When it comes to news, more Americans would rather hear it from their TV sets than read it in the morning paper.
Now the Internet–home to uncountable sources of fact, rumor and innuendo–is starting to deliver news with more of that TV flavor. One group of new sites is letting Web surfers design their own newscasts, presenting a string of video clips tuned to the topics they care about the most. Another is using animated news anchors to read summaries of the news a la Tom Brokaw, albeit in android-accented English.
Portals like Yahoo! and Excite have been letting visitors build custom news pages for some time, but upstarts like Zatso and The FeedRoom have upped the ante with extensive daily offerings of video clips. The goal is to make the experience like watching the nightly TV news, only with the ability to fast forward through topics or probe them more deeply, depending on your interest.
Unfortunately, the video clips don’t approach TV quality unless the viewer has a high-speed Internet connection. In fact, when The FeedRoom’s service goes live in June, it will be available only to Web surfers with a cable modem or high-speed phone line.
Visitors to San Francisco-based Zatso’s Web site start with a menu of news clips from six categories: Top Stories, Crime, Business, Family, Government/Politics and International. They can then personalize the programming by choosing from a list with eight additional topics, such as technology, entertainment, sports and weather.
They also tell the site to look for stories in any topic that include certain words or phrases–“Bob Jones University,” say, or “dengue fever.” And if they’re worried about what Zatso might show them, they can block segments about violent or disturbing topics. They can even exclude stories by word or phrase–“Dodgers,” for example, or “Regis Philbin.”
Zatso, formerly called ReacTV, has lined up nine national news outfits, including Reuters and San Francisco-based ZDTV, to provide many of its clips. But its goal is to localize its service as well as personalize it, so it’s trying to join forces with local broadcasters across the country. The company has signed up 36 so far, mostly on the East Coast.
Viewers can choose up to two local broadcasters that they’re interested in from the 27 now on-line, and those stations’ segments will be added to the viewers’ personalized menu of clips.
Eventually, said Zatso President and CEO Roger Keating, the company wants to push the news even closer to its viewers’ homes. He envisions adding high school sports segments and local crime stories with maps showing how far the mayhem was from the viewer’s home.
The Zatso newscast plays clips one by one, accompanied by a short summary of the segment and links to related stories and Web sites. The screen is divided in half, letting viewers explore the links while the clip continues to play.
Another major difference between Zatso and TV: Viewers control not just the topics, but also the pace. As soon as they’ve heard enough about stock market gyrations or the latest Dr. Laura protest, they can skip ahead to the next segment. This being the Web, however, they’ll have to wait several seconds while the video stream “buffers.”
Keating says Zatso was guided by five “design principles”: People crave video news, local stories and personalized information. They want to explore more deeply the topics that catch their interest. And they want to hear the news from someone they know and trust. Hence the need for local partnerships.
The FeedRoom takes a similar approach, offering clips in various categories that viewers can personalize. It has already signed up KNTV in San Jose, Calif., as a partner, and it hopes to be in many of the top 30 markets within a year, said President and CEO Jonathan Klein.
“As popular as the Web is, there are more viewers in one week of the NBC Nightly News than there are in several months of Yahoo! news,” Klein said. “That kind of tells you there’s a power to the video, there’s a convenience, there’s a trust factor. There’s an emotional power to it, there’s a connection that forms in your brain when you’ve seen something.”
Yahoo! offers video news, too, and recently launched a video-intensive business news site called Yahoo! Finance Vision. In addition to live broadcasts while the markets are open, its offerings include features on selected “hot companies” and archived interviews from previous days. Visitors can control which topics to explore deeply through synchronized links, but they can’t shape the video broadcast to their tastes.
Supplementing an array of edited news clips, The FeedRoom expects to offer live and raw footage that viewers cannot get on TV, as well as individualized traffic reports and other services. It also plans to run short commercials between segments, something Zatso doesn’t do now.
Although The FeedRoom allows users to watch full-screen video clips, the result is more like a slide show than a network broadcast. But Klein insists that it’s not fair to judge on-line news ventures by the boob tube’s standards. “You don’t use this instead of TV if you have a TV,” he said.
While the video-oriented services work best with high-speed connections, 1KTV, from Woodland Hills, Calif.-based V-Star Inc., aims for the masses who still have dial-up modems. The service features animated newscasters reading short news, weather, sports and lifestyle stories, followed by longer text versions and links to related pieces.
To use 1KTV, viewers need to load the animated news readers into a computer via a free CD-ROM that 1KTV delivers. The newscasters are crisp but robotic and two-dimensional, so the novelty may be more appealing than the performance.
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The news comes from 1KTV’s partners, which include the Associated Press and United Press International. The company also offers original humor–mostly one-liners pegged to recent events.
Viewers can choose the general topics but can’t personalize the summaries. The only local version of 1KTV so far is 1KTVLA, which is tuned to Southern California.