Thomson Reuters has today launched a video-on-demand platform for the financial industry which it hopes will change the way viewers interact with news.
Reuters Insider is populated with clips created by its journalists, analysts and 150 partner organisations, including leading financial institutions and news providers like CNBC.
Available at no additional cost to the 500,000 subscribers of Reuters’ Desktop service, the company said the platform aimed to transform news programming for “the crème de le crème” of the financial world of from “a passive one-way broadcast into a highly collaborative and personalised medium”.
Reuters has made thousands of hours of video material searchable on a platform which also allows users to upload their own clips and documents and share content.
Insider aims to become a “one-stop shop” for financial news videos. In doing so it will take advantage of the hundreds of research and analysis videos produced by banks, hedge funds and financial services companies which are not widely circulated outside those institutions.
The new platform is aimed to appeal to younger traders who, Reuters believes, increasingly demand a range of video services integrated with other information – charts and data – and social media tools.
Insider is part of a large scale investment, called the Thomson Reuters New Era, aimed at integrating its services in the daily workflow of its business clients.
While declining to outline the cost of the venture, Reuters editor in chief David Schlesinger told Press Gazette development of the new service had been the single biggest investment in editorial during his three years in the job.
“We have brought in more than 100 people; we have built studios [in London, New York and Hong Kong] and added the entire infrastructure,” he said.
In addition, Reuters now has cameras in all its major bureaux across Europe to feed the service.
Insider videos will feature a fixed schedule of market participants talking about specific industry topics in addition to breaking news, all of which will be streamed and archived.
Schlesinger said: “The fundamental theory behind it is that the world has changed. In your private life you expect a multimedia experience when you get information so we thought people in their professional lives will expect it as well.
‘We really thought it was vital to bring video-on-demand to the professional world just as YouTube is part of people’s leisure activities. In the new generation we expect people to think video will be a fundamental part of their work life as well.”
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