Screenfeed Adds Video News Feed And Content Moderation Tools

April 11, 2012 by Dave Haynes

I’m often not sold on the idea of news as valuable content on digital screen networks (it’s not exactly hard content to get if you’re interested), but if you are going to do it, do it well.

It’s the reason I like Minneapolis-St. Paul-based Screenfeed, which DOESN”T do news tickers and pretty carefully curates and packages the news and infotainment so it is relevant and visually optimized for this medium.

The company started out with full screen stills with short headlines along the bottom, and has broader the offer from there. Today it announced a new service called Video News Bites, a daily news channel with custom-created spots and some nice little wrinkles in how end-users can apply the service and tune it to their needs and sentiments.

“Video News Bites was built from the ground up with the unique needs of the digital signage network and their viewers in mind,” says Jeremy Gavin, CEO of Screenfeed. “It’s the biggest endeavor we’ve taken on since we launched. We’ve taken all that we’ve learned from our customers’ need to reach their audiences and built a solution unique to the medium. Its something we’re proud of. For example, for our customers with low or no-sound environments, we’ve included the entire script of each story in visual captions.”

While the company’s editors by necessity are pretty careful about what they make available, I know from direct experience you never quite know what will trigger hissy-fits from venue partners and operators … as in “Get that story off our system NOW!!!”

So this new service has a moderation tool that lets users log in and fire through all the pieces, approving or rejecting the content. The old newspaper editor in me gets twitchy about people filtering the news so the sun is always shining, but I also get people are running businesses and they didn’t sign up to be news organizations.

I don’t normally hand over space to let people pitch their pots and pans, but like how Gavin put this together and it should be instructive to more than a few companies in this space e that are pretty much hopeless in ‘splaining what they do. Short, tight simple explanations and screen shots/demos. It works.