The quantity of available online video content is increasing at a seemingly exponential rate. And yet one technology company, Tout, estimates that as many as 95% of media brands’ web pages are still not video-enabled.

What that means for makers of content, said Tout CEO Michael Downing, is “a tremendous opportunity to bring video to those [publishers’] pages… creating an entirely new revenue stream.”

While serving as entrepreneur-in-residence at Stanford Research Institute in 2009, Downing envisioned a product that could capitalize on that tremendous opportunity from both directions, helping the world’s biggest media companies not only more efficiently make high-quality Internet video content, but more effectively monetize it. Five years later, that vision has become a reality. Tout’s “mobile video reporter” app for iOS and Android devices empowers journalists in the field to capture video news updates on their phone and upload them to a website in 30 seconds or less. Meanwhile, the company recently launched its “Programmatic Video Content Exchange,” a service that facilitates the matching of that content into relevant text-based articles.

THE APP

There are many ways by which smart phones can capture, edit, refine, publish and add voiceover to video; Tout’s app, which also has desktop functionality for those old-fashioned users who still use cameras, happens to be a particularly fast and streamlined one. It also connects the given media company’s news team to one virtual control center, where managers, editors, etc. can monitor all their reporters at once, and parse out the content they are uploading accordingly.

Of course, major broadcast media companies have their own means of capturing journalistic video, as do local stations’ news teams. Where the Tout app seems most relevant is in the text-based media space, helping publications who are desperately in need of large quantities of sharable video to beef up online articles and drive more traffic. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, has thousands of reporters spread around the globe, all capable of rapidly writing and uploading stories – with Tout every single one of them could conceivably add a video component as well… to every single article.

THE EXCHANGE

Or,The Wall Street Journal might want to supplement articles with high-quality video that someone else has made. In that increasingly more common scenario, Tout’s Video Content Exchange creates a bridge between supplier and publisher that offers new revenue opportunities for both parties. Inserted into every page of its subscribers’ websites, Tout’s technology automatically detects what articles are about, then retrieves and inserts a relevant video clip from any of more than 500 currently partnered major media brands, including Fox, BBC and Sports Illustrated. With pre-roll advertisements in front of every video, the service immediately expands the digital reach of both sides of the equation while offering a new source of revenue shared between them.

Tout is partnering with local TV stations as well, pairing news clips from regional markets with relevant text-based articles at local newspapers and other publications.

“Local TV is struggling right now to find out what’s happening in audience trends and who’s tuning in,” said Downing. “Sinclair, Granite and all the various companies that own a few stations here and there are looking for innovative ways to generate more revenue off the media they’re already creating… This is an opportunity to take that product and find an audience that is five or 10 times larger than who’s tuning in and distribute that video in intelligent ways across these [publishers’] sites.”

To that end, Tout recently announced an agreement with the Local Media Consortium, a nationwide alliance of local media outlets representing more than 50 local media companies and more than 1200 individual publications. Those LMC members will now have access to the Tout Programmatic Video Content Exchange, ready and willing to publish TV offerings across their pages, which cumulatively garner more than 4.4 billion monthly views and more than 156 billion yearly advertising impressions.

“We’re providing tools to media companies to help them address what’s going on [in digital,” said Downing. “This kind of technology has the potential to help reinvent how local news is covered, collected and monetized.”

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