Losing the reins

Last week offered an insight into a mood of panic in the UK's news establishment, much of it based on losing control of video content.

The old regime had already clocked a generation growing up sharing links to short videos - news, music, the bizarre, the funny, and cats - and had presumed that they would still be the principal providers. BBC, ITV and Sky thought the new competition would be newspaper websites, and did various deals to provide them with clips, hoping that their brands would be thus enhanced, and new consumers would find a way back to the original source.

I don't have access to detailed figures, but if you look at YouTube's page of "Popular In The UK Now", there's nothing direct from UK broadcasters or newspapers. There's two from Russell Brand (as I write) and two that feature UK football coverage, but edited and re-posted.

Advertisers have become hyper-excited about pre-roll ads on these short videos, assessing that these are the new favourite ways of idling time at work and on mobiles, and "Total Video Views" are the new Holy Grail of metrics. In the USA, the big players in these field are all new media names.

In UK newspapers wrestling with a video future, The Telegraph Group has effectively given their Yankee digital guru Jason Seiken notice, with a kick upstairs. Chris Evans (not that one) is essentially the new Editor of The Daily Telegraph, and has to work out a new and different digital future, that probably moves away from women with three breasts and car reviews. The Guardian is more successfully engaging with "millenials", especially in America, and has lead the way, with ITV, in "live pages", but there's a question about how long the investment can run without balanced books in sight.

At Sky News, boss John Ryley has announced a live, on-air, month of experimentation in the run-up to Christmas, with two new teams working on "Live News" and "Digital", in a sort of laboratory experiment to try to re-establish Sky News as the place to go for the under-40s. Many think this simply presages a shift of production effort from the channel to the website. Either way, it looks like an uncomfortable couple of weeks for Kay Burley and Jeremy Thompson.

And at the BBC, boss James Harding has put a little more flesh on his exercise looking at "The Future Of News", revealing it's not just him heading to Stanford, but a team. "We are not giving ourselves a great deal of time. Stanford University in California has kindly agreed to host us for two weeks, where we will hold a series of seminars, meet with some of the leading new media businesses, collate the interviews and information we have to date and set out a framework for the Future of News. We will look to draw the ideas together in a first draft by Christmas."

Meanwhile, flying the other way, Comscore are offering help in London.
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