As Director of Video Transformation at the Associated Press, Sue Brooks has done in depth research into the importance of video to the content offering of news sites. Below she explains how 'stickiness' of video supports paid content strategies, and encourages news publishers to "use video creatively, reinvent the genre," rather than copy broadcasters. The AP Video Hub makes it easy for publishers to download and edit raw footage.

Anthony Rose is the co-founder and CTO of Zeebox, a new platform for second-screen social engagement. He explains the concept and discusses how an "explosion of content" will get whittled down to the recommendations of friends.

Hear more from Sue and Anthony at DME13 in April. With thanks to ICM Business Video - our video partners at DME.

More than a third of all traffic to The New York Times generates from a mobile device, said Alexandra Hardiman, The Times' Director of Mobile Products at the 5th Tablet and App Summit. And when the paper live-streamed the recent presidential debates, 40% of streamers watched on a mobile device.

Mobile has hence become a key part of the paper’s business, and The Times is putting a great deal of attention into cross-platform usage and mobile-first design, Hardiman said. The fact that tablet use is high in evenings is a very exciting prospect for a news organisation without a broadcast operation, she added, as it is a time of day that papers usually struggle to reach readers.

Tablet and smartphone access is also a key element of The Times’ digital subscription model that has “re-balanced our business,” Hardiman said. The New York Times had 566k paid digital subscribers in Q3, an increase of 11% from the preceding quarter. Perhaps more surprisingly, Hardiman specified that the paper’s print home delivery circulation also increased.

Know your customer, wherever they are, and use that knowledge, advised Stephen Pinches, Group Product Manager for Mobile & Emerging Platforms at the Financial Times, at the 5th Tablet & App Summit last week in Frankfurt. This philosophy is why the paper decided to build its own web-based app for the iPad rather than be part of Apple’s Newsstand: because as well as taking a 30% cut of subscription revenue, Apple does not provide publishers with subscriber data.

Within six weeks of Apple’s demand that publishers offer the same subscription deals through iTunes as they do on their own site, the FT rebuilt its native app as a web app. “It has all the things you would expect from a native app,” Pinches said, but “it allows us to enact whatever business model we choose.”

“We believe that data is fundamental to build our model,” he said, and gave personalized content as an example of how to strengthen relations with readers and offer a better service. “If you are a CEO of a media company we can tell you what other CEOs at media companies are reading.”

For Android devices, the FT took the HTML5 web app and “wrapped it in a little code” to put in the Google store. The paper has already launched a Windows 8 app too.

Google has extended a warning to France’s news publishers: quit trying to make us pay a tax on the snippets of your content displayed by Google News, or you will soon find yourselves un-Google-able. The word may sound like gobbledygook, but the danger is real: the exclusion of the country’s media from the search giant’s results is a worrisome prospect.

Google addressed its warning in the form of a letter to several French ministries earlier this month, AFP revealed yesterday. “I’m a bit surprised by the tone of this correspondence, which sounds like a threat,” replied Culture Minister Aurelie Filippetti. “You don’t deal with a democratically-elected government by making threats.”

Two groups of France’s news publishers, who consider themselves insufficiently compensated for the traffic generated on Google News by bits of their own content, have been looking for a way to share in Google’s advertising revenues since the spring, according to Le Figaro.