Some conclusions about how video for news and information has changed

What we can say is that the history of broadcast and video journalism in Australia has seen some important video news story-telling traditions come about:

•                Firstly: the ‘bulletin’ as the way in which we can hear or see the news of the day

We can see  how the television bulletin has changed over time, but the tradition remains the same; we can still tune in to a station or log in online to get an update of the day’s events in a shorter time frame than a newspaper would require.

•                Secondly: the use of image as journalistic evidence

That is, that the image and the sound of something happening is used as the more engaging and evocative evidence of the news really happening. And there are some really great examples of the use of image to prove the truth of a particular story.

•                Thirdly: the video narrative as a particular story telling device; one that is evocative and important.

We can see that the different uses of image and video especially, have changed over time, from passive to interactive.

The development of online video news has been a little more blurred than television—this is mostly because video was not a very popular component of online news story telling at first.

While most of the commercial news organisations who were going online did create video components to their story telling, it was not found to be popular and more importantly, they could not figure out how to make money from video!

Although streaming had happened in the past, video became an important part of online spaces when Microsoft developed the ActiveMovie media player in 1996-- this allowed streaming media. In 1997 RealPlayer released their own streaming application.

The problem was that despite the technology being available to stream video, the old dial-up connection speeds made video still too slow to actually make any impact on news and information communication.

This of course changed quite rapidly, with the adoption of QuickTime and Flash—and of course faster broadband speeds.

Once internet speeds got faster, video started to become a popular method of communicating news and information. YouTube which launched in 2005, has popularized the use of citizen journalism, vlogging and video news.

Of course, the introduction of YouTube and social media has changed the fortunes of video news content online.

 But we need to remember that we are still in the infancy of video—we are still kind of learning the ropes of making effective online video—and there are plenty of examples of people getting it right online—and wrong.