CNNMoney.com Video Strategy to Challenge TV

NEW YORK — Further blurring the line between television and the Internet, Time Warner Inc.'s CNNMoney.com plans a major push into online video starting Jan. 15, with an array of original business and financial news clips posted daily.

Executives and editors are betting the site's new look and a dedicated video team will better serve users, attract lucrative online ads and even take on financial TV networks such as CNBC and the new Fox Business Network.

"The future of business television is online," CNNMoney.com Editor Chris Peacock said. He said his site will soon go from producing one or two original videos each day to 15 or more.

"The audience for business and finance information migrated online very quickly," Peacock said. "They're at their desks. They're an at-work audience. We have a footprint to reach more people through our distribution than I think the classic cable networks can."

Atlanta-based CNN tried before to compete in the financial television business dominated by CNBC, but its CNNfn channel folded in 2004 after nine years.

CNNMoney.com pressed on as CNN's business arm online and, in 2005, it encompassed the Web sites of several Time Inc. magazine brands. It now includes content from Money, Fortune and Fortune Small Business.

The site is one of the most popular online destinations for financial news. Last month, it had more than 7 million unique visitors, according to Nielsen Online. It also had about 30 million "sessions" with people surfing the site.

That squeaked it ahead of Wall Street Journal sites into fourth place overall behind financial pages from the big Web portals — Yahoo, MSN and AOL, another unit of New York-based Time Warner.

The site's new video strategy comes at a time of upheaval for the media and advertising industries as video increasingly migrates online, offering alternatives to traditional television. Announcements about higher-quality Web video and more news and entertainment programs online have become commonplace.

However, the Internet still has a long way to go to directly challenge TV for viewers and advertisers, said Jimmy Schaeffler, a media analyst with the Carmel Group research firm.

"TV is still the dominant force," he said. Schaeffler said broadband users who watch video are "a growing audience but it's still not comparable to the main TV viewing audience."

CNNMoney's video strategy may make headway against TV during the business day when people at work want short video snippets on their computers, said Derek Baine, a cable television analyst with SNL Kagan.

Baine said it is surprising that Time Warner took so long to embrace such an approach since it stumbled with CNNfn and has been "left swinging in the wind" as new financial news competitors emerged.

One of them is the 24-hour Fox Business Network, which Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. launched in October. While its early audience numbers have reportedly been small, FBN executives want to follow the path of the Fox News Channel, which overtook CNN.

News Corp. also last month completed its purchase of Dow Jones & Co., the Wall Street Journal publisher. The potential long-term alliance of FBN and the Journal has the industry's attention.

CNBC and the New York Times, organizations Murdoch has said he would like to challenge, said on Jan. 7 they would share financial articles and video on their Web sites.

CNBC, which is owned by General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal, is dominant in the world of financial TV, but placed near the bottom last month on Nielsen's Top 25 ranking of financial news Web sites.

While people worry about conflict between TV and the Web for viewers and advertisers, "I know very few people who want to turn their computer into a TV and vice versa," said Allen Wastler, who became the managing editor of CNBC.com last summer after holding the same title at CNNMoney.com.

Wastler, who had no comment on CNNMoney.com's latest effort, said the "holy grail" of the industry is finding the complementary relationship between the Internet and TV that best serves the audience.

Sharing content is familiar ground for CNNMoney.com, said Jonathan Shar, the site's general manager. He said that "with the DNA of CNN, it felt like we could build the video presence within our multi-brand experience ourselves."

Shar said the site's number of original videos could reach 35 a day.

"We're competing with anyone who is attracting consumers who are interested in business and financial news," he said. "The ultimate goal is to start competing with television for those (advertising) budgets."

A mock-up of CNNMoney's redesigned home page shows an embedded video box placed high and topped by the current top headline and a row of updating market numbers. In coming weeks, story pages and data-heavy market pages within the site also should include embedded video.

The dozen people CNNMoney.com hired to produce online video are "absolute human Swiss Army knives," Peacock said. "They can shoot. They can edit. They can publish. They can create graphics. They can write scripts."

About half of the new video clips, which will be 1 to 3 minutes long, will be related to content from the three magazines, said Caleb Silver, the site's new executive producer for video.

"This is a rare place where the merger of all these content properties is actually working," Silver said.

The videos will include CEO interviews, big and small company profiles, car and technology reviews and regular features such as Street Life, a daily video column from Andy Serwer, Fortune magazine's managing editor.

There also will be market news updates throughout the day hosted by anchor Poppy Harlow, who joined CNNMoney.com this month after leaving rival Forbes.com. Those videos will not be streamed live, but will likely be updated 8 to 10 times a day.

"We're not pretending that we're trying to recreate a television channel here," Silver said. Instead, he called their approach the "new way of digital journalism."

On the Web:

CNNMoney.com: money.cnn.com

Fox Business : www.foxbusiness.com

CNBC: www.cnbc.com