 15 bite-sized video segments per day, a mix of clips and news explainers narrated in a humorous (and somewhat frenetic) voice that's reminiscent of those found on entertainment or pop culture-focused TV channels. Ora.tv, which is backed by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helú, is positioning itself as an "on-demand digital television network." Currently, it is only running one half-hour show, Larry King Now, which it also slices and re-distributes as one to four-minute clips.
Arguably, HuffPost Live is the most fully realized of all these products: After a faltering first few weeks, it has developed a consistent rhythm and format, and if at times it moves slowly (which it does), it is no more guilty of that than its peers on daytime television.
Around the time of HuffPost Live, Sekoff said he planned to extend HuffPost Live's coverage to 16 hours per day, but he says that is no longer on the road map for 2013.
"Our immediate goal for 2013 is to increase distribution both internally and externally (i.e. making it easier to access HuffPost Live content across the HuffPost and AOL universe, and to get our programming on as many screens and platforms as possible -- including Android phones and tablets and additional OTT platforms like X-Box)," he wrote in an e-mail to Mashable. "From a programming perspective, we are looking to build on the special approach to big events we started in 2012... and apply it to events such as the Oscars and the Super Bowl."
Have you tuned into HuffPost Live? Do you like the format? Tell us in the comments.
Image courtesy of HuffPost Live
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