Q&A with Jeff Crigler of Voxant
October 3rd, 2007 by Jim Savage
With the continued interest and growth of Web 2.0 technologies we wanted to take a further look at online multimedia. Voxant is a fast growing company that specializes in delivering broadcast content, on behalf of the broadcasters, to the long tail of the web. To give you the front line perspective, we asked CEO Jeff Crigler some questions about Voxant and the overall space.
Q: Voxant was first founded in 2004 and you joined in 2005. At that time did you recognize the power online multimedia would have on today’s news? It is rare to find a major news story without an accompanying photograph or video clip.
Jeff: Yes, I think that is why Longworth started the Company and then hired me in July 2005.
Q: What particular photograph or video clip do you believe had the most impact on a story’s coverage in the news? Do you think the story would have gained so much national/international attention without the picture or video?
Jeff: The Macacca moment from the last Virginia senate race comes to mind, but there are countless examples. On any given day we can check the headlines in our text stories and watch a corresponding surge in embeds of images or video related to the same story.
Q: Do you feel as though user-submitted video Web sites, like YouTube, detract from the importance and capabilities of video used as a reliable source of news, or do you think the popularity of online videos make it easier for people to accept their news in video format?
Jeff: No, I don’t. I think viewers are pretty savvy and understand the difference. What will be interesting is to watch the blogosphere and see how the “citizen-journalist” affects the media market. We are only at the beginning of this trend. We intend to support citizen journalist submission of content in the fourth quarter…so, stay tuned.
Q: Do you foresee news networks replacing text news stories with video content in the near future?
Jeff: No. Text is a great medium and is still the fastest way for most of us to absorb news. With our busy lives, text will remain the dominant medium for many years to come. There is still no good way of “scanning video” the way you can look at the front page of the newspaper and “get” what is going on in a few seconds. People like the MIT media lab have been working on ways to do this, but its still just “research.”
This is why we chose to also include text in our service and it has turned out to be the most popular type of media for us.
Q: What percentage of Voxant subscribers use multimedia for their blogs and what percent use it for their Web sites? Which segment is experiencing more growth in terms of subscriptions and/or downloading content? What do you think this means for the online content industry?
Jeff: About a third of our affiliates are regular users of multimedia. We see that growing over time…. But we also see the entire segment growing. So it will still be a few years that text dominates the information flow. Also keep in mind that the Web is essentially a textual medium (unlike TV, for example). I don’t expect this to change quickly. Though I think with time it will evolve to be more interactive. We are seeing some exciting new media forms emerge which combine the two and that is where I think we go next in the evolutionary process.
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