Newsy Blog » Posts in 'news consumption' category

Newsy App for iPad Offers Multisource Video News Analysis

Available to download for free from the App Store today

Columbia, MO (PRWEB) April 21, 2010 — The Newsy app for iPad is available to download for free from the App Store today - setting a new standard for watching and sharing news videos on the iPad. Users experience fast loading, high quality Newsy videos, which highlight the differences in how global media outlets report a story.

Newsy’s iPad app allows users to drag and drop videos to build customized playlists, easily share videos through email and social networks, read and post comments on the fly and drill down deeper into a news story by exploring the sources Newsy analyzed.

“Newsy’s app is built specifically for the iPad platform and delivers on what users want from video news on the go – speed, sharing, community and customization,” explains Newsy President Jim Spencer. “As a news analyzer, we break through the bias barrier – as an innovator in mobile video news, we are pushing the technology barriers with Newsy’s extraordinary iPad app.”

Updated instantaneously with Newsy’s iPhone app, Android app, Intel Atom app and Newsy.com, the Newsy app for iPad allows users to browse videos quickly, using a scrolling cover flow feature – embracing Apple’s successful iTunes interface.

The Newsy app for iPad allows users to share videos through Facebook, Twitter and email as well as easily connect with Newsy sources through links provided in both the transcript or by using the ‘Sources’ button included in every Newsy video. Users can interact with the Newsy community by posting and reading comments, which update in real time across all platforms.

Additionally, while watching videos, users can scroll through the transcript, browse comments and examine sources.

The Newsy App for iPad is available for free from the App Store on iPad or at http://www.itunes.com/appstore

To watch a 90-second video demo of the Newsy iPad app, go to http://www.newsy.com and search for: ipaddemo

A news analyzer, not a news aggregator, Newsy.com offers context with convenience — in 2 to 3 minutes, users understand the nuances in news coverage from different media sources.


About Newsy.com

Newsy.com (http://www.newsy.com) is a multisource video news service that analyzes the world’s news coverage. Through short videos available on the web and mobile devices, Newsy.com accelerates the understanding of how a news story is being covered differently by media outlets around the world.

Newsy.com Develops App for Intel Atom-Powered Netbooks

Newsy app now available in Intel’s New AppUp Center for free

Columbia, MO (PRWEB) February 4, 2010 — Newsy, a multi-source video news service producing daily videos for web and mobile devices, today announced it has developed an application for Intel Atom-powered netbooks. Newsy is the only news service that analyzes the key differences in how a story is being reported by various news organizations around the world.

Available to download from the Intel AppUp Center for free, the Newsy app offers 2- to 3-minute news videos designed for quick and easy viewing. The Newsy app is perfect for netbooks - offering short video news analysis for people on the go.

“Our new Newsy app reaches the fast-growing netbook community,” Newsy.com President Jim Spencer explains. “Newsy is the leader in multi-source, multi-platform video news.”

The Newsy app is one of the first applications available in Intel’s new AppUp Center. Owners of Windows-based netbooks can go to the AppUp Center, download the store and install the Newsy app.

Newsy is building apps for several platforms - its popular iPhone app quickly ascended the list of free news apps in the Apple App Store. The Newsy app for Intel Atom-powered netbooks enables users to share videos via Twitter, Facebook and email as well as read and post comments - which are instantaneously synced with the website.

A news analyzer, not a news aggregator, Newsy.com offers context with convenience — in 2 to 3 minutes, users understand the nuances in news coverage from different media sources.

About Newsy.com

Newsy.com (http://www.newsy.com) is a multi-source online video news site that monitors, analyzes and presents the world’s news coverage. Through short video segments available on the web and mobile devices, Newsy.com accelerates the understanding of how a news story is covered differently by media outlets around the world.

Newsy.com Releases New Version of iPhone App

Download URL for new version of the Newsy App in the iTunes Store:

http://bit.ly/8Y4mRy

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Version 1.5 of the Newsy app enhances user experience for watching multi-source online video news on the go

Columbia, MO - December 7, 2009 - Newsy, a multi-source video news service producing daily videos for web and mobile devices, today debuted a new version of its popular free iPhone app that deepens and enhances news consumption for mobile users. Newsy is the only news service that analyzes the nuances in how a story is being reported by various news organizations around the world.

Version 1.5 of the app features a ‘Sources’ button that enables easy access to the specific news stories analyzed in a Newsy video – with just a click, users seamlessly are connected to story-level pages so they can further research the topics that matter most to them.

“Users love Newsy because they discover sources and perspectives that they would not find on their own,” Newsy.com President Jim Spencer explains. “The functionality of the app’s new version furthers our commitment to offer quick video news analysis on the go - users can easily dig deeper into the sources they find most relevant.”

In the new version of the app, once a video completes playing, a ’Sources’ button appears next to the ‘Share’ and ‘Comment’ buttons. As with the first version of the app, user comments made via iPhones and iTouches are synced instantaneously with the Newsy.com website.

Version 1.0 of the Newsy app, released in September 2009, quickly ascended the list of free news apps in the App Store. The only online video news app of its kind, the elegant solution allows users to browse videos with the gravity scroll or search specifically with keywords.

A news analyzer, not a news aggregator, Newsy.com offers context with convenience — in 2 to 3 minutes, users understand the nuances in news coverage.

About Newsy.com

Newsy.com (http://www.newsy.com) is a multi-source online video news site that monitors, analyzes and presents the world’s news coverage. Through short video segments available on the web and mobile devices, Newsy.com accelerates the understanding of how a news story is covered differently by media outlets around the world.

Want Multi-Source Mobile News? There’s an App for That.

Yesterday, Apple started featuring the Newsy app in the ‘New and Noteworthy’ section of the App Store. During the day, the Newsy app climbed the Free Apps list in the News category - - currently the Newsy.com app is ranked # 5  - ahead of The Time, WSJ and Huffington Post apps!

The buzz has been extraordinary — thousands of people are downloading the apps, it has a three star ratings (beating out other news apps like MSNBC’s and NPR’s) and reviews of the app have been stellar.

Over the past year, we’ve been thrilled at how well we timed the launching of Newsy.com with a couple of key trends - 1) the growing perception of a bias in the news and 2) the increasing demand for online video.

Now we’re ecstatic that the Newsy app is clearly meeting the demand for news content on mobile devices. On Friday, in Diane Mermigas’ article ‘Mobile: The New Mass Medium‘, she discusses consumers’ 24/7 love affair with wireless mobile devices and highlights the thirst for news content:

“The number of Americans using mobile devices to access news and other information doubled from 2008 to 22.4 million as enterprise workers perform functions on mobile devices that were formerly reserved for laptops, according to comScore. A survey of 300 Bostonians conducted for Samsung reveals that one-third would rather forgo sex for a entire year than give up their cell phones for that amount of time.”

Focus on Value - Not Business Models

In an article for the fall edition of Nieman Reports, ‘Let’s Talk: Journalism and Social Media’, RJI Fellow Michael Skoler questions the notion that the Internet is to blame for journalism’s lost business model. He asserts that journalism began losing its value when it started to become less relevant a few decades ago. The connection journalists had to their communities diminished once news conglomerates took over local papers and stations and cut on-the-ground reporters.

Skoler believes discussions about saving the future of journalism should not be about finding a new business model - the focus should be on how to make news more valuable. After all, people only pay for what has obvious value to them - as Skoler puts it - “every good business plan starts by explaining how it creates value for the customer.”

The Economist and The Week are two of today’s more successful media outlets. The value these magazines offer is not only in the smart analysis of everything they consider worth knowing – but also in the smart packaging.  Smart analysis and smart packaging overlap very closely with Newsy’s vision and goals.

Newsy offers value to consumers by providing analysis on a variety of sources and perspectives in short video clips - we blend context with convenience.

Bloggers Love Newsy.com

For the past couple of months, we’ve focused on innovating our content - offering not just a site that aggregates but truly analyzes the key nuances in reporting from media outlets around the world. This difference makes us unique in the online video news space - we’re the only one.
We’ve been rewarded for our efforts - there’s been a sharp increase in the amount of bloggers who are embedding our videos into their sites.
Puppetgov.com is now featuring Newsy videos a few times a week in its ‘Video News‘ section. In fact, all types of bloggers are embedding a wide variety of our videos - from politics to technology to health to new media.
We’re pleased that so many bloggers are choosing to augment their content with Newsy videos. It’s a win-win situation - for Newsy, the benefit is distribution - driving traffic and building brand awareness for our site.

It’s an On-Demand World

In his post “Drowning Upstream,” Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine argues that businesses seeking to avoid the ravages of the internet are headed in a doomed direction by virtue of the fact that they should be designed to take advantage of the internet in the first place. Jarvis writes,

“I’ve said often that protection is no strategy for the future. An industry whose strategy for the future is built on trying to keep us from doing what we want to do and resist the flow of the internet is an industry that is merely biding time. That should be the lesson they learn from newspapers and music.”

As a person who consumes television solely from the internet and dvds delivered to by mailbox by Netflix, I have to agree that cable television as it is currently sold is a dinosaur on the brink of extinction.  Consumers are learning to expect the same media menu offered by iTunes when it shook-up the recording industry by allowing users to buy single songs instead of albums that featured a few hits and a lot of filler.

What Jarvis fails to explicate fully is that audiences are also growing savvy to watching media around their schedules, instead of clearing time for the communal television hours that ruled in the heyday of prime time. It’s not just a channel issue, it’s a program issue. Sites like Hulu and TV.com are appealing because they remove the constraints of the network line-up, but that also means that they effectively remove the bookends of the evening newscasts from the daily television intake of Americans.

Jarvis calls for the unbundling of cable, but does not mention that the value of news programming on cable is met, if not surpassed by the quality of news available solely on the internet. As demand for pick-and-choose cable television increases, so does the need for services that curate the spectrum of digital media found on cable and the internet. I am not referring to the baseless punditry that has become a staple of cable news shows, but a service that scours the internet, cable, and satellite channels to provide a diverse range of credible perspectives on the news stories of the day.

Newsy.com offers a business model that is unique among media companies because they are infinitely adaptable in their curation of open-source content into two-minute online video packages for the internet, cable television and mobile devices. Newsy does not claim to be a comprehensive news provider, nor is it simply a recommendation service like iTunes Genius. Newsy.com takes viewers to the next level by telling the stories among the thousands of headlines returned from a typical search for news on the internet.

A Plea from a Busy Parent

I just typed “busy parents” into the google machine and it spit out over 32 million results. That’s probably a result of our collective guilt and our attempts to compensate for it - or our true desire to find solutions to everyday problems caused by our hectic lifestyles.

I am a proud father of two young boys and can relate to people who consider themselves “busy parents.”  Even still, my guys are still young - I can’t imagine what it will be like in a few years when both have basketball practice, homework, music lessons, etc.  I often end the day chatting with my wife and watching a little bit of TV - usually some short form comedy like the Office or some kind of sports like the NBA playoffs.   Much of the time I end up DELETING stuff I recorded and just don’t have the time to watch, even shows I really enjoy like Charlie Rose

    .  I also subscribe to Sports Illustrated.  Presently, I have a stack of about 20 issues of SI sitting on my desk… untouched.  And I REALLY like reading SI.

    What does this mean?  It means we, as parents, have precious few seconds during the day for information gathering, and sometimes the standard media formats that we love just can’t deliver what we need.  The long form interview (Charlie Rose) or the magazine (SI) can take up too much time to digest, but will still long for the nuggets we get out of them.

    I wish there was a way to get someone ELSE to look through the media for me and pull out the nuggets I would have found if I had the time.  And to top it off it would be great if that someone would find various opinions and perspectives on the things I want to know about so I do not have to scour the universe.  Even better, if they introduced me to media outlets I wasn’t familiar with before.  Oh, and if they could do it all in video format that I could access on the web and with my mobile device - making it that much more engaging - that would be the be-all end-all for a “busy parent” like me.

      Future of Television

      Yesterday we announced our partnership with Mediacom, a cable and broadband Internet company. As a content provider, we at Newsy.com understand the importance of distribution and this partnership effectively enables our multiperpsective video content to travel across the web, mobile devices and now, TV.

      Fred Wilson, an excellent blogger, recently posted on the future of TV:

      http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/05/youtubing.html

      Recent developments like Boxee are changing the landscape of television and video. At Newsy you have our commitment to deliver you multiperspective news when, where and how you want it.

      Context with Convenience

      You’re busy - we know it. This morning I went to Google News and searched on “space shuttle” - 5,252 results.

      http://news.google.com/news?pz=1&ned=us&hl=en&q=%22space+shuttle%22

      That’s amazing but what do I do with 5,252 news results and sources? Better yet, do I just go out and look at sources I am familiar with - how can I tell the differences in how the story is being reported?

      That’s what we are trying to do at Newsy.com - give you a variety of sources and perspectives in short video clips - we blend context with convenience to help make you smarter, faster.

      Let me know what you think about our stories - delivering an exceptional news service to you is our focus.