Wednesday, March 1, 2006

AP's new video service has emerged from its beta test period and you can expect to start seeing it on potentially thousands of local newspaper and broadcast Web sites.

It's an experiment with a new business model for the AP, which is a membership organization. Typically members pay "assessments" for various levels of service. This project is different: members pay nothing and theoretically can make money by sharing in network advertising revenues.

It's all being done in partnership with MSN, which provides not only the technology but sells advertising on the video service. But Microsoft, as usual, has delivered a nonstandard implementation, one that won't run unless you have a PC running a recent version of Internet Explorer. Firefox? Macintosh? Linux? Tough luck, you're out.

AP has been catching hell from members about the compatibility issue (and I've been providing some of it myself). I'm told that MSN is -- perhaps reluctantly -- going to address it for Firefox. What that means for Mac users is not yet clear.

This will put some newspaper sites in an odd position of having content on their Web sites that their own newsrooms can't see. Many newspaper newsrooms are still running OS 9 Macintoshes, unable to take advantage of modern Web standards, much less Microsoft-only services.
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