|
Download PDF version of this story
Download and install the FREE Adobe Acrobat Reader to read PDF files
(This is a discussion paper not a legal document, proposal, offer or contract.
It doesn’t imply liability or obligation on behalf of or to any person or organization.
If after reading it, if you'd like to discuss it further with us, without obligation,
)
Part of Newsknife's mission is to explore
news innovation. We believe that the Virtual Host system
from Oddcast Media Technologies offers great scope for creating
a web news show that closely simulates popular television news shows.
A major reason we believe this is that the Oddcast VH system is easy for millions
of web users to view. It doesn’t require broadband. An ordinary dial up modem will do.
And users don’t need special plug-ins to view it, except Flash, which they probably already have.
The Oddcast hosts can be remarkably lifelike. Our demonstration
news hosts, Jennifer Nash and Mike Saunders, have been customized
from standard Oddcast characters. Much more sophistication is possible.
We often say that the Newsknife virtual hosts are “more animated
than the average news anchor”©. When you watch a real-life
perfectly coiffed TV news anchor reading from the teleprompter you
might sometimes be inclined to agree.
Another advantage of Oddcast VH shows is that they can be downloaded
and viewed off-line. This raises the possibility of relaying the
Newsknife VH web news show to malls, hotel rooms and for broadcast
by television stations. There are technical considerations to work
through, but suffice to say that at a time when website profitability
is a challenge, the addition of these potentially huge profit channels
is attractive.
So why are we discussing this in public? Why not develop the Virtual News show ourselves?
The reason is that Newsknife’s parent company Industry Standard Computing Ltd is a
small organization, (specializing in marketing, software development and publishing).
We couldn’t finance a significant Virtual News Show ourselves. We had intended to satisfy
ourselves as to its likely technical feasibility and then seek private investment.
However, having now worked through the technical and marketing issues and created the
initial simple demonstration, we have decided it is probably unrealistic to seek private
investors for the standalone project.
We cannot see a clear profit opportunity for them. Optimism about
profit on the Internet has faded, and although the costs would be
relatively low we think it is unlikely that any standalone news
site could return a profit within a couple of years. And the off-line
use, while potentially lucrative appears not to be a low-cost clear-cut
profit opportunity.
We have instead decided to discuss here the use of the Newsknife Virtual News show
as an attractive and reasonably inexpensive way that an existing news website owner
could differentiate their site – and therefore attract more viewers.
Consider the Newsknife Virtual News show for your site!
The rest of this discussion paper outlines the Newsknife VH news show concept,
and discusses costs, profit opportunities, technical issues and what happens next.
The Virtual News concept
Our concept is that two VH puppet news anchors, a man and a woman,
would speak news headlines in a TV-style news show targeted primarily
at the US audience.
The show would be served up continuously from a web site (and possibly
shown to malls, hotel rooms and broadcast from television stations).
Long-term ‘news content’ strategy
The novelty of the VH characters should quickly attract a large number of viewers.
However, this novelty may well fade and the long-term success of the show would
depend on its qualities as a news show. Thus…
- The essence of the show is that it should in
every way possible be like a live human TV news show, e.g. with relaxed interaction
between the hosts.
- But most important, the show must offer a news advantage over
other news purveyors (whatever their media type).
We have devised a method of news gathering that should guarantee
that any news item would always appear on the VH web news site within
15 minutes of it having appeared among the top 6 stories in any
one of the world’s top 6 news websites (as rated by www.newsknife.com).
Given that such stories usually appear on one or two sites before
the others, over time the VH news site would be able to fairly claim
it is “the world’s most consistently up-to-date news”©. This
has the potential to build considerable long-term viewership.
Costs
A full-featured demonstration needs to produced, (and is detailed
below). We are not in possession of enough information yet to produce
an accurate estimate for doing this; $US50,000 is the working figure
we have in mind.
The start up cost for full production is likely to be minimal; a few computers and
Internet connections. Running costs include Oddcast charges and staff costs.
Oddcast charges vary depending on whether the show is served to the VH news site from
Oddcast’s servers or exported from Oddcast to be served up by the news site’s own servers.
We understand that an indicative license fee is $US25,000.
The staff requirements to create the show (principally the news selection, scripting,
recording and uploading) 24 hours a day, seven days a week should be around 20 people
in four 5-person shifts per day.
In other words the cost when compared with the budgets of major
news sites is probably very small.
Profit strategy:
As we mentioned earlier, Newsknife has decided that the chances
of any web site making a profit within two years of launch are slim.
However, an existing news site that has long term funding may well
find the relatively modest cost of adding the VH News show to their
site and off-line publishing, entirely acceptable, especially considering
these possible benefits…
- News sites inevitably appear somewhat similar. The VH news show would differentiate
the site that had exclusive use of it – attracting more viewers.
- Our concept of serving up the top headlines within 15 minutes of them appearing
in any of the world’s top 6 news sites, is a unique selling point.
- The show may be able to be used off-line in places where unlike
on the Internet, it is possible to make a profit from public news
delivery.
Profit could be made from three sources:
- The site could be expected to be a good advertising vehicle given that
20,000,000 Americans go online for their news every day. We have devised
a novel advertising format that could actually attract visitors.
- Website visitors that pay a small members’ fee would view substantially
enhanced and personalized news, e.g. “a list of news headlines since your
last visit (within 24 hours)”.
- We think that a substantial audience and profit could come from
off-line broadcast of the show.
For example, here is an ambitious hypothetical TV broadcast scenario.
The VH news show could be offered free to TV stations worldwide
for immediate re-broadcast. The aim would be to establish widespread
usage of the service, with profits coming from after-sales, as explained
below.
Major TV stations wouldn’t even consider it, but small independent
stations might. It could be ideal for broadcasting a low-cost all-night
news service where they would sell advertising. This could be a
source of large profits for the VH news show originator, from production
and transmission charges for VH commercials prepared for the TV
stations to run with their VH news.
This is an appropriate place to describe the difficulty to be faced
when distributing the VH news show off-line. The VH files downloaded
from Oddcast can be displayed easily on a computer, and Oddcast
says it has converted VH shows to broadcast quality using the Sony
Beta format.
However, for TV transmission the off-line VH show must first be
fed into the TV broadcasting equipment. That may not be too difficult
if the owner of the VH news website also owns the television broadcast
facility and can do the computer-to-TV conversion “in house”. However,
widespread resale of the show to multiple broadcasters as in our
scenario above must involve the TV stations in little or no cost
and effort or it will fail.
We envisage that the VH files would be received continuously by
the TV stations and fed from their computer into their broadcasting
equipment. Our experts say that to do that to reasonable quality
would require the TV station to add an SDI card to their PC, probably
at around $US3000. It is this entry cost that Newsknife considers
to be the barrier.
The next step
Newsknife worked closely with Oddcast to create the no-frills demonstration
of the VH news show concept, shown on the Newsknife web site. The
next step is to create a full-featured demonstration.
By “full-featured” we mean…
- There would be an unpublicized mini-site where potential investors
could visit to study VH news in action, in approximately the form
that members of the public would finally see.
This mini-site would include the news home page, core members’-only
functions, a novel “welcome” page that would display while the VH
downloads, and other interesting features we have in mind.
The key issue is that the mini-site would deliver live up-to-date
VH news, i.e. within 15 minutes of the news item having appeared
on any top news site. This would require us to set up a temporary
news writing\voicing\uploading situation. This would be a demanding
task, and so would only be done a few times by prior arrangement,
for say, a four-hour period.
- During the periods when the mini-site is live, the VH news appearing
on the site would also be broadcast (or at least fed through a
TV monitor) to a location where the potential investor could view
it.
Technical participation by Oddcast would be needed to produce the
full- featured demonstration and the final site. We have discussed
the following with Oddcast…
- Computer files containing the spoken news segments must be uploaded
from where they are recorded to Oddcast for merging with their VH
puppet figures.
Oddcast’s standard VH audio upload procedure would
need to be customized to bypass manual use of their VH Slideshow
Editor.
Automated audio uploads and audio file assignment to a puppet
would be required at least every 15 minutes. We have ideas of how
this could be achieved.
- Software commands can probably automate eye movements left and
right between hosts when they refer to each other.
- When a person visits the VH web site it can take a few seconds
for the animation to download to their browser. It should be possible
to do this in the background while the viewer watches a news summary.
- Ideally, the news puppet characters would have a unique look so
that other Oddcast developers couldn’t copy them.
Summary
The Newsknife VH news show is particularly attractive because it
could be lucrative and yet the costs are relatively modest. Inevitably,
during development there would be fine-tuning and improvement of
the concepts described here.
However, we believe this discussion paper outlines a good approach
to using Oddcast virtual hosts for a news show because it is based
on marketing principles that will outlast novelty value.
Contact
The Manager
Industry Standard Computing Ltd
www.newsknife.com
Copyright © 2002 Industry Standard Computing Ltd. All rights reserved.
|
