Trinity Mirror makes ‘seven figure’ investment in online video

Trinity Mirror is making a seven figure investment in transforming its online video output to compete with other digital publishers such as News UK and The Guardian as it looks to unlock the “huge opportunity” curating multimedia partner and advertiser content provides.

Trinity Mirror
Trinity Mirror has made a ‘seven figure’ investment in improving its online video content.

The publisher of the Daily Mirror, The People and several regional titles has entered a partnership with online video company Stream Foundations, which will first look at the types of audiences the minimal video content across its sites currently reaches.

Stream Foundations will then advise Trinity Mirror on the types of content it should curate, license and produce itself – although the company is not committing to building an in-house video production studio in the near future, favouring instead cheaper video journalism techniques, such as using mobile phones.

Speaking to Marketing Week at video advertising company YuMe’s partner day in London today (4 March), Trinity Mirror digital sales director Shaun Jordan admitted to Marketing Week the newspaper publisher had not been “particularly good” in the video space to date but that there is demand from agencies for video inventory that is not currently available on its sites.

He added: “Our CEO Simon Fox realises there’s a huge opportunity in this space and on the back of that is looking to invest considerably in video.”

In the short-term Trinity Mirror will begin bringing more video content – whether that is created by its journalists or advertising that relates to articles – above the fold to the top half of the website and will start encouraging staff to think about including video in more of their stories.

Longer-term, Trinity Mirror will then consider where it can make investments to bring video content created by third parties to its portfolio of sites. Jordan predicts that by the end of this year Trinity Mirror will have “significantly” more video content to talk to advertisers and agencies about, particularly in the mobile space now the publisher considers itself a “mobile first” company.

Last month Trinity Mirror revised its profit forecast upwards, driven by a 32 per cent year on year surge in digital revenues in the final two months of 2013 alone. Overall, digital revenues are expected to be up 3 per cent year on year for the fiscal year 2013. 

Rival tabloid newspaper publisher News UK made a major commitment to online video last year by investing £20m to acquire the rights to broadcast near-live online highlights of 390 Premier League matches across The Sun, The Times and The Sunday Times over three seasons. It has been hoping the rights will convince users to pay £2 per week for its Sun+ digital package that launched last year, which News UK revealed in December had reached 117,000 subscribers. 

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