Thomson Reuters will launch an on-demand, customisable financial web video service for its paid subscribers, called "Reuters Insider" tomorrow, paidContent reported. The new product will include specially produced video programming by Reuters, as well as 150 of its content partners, including CNBC.

The video platform was created to help hedge funds, traders, research analysts, banks and brokers communicate with clients, as well as to transform "financial programming from a passive one-way broadcast into a highly collaborative and personalised medium," according to the Financial Times. Subscribers pay as much as $2,000 a year.
Taking the video and online social networking revolution into the financial sector indicates the increasing reliance by traders on videos with data, graphs and charts embedded within for trading decisions.

The service is much like a Youtube for the financially interested, David Carr wrote in an article for The New York Times. It has a main window called Channel One, which enables subscribers to navigate and search for videos by sector, date, markets or region, and facilitates application of filters to create personalised channels.

While Bloomberg is eyeing the consumer media market after its recent purchase of Business Week, Reuters seems to tread an opposite path by investing about $100 million on the Insider.

"Making such a big bet on video, Reuters is acknowledging that professionally generated text - no matter how relevant, no matter how actionable - just isn't going to get it done anymore," Carr stated.

The company will produce 3,000 new online videos each week, and live webcasts will be available via video-on-demand just 30 seconds after their original airing, Mike Stepanovich, managing director of Project Insider, told paidContent.

"The trend that we are seeing in professional information is not all that different than consumer media," Devin Wenig, chief executive for the markets division of Thomson Reuters, told The Times. "People are increasingly visual, and they expect to access information in that way. They want to be able to look at a chief executive and see the expression on the analyst's face."

With many news organisation opting aggressively for web-based programming and doing away with cable news, this new video service will be integrated as a part of its desktop product offerings. "This is about turning video into actionable information," Wenig told the Wall Street Journal.

The video service also generates real-time transcripts through voice-recognition technology and develops rough renderings which are then moderated by the company staff while adding tags, links and other relevant information, according to The Times. The web video service also plans to highlight search terms in the metadata as a part of its new informational system, in order to optimise user navigation to exact moments in the video. These links can then be shared online.

Subscribers can also create and submit their own videos, according to paidContent.

About 15 percent of the service's content will come from in-house, while the rest will come from top business news outlets such as Forbes, Sky and CNBC, as well as from analysts at places like JP Morgan and UBS, according to The New York Times.

"Traditional desktops are about the two-dimensional consumption of data whereas what this does is change the paradigm," Stephen Wilson, Thomson Reuters' global head of exchange-traded instruments told the Financial Times.

The company plans to introduce the "Reuters Insider" iPad app in the coming weeks.