Buzz Watch: Brangelina Twins and The Evolution of Online Video

Authored by Jay Baage on July 13, 2008 - 9:06am.

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, the most famous couple in Hollywood, welcomed twins to the world on Saturday evening at a hospital in France. For some gossip magazines (and web sites), it's the biggest story of the year. Brangelina will be selling the first pictures of the twins for at least $11 million dollars, according to reports, which they will donate to charity. As I was searching the web this morning to see video clips of the story, I turned to the big television networks' websites to see what I could find. I was surprised to see how little there was out there and what I could find, for example on BBC News (my nr. 1 source of general news), was not embeddable (although it was made available on BBC's YouTube channel with the embed option turned off). Appearently, the Associated Press (AP) have taken a different strategy, because the clip I found on AP's YouTube channel was embeddable. In the long run, pictures are great, but isn't video even better? Especially as broadband penetration continue to increase? I think that BBC and others are making a mistake by not making popular news clips like this embeddable - don't they want their videos to go viral and be embedded on thousands of blogs around the web (with their branding all over it)? As more people turn to the web to get their video fix, it won't just be the pictures of celebrity kids that will sell for millions of dollars, it will be the videos too...

Jay Baage