The French newspaper, Le Figaro, is changing the way in which we engage with the news. The daily newspaper is actively adopting video to communicate with its audiences. Of course, using video to convey political issues is nothing revolutionary. However, using interactive and personalised video as a national news publisher, is.
Le Figaro have created an interactive video player that showcases 60 hours of live video per month. With this player, viewers are able to live comment on videos and soon, they will be able to cast a live vote on topics.
As the head of digital within Le Figaro said, “interactions are so important because we don’t want to be TV. The key is being user-centric.” Adding interactive video to news sites not only provides the opportunity to increase audience interaction and thereby subscription growth, they also give insight into what topics audience members want to know more about.
Newspapers, such as the London Times and the Financial Times are now also looking to introduce an interactive publishing strategy. And these won’t be the only broadcasters to adopt the trend.
The level of interactivity currently adopted by Le Figaro is still fairly limited. But VideoSmart believe this could be taken a step further. Instead of using interactivity per single topic, why not create a 60-second video of the most recent headlines, and let the consumer click in-video links, which leads them to the issues they want to learn more about?
This technique, more commonly known as branching, would help to only serve relevant content to the viewer. Because in an age so crowded with information, we need to give customers a say in what they see.