Arianna.TV: HuffPo to launch a video news network

By 2013, HuffPo wants to offer video content equivalent to 16 hours everyday

On the one-year anniversary of AOL acquiring the online publication for $315 million, the Huffington Post announced that it will launch an online video streaming network over the summer. With more people and companies utilizing the ease of producing and broadcasting their own online video channels (from YouTube to Google+), it looks like alternative news sources may be adopting more video components to offer viewers more video content.

President and Editor-in-Chief of the HuffPo, Arianna Huffington announced the new addition in a news blog Friday morning.

Huffington wrote that the video will be streamed to its flagship site, as well as to other AOL Web sites with plans to stream 12 hours a day, five days a week, with eight hours of content produced in New York and the rest out of Los Angeles. This will increase to 16 hours a day of original live programming by the end of 2013.

This video addition could have been spurred or expedited with the upcoming 2012 elections proving to be a growing driver of constant content.

While most people have not cut the cord on their cable habit, there is little in doubt that most people are no longer dependent on cable for much of their video watching needs. A recent comScore report showed that 71% of American Internet users use video-sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo, representing an increase of five percentage points over last year, when 66% of users visited such sites. 

Interestingly, despite limited broadband reach, 68% of rural Internet users visit these sites, compared to 71% of suburban users and 72% of urban users. And, the average online video consumer watches an average of four hours and 20 minutes per month watching video on the Web -- that's an hour and 10 minutes more than the amount they watched a year prior.

The HuffPost Streaming Network, which will be overseen by the founding editor (and now HuffPost Streaming Network president) Roy Sekoff, will be viewable from computer, smartphone, tablet and over-the-top TV.

"The network will be built around segments spotlighting the biggest, hottest, most engaging stories HuffPost is covering at any given moment and using them as the jumping-off points for conversations, commentary, and comedy," Huffington wrote. "These segments will be as long -- or as short -- as they need to be. We won't be limited by the usual time constraints of TV."

Unlike tradition newscasts and new magazine broadcasts, it appears that the HuffPo video arm will be an on-demand system -- which is how everything is trending anyway.

More details will have to come out about how the company will finance this new content, especially since a lion's share of their current content is from affiliates and unpaid bloggers. Will the HuffPo encourage people to contribute content or edit video for free? If all of the content is original then this will be a hefty financial investment and overhead to upkeep.

Huffington also took this anniversary and video-streaming announcement as a time to share the company numbers with the public. The Huffington Post products are collectively seeing 36.2 million unique monthly visitors as of this year,an increase of 47% from a year ago. 

And the company has brought in a very engaged audience considering on Jan 25, 2012, more than 250,000 comments were made across the enterprise.

The HuffPo has capitalized on its ability to create great social, viral buzz and with 21.6 million social referrals (or redirects) to the site in December 2011, it is clear that the company knows how to get its readers to share posts.

But many have been critical of the HuffPo model since it is greatly composed of user-generated content, and aggregation and their AOL connection with the hyper-local news creation sites called Patch have been a big money suck with little return on the hundreds of millions that were invested to create and keep them running around the country. 

(Image Source: NYTimes.com)