14 DAY TRIAL // The US news media group Belo came to an agreement with Internet giant Yahoo! that will have thirteen of its local television stations provide video content to the local news service of the Sunnyvale-based company, on a daily basis.
The two have formerly been connected, in 2005, by a deal regarding the distribution of local job postings to Yahoo!'s Hotjobs and are both members of a larger newspaper consortium for graphical advertising technology, cross-selling online advertising inventory, content distribution and search, as Oliver Luft of journalism.co.uk mentioned.
The advertising revenue generated by the video clips will, of course, be shared between the two corporations under the new agreement. The stations providing the video content are the ones in Portland, Charlotte, San Antonio, Hampton/Norfolk, Seattle/Tacoma, Houston, Spokane, Louisville, St. Louis, New Orleans, Tucson and Phoenix. The two remaining stations of Belo, that will not be held under contract to share their videos, are the ones from Dallas and Boise. An interesting question to be raised is who of Yahoo! and Belo did not want the content from the two stations mentioned above to also make the object of the deal.
The exclusivity involved, that is said to be one of the most important terms in the contracts, is forcing the video producer to provide high numbers of clips when there is nothing notable in the news and the content will run within the local news pages of Yahoo! News. In case there's major news, that will be changed and the video will be available to all Yahoo! users.
Yahoo! has carefully chosen its partner, and under reviewing all the possibilities they opted for Belo, one of the nation's largest media companies with television, newspaper, cable and interactive media assets and an operation base that includes Texas, the Northwest, the Southwest, the Mid Atlantic and Rhode Island.