Slicing Decades of Video for New Life on the Web

Media companies are rushing to repackage their videos for the Internet, and some say they can hardly keep up with advertiser demand for more. Video clips of TV shows and behind-the-scenes outtakes are omnipresent online — but how do they get there?Part of the answer is here, at the headquarters of Discovery Communications, where a small team of editors mines the 23-year-old video vault of the Discovery Channel for animal attacks, dinosaur animations and scientific oddities. Old shows that ordinarily would not be repeated on Discovery or its other cable channels can be repackaged online, turning every week into “Shark Week,” three minutes at a time.As users spend more time watching videos with advertisements attached, they are fast becoming an incremental moneymaker for media companies. While the young medium is not impervious to the economic slowdown, the research firm eMarketer forecasts a 45 percent gain in online video spending in 2009, evidence of the sharp rise in video production for the Web.
http://nytimes.com/2009/01/26/technology/internet/26vault.html