The NY Times (NYT) is struggling financially, So much so in fact, the company's news businesses fell from $79M  last year to a low of $37M. This is a very simplistic explination, for a better review of the NYT financial troubles see Silicon Alley Insider's aricle here.

With fininancial troubles this severe, how would you help combat poor profit margins? The NYT believes that one way is to deliver HD video "governered" to each individuals bandwidth. Actually, the video is being distributed closer to DVD quality, at 1.5 Megs a second.  How is all this Throttling being done? Making the switch from FeedRoom to Brightcove was the first step. This was not a big suprise since the NYTs is an investor in Brightcove, but maybe a good first step in getting the company back profitable again. For an explination of all the changes, see an interview with the director of the NYT's video and Television department, Ann Derry here at Beet.TV .

What does all this really mean for video pros and hobbiest like  you or me?  First, this tells me video is important, very important in fact. So what do I have to do to be successful with on line video? Make it good, and you better make it interesting. Secondly, your video content has to be searchable via your site, visitors can find it, if they can't search for it. Lastly, Provide some type of embed code where visitors can share your content else where on the net. This is equivalent to handing out a business card, except your visitors are doing the work for you. How do you know if you are successful? The number of hits you are getting and how often it is shared accross the net. Now lets go make some video!