(Image source: Business Insider)
BY LAURA JANVIER
ANCHOR LOGAN TITTLE
The Huffington Post is making the move to TV. The new media giant announced Thursday its plans for an online news channel. KUVE has the details.
“A new television network -- on the web. The Huffington Post says this summer it will begin providing 12 hours each weekday of live original programming. The content will be similar to the Huffington Post website.”
They’re calling it the Huffington Post Streaming Network, or HPSN. Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media, told Beet.TV what makes the product unique is that it will be interactive.
“And it is much more the way my children, my two daughters who are in college watch television, which is they open up different windows: their Facebook, their Twitter feeds, their email.”
The idea is to create a network where viewers can interact with the anchors through social media. Demo clips showed commenters being invited on the show via Skype to speak directly with journalists about their stories. A writer for Forbes says this could be a glimpse into the future of television.
“All of this is probably what every cable network will be doing more of as viewership shifts from one-way television sets to internet-enabled devices. But if AOL can get there first, the opportunity could be large.”
But the opportunity won’t come cheap. A writer for DigiDay outlines just how big of a project this is.
“The service itself is ambitious, but even more so is the investment AOL is putting behind it: $30 million, according to an AOL source. HuffPo plans to create all the video itself. It will dedicate 100 employees to the operation. The scale of the effort would put it on track to be one of the largest producers of original for the Web video around.”
Venture Beat says even though this is a big investment, AOL stands to make big returns if it’s successful.
“The choice to transform the Huffington Post into a video network also makes a lot of sense. [AOL Chief Executive Tim] Armstrong said 70 percent of Huffington Post articles contain embedded videos. So, by producing the bulk of those videos in-house, AOL will be able to gain more leverage on advertising.”
The service is planned for this summer and they plan to extend content to 16 hours a day by 2013.
