ABCNews.com Lags Competition on Online Video Features
With the news today that MSNBC.com is now offering embeddable video players as part of its product offering, ABCNews.com clearly falls behind the pack as the only major U.S. television news organization to not offer embeddable video online.
Let’s recap.
CBS News: Yep.
MSNBC: Yep.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
CNN: Yep.
Fox News: Yep.
ABC News: Nope.
ABCNews.com has been consistently behind on producing a world class online news product (more examples here and here).
Not allowing visitors to embed video is a strategic decision that shows an old fashioned and out-of-date mentality when it comes to the web.
Not being able to embed means not being able to market. Not being able to market means that people aren’t going to find your content (and share it again, and so on).
Now, to be fair, I used the word “embed” in the paragraph above and not “share.” They do allow you to share via Add This… but providing a URL that’s friendly to WordPress versus Blogger or MySpace doesn’t get a lot of points on today’s web, I’m afraid.
I did a little research to see if anyone else has been covering this issue, and found that NewTeeVee’s Chris Albrecht was “baffled” way back in May, 2008 to find that ABC.com (not ABCNews.com) was not yet offering embeds.
Oddly, there is a large Facebook widget on the ABCNews.com homepage. Now how about adding embeddable video guys!
If anyone has further insight into the history or status of the issue, I’d love to hear about it.
