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Thomson Reuters Aims To Transform News Consumption With Interactive Video Platform

The video platform offers voice-generated transcripts of each video and allows users to intelligently search the content on the platform.

Time-strapped financial professionals are constantly on the lookout for news and research to help them stay ahead of – or at least alongside - the pack. Now, Thomson Reuters is offering an interactive on-demand video platform that it says will completely change the way finance pros consume and distribute news.

The new video platform, Reuters Insider, aggregates original programming from Reuters as well as 150 content partners globally (including video from Wall Street & Technology and sibling brand Advanced Trading) and enables users to customize the videos they want to see appear on their screen.

Reuters Insider also allows firms to self-broadcast research, market commentary, morning calls and trade ideas straight to the desktops and mobile phones of Thomson Reuters customers via their own branded channels.

With technology developed by Thomson Reuters and some partners, users are able to see a voice-generated transcript of each video, and by clicking on a particular word in the script they can go directly to where that word is spoken in the video itself, drastically reducing the amount of time it would normally take to rewind and fast-forward a video to find a particular point, or sentence, of interest.

“You have a tool kit with transcripts and metadata that allows you to query on demand information – with a combination of different phrases and ideas so you can intelligently search the content on the platform,” Eric Frank, president, investment & advisory, Thomson Reuters, explained in an interview with WS&T.

Frank says the video platform has been getting positive feedback from users, with 20,000 finance professionals so far signing up for the service which was launched last month.

“The feedback we’ve been getting from the buy-side is, ‘I don’t really follow the TV form of video, I’d have to be following it and waiting for something to happen. If I have the confidence a system is culling the most important topics, that’s really useful,” he says.

“The second reaction is, it’s not just wonderful content that Thomson Reuters created – but it also offers content from other providers through aggregation. Now I can see the sell-side content. I can see independent ideas…”

The video platform is compatible with mobile devices like the iPhone and the iPad. Users can also click to send a video to a colleague – and direct them immediately to click on a specific point in that video.

Frank draws comparisons between the user experience of Reuters Insider and Apple’s app store, suggesting that the community of financial professionals will decide what content they want to put on the platform, in the same way that a community of developers among the public creates and uploads applications to Apple’s app store.

“If you think of Apple, with the iPod, the iPad and the app store concept, the user experience and design makes it more than portable music. Also, the store concept works very intuitively. There is a universe of people who put things in the store, and it’s easy for people to get information and for people to create apps and upload them to the store,” he says.

“This is parallel to what we’ve done at Insider,” he explains. “We done the same thing applying it to our financial base and video. The Insider platform is a very powerful tool for our customer. It’s not just, ‘I’m going to fire up Windows and play video.’”

Melanie Rodier has worked as a print and broadcast journalist for over 10 years, covering business and finance, general news, and film trade news. Prior to joining Wall Street & Technology in April 2007, Melanie lived in Paris, where she worked for the International Herald ... View Full Bio

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