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Posted in News on 08/27/2012 By Mark Glaser & Courtney Lowery Cowgill

HuffPost Live’s raucous video launch

As publishers push into online video—the better to sell video ad inventory—no one has pushed harder and more bolder than the Huffington Post and its new HuffPost Live channel. And in this media environment, bold is good. But bold can also be risky. Huffington Post hired 100 people to staff the channel, which runs original programming 12 hours per day, 5 days per week, including live Google+ Hangouts with audience members coming on as talking heads alongside experts. This launch bears watching because everyone wants to know, basically: Can the talk radio model translate to streaming video and online chat? James Careless of StreamingMedia.com put it this way in a roundup of opinions from experts: “Overall, HuffPost Live has been given good marks…What they’re not as clear on is the long-term value of the site, and whether or not HuffPost Live will be good for the streaming media industry as a whole.”

Other reviews were all over the map. The headline on Michael Humphrey’s review on Forbes read, “Courageous, flawed and promising.” The Baltimore Sun’s Gus Sentementes predicts, “This is going to turn into a very ‘sticky’ website for HuffPo.” And the Guardian’s Michael Wolff, characterized it as “indescribably moronic. Like fingernails on a blackboard.” Still though, Wolff admits, “The breakthrough feels close … HuffPo Live really sucks, but the game is afoot.” The business model behind HuffPost Live is also partially experimental. At first, the project hoped for five or six launch sponsors, but it launched with just two, Cadillac and Verizon. And as AdAge’s Jason Del Rey notes, there are no traditional commercials during live segments. The idea is that big sponsorships ($1 million to $5 million) are logo branding, pre-roll ads and custom-marketing integrations. As HuffPost Live’s co-creator Roy Sekoff told the Mediatwits podcast: “We wanted to have different kinds of sponsorships [on HuffPost Live] where we integrate the brands into some of the programming.”