Rich Skrenta, CEO and founder of Topix.net chats about the future of Internet video

Posted by John Burke on May 20, 2005 at 4:47 PM

If you hadn't noticed, more and more videos seem to be popping up on the World Wide Web, adding to the richness of the medium. This past week, news aggregator Topix.net added Reuters video streams to its list of sources, expanding its news gathering capabilities. The Editors Weblog conducted an email interview with Topix.net CEO and founder Rich Skrenta find out where Internet video is going. Be sure to join Skrenta, who will be speaking at the 12th World Editors Forum in Seoul, during the Editors BlogCong, from May 29 to June 1 at www.editorsweblog.org.

1. How important do you think video feeds will be to the future of Internet news?

Video content on television is obviously hugely popular with consumers. The Internet is primarily a text and static image medium today, but as the technology allows more users access to video it will become an essential part of the package. What's exciting is that the Internet can merge the benefits of a detailed written report from a newspaper with the richness of a video report from television, all in a single package.

Television is a linear experience -- you turn it on, watch for 30 minutes or an hour, and shut it off. Internet delivery is going to be much more about finding individual pieces that you want to watch, interspersed with other content.

2. Do you predict that many news organizations will begin to include more video in their feeds in order to compete? Is this the end of television?

I'm not getting rid of my television. :-) Or radio or newspaper for that matter. I think adding video content to online news is an opportunity for growth and differentiation. If there are two similar stories about an event -- say a hurricane -- and one has links to video clips, but the other doesn't, I'm going to want to see the article that lets me expand the experience of the story.

3. Will Topix be diversifying by installing a video aggregator and search like Yahoo and Google have done?

I think we see video content as just another part of the incremental news stream to include in our categorization, and provide through our 300,000 news channels. It's not really about including or excluding any specific kind of content. If we can automatically figure out what a new document, video or audio clip is about, and our users might want to see it, we want to include that in our news channel stream.

4. Will the convergence of newspapers with broadcast media be sped up by Internet news video?

I'm not familiar enough with that trend to comment. I don't think media is converging actually, we're seeing more and more outlets for information, new publishers and news kinds of publishing are springing up every day. The number of producers of content is exploding, not contracting.

5. Will we soon be able to receive RSS feeds purely for video streams?

You already can. Check out the Reuters video RSS feeds at http://www.reuters.com/newsrss.jhtml

6. Will RSS summaries be a quick, enticing 5 seconds of video clippings instead of a text summary like most RSS aggregators include now?

That's a user experience issue that still needs to be figured out. I'm sure some publishers will have video start as soon as you access an item, as happens with some rich-media ads. Others will wait for a user action to start the playback. If you've got video playing for a summary it's going to be distracting to show more than one summary at a time. Probably a representive still frame and some text would be my bet, but it's early for this stuff, we'll have to see how it evolves.

7. Does all this mean that the future newspaper editor will also have to be trained in video editing?

The newspaper editor currently works with a lot of different folks -- infographic designers, photo editors, graphic layout experts. A film director works with a whole team of people to put together a movie. They don't need to know how to develop film to do that.

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