Of all the print media’s dabblings with video, I find the WSJ/Barron’s has done the
best job technologically. The CNBC video feed can be nightmarish in its reliability and bandwidth consumption, Bloomberg uses WMP (blecch), and
the NYT seems sometimes flash-based and sometimes WMV.
Whoever selected this system (Bill G.?) did it right. It works technically well — much better than I’ve seen the competition do.
As to the question of when the entire model will be profitible, I assume this is a long term bet. Dow Jones, for example, has Marketwatch, Barron’s and WSJ video, and they are recording and hosting a lot of video amongst the 3. It is really a bet on the future — against the cable cos, but in favor of internet properties that are hosting/moving all this video around. The companies in this space are betting that eventually, much of video consumption — be it on TV or on iPod like devices — will be Net based.
