The New York Times has several points of entry for its videos. Scrolling down a bit on the home page will take the reader to an embedded Flash player that has a default video selected and ready to play. The video loads quickly after playing a 15-second ad and includes a few seconds of branding that show the company’s logo and a short jingle.
The video is also found embedded within the article itself. Readers usually have to scroll down a bit in the story to see the video so they are unlikely to see it if they don’t find the story interesting enough to scroll down. This is probably fine since most people who would be interested in watching the video would read at least enough to find it down the page.
What I like about the placement of the video within the article is that it is obviously content and not an ad. It is in the left column with the text – not in the right column with the ads. It loads quickly and includes an option for changing the quality – something the embedded video on the home page does not include. What I didn’t like was when I changed the quality I had to start the video over. It would be nice if the video could shift seamlessly to a lower or higher quality like video sites such as Hulu do.
The video did not play perfectly – there was some buffering here and there – but overall it was a good user experience. The screen is small but adequate for the content. There is also a box under the player with a title and short description of the video. The title screen of the video also gives a description and the name of the reporter. These additions to the video help to add context for the reader. It also helps that the video is within the written article.
I’m not sure if the site uses any DRM besides streaming, but this seems to be enough to prevent the average person from downloading it – at least I wasn’t able to download it using the RealPlayer Download feature. The videos also include a watermark (the Times T) so that if someone does capture the content they will able to identify it.
The third place to find the video is on the New York Times video page, which plays the videos in a slightly larger player. The quality also seems to be higher. I wonder how many times the content must be compressed in order to have the different versions for each player.
New York Times is respected for their commitment to embracing new ways to tell stories through video and other multimedia and digital technologies. Digital media can add a layer to a story that is not possible with words alone and I think New York Times does a good job figuring out what stories will benefit from the extra work of creating, editing and compressing video.
Digital Media 
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