| Chinese Publisher Launches "Instant" Crime Videos |
|
|
Tag it:
| Written by A. Lin Neumann | |
| Friday, 20 November 2009 | |
.jpg "Image") New Hong Kong and Taiwan Web Service Recreates Crime in a Flash
Maverick publisher Jimmy Lai, whose gaudy, opinionated Apple Daily newspapers in Taiwan and Hong Kong are famous for their outrageous coverage of street crime and other horrors, launched this week an audacious new mobile Web service that brings detailed, almost-instant re-enactments of the daily police blotter to Internet users. An extension of the newspapers' existing Apple Action News video service on the Web, the computer animations were two years in development and bring together crime reporters in Hong Kong and Taiwan with a 300-strong team of animators in Taipei. The end result is a kind of video-on-demand reality TV for the Internet. Apple Daily editors say they can produce the finished videos, which are three to four minutes long, in two hours flat from the time a reporter checks in with the animation desk. "We had to completely retrain our reporters to go after the right kind of detail for this product," said Simon Lee, the company's CEO for new media, who spoke about the product at a newspaper conference in Singapore. Users who access the service – which is available only in Chinese and only to customers with registered mobile phones in Hong Kong or Taiwan – click to download a video to their mobile device or computer that recreates, in amazing detail, a street crime. In one such video, a Taiwanese policeman was stabbed to death in the neck by a man seated in the back of a patrol car before the assailant was himself gunned down by other cops. The video opened with available TV news footage of the crime scene but quickly segued into blocky animation that shows the victim being stabbed repeatedly while blood gushes from the neck wound. "Some of this is a bit controversial," admitted Lee, who said the company will monitor the gore levels carefully to avoid offending local sensibilities or government regulators. Apple Daily's Lai, however, has made a career out of offending sensibilities in pursuit of profit for his newspapers. When he launched Apple Daily in Hong Kong in the 1990s he quickly tangled with Chinese authorities ahead of the 1997 handover, getting himself banned from the mainland and making the newspaper a target of attack by Beijing. Consumers loved it – and also ate up Lai's street-level view of crime as his reporters raced around town on motorbikes to snap pictures of the latest gruesome outrage, whether a traffic accident, suicide or triad murder. Apple Daily was soon locked in a tight race for Number One in the market with traditional leader Oriental Daily News. A few years later, he brought the same formula to Taiwan. Lee says Lai is the driving force behind the new instant crime animations also. "We only need one creative genius," Lee said with a laugh. A marketing pioneer – Lai founded the Giordano clothing chain before moving into publishing; he was forced to divest after he angered Beijing and the company was threatened with expulsion from China – the publisher this time has taken existing technology and wedded it to news reporting to create a product that appears to be totally new and in tune with crime-addicted readers of Chinese newspapers Executives hope the new service will generate both revenue and customer loyalty to the Apple Daily's online portals. Based on a transaction model instead of a lengthy subscription process, a customer accesses the service by sending an SMS to Apple Daily. They receive instructions on how to view the videos by return SMS. A new customer is given 50 bonus "points" to spend on videos, with each video costing one point. The points are equivalent to roughly 20 Hong Kong cents. Once the bonus points are gone, customers are prompted to buy more, which they can do with one click. The charge shows up on the user's monthly phone bill. Lee expects each user to view dozens of videos a week. "We hope it is cheap enough that no one will bother stealing the videos from a download site," said Lee, citing the experience of I-Tunes, which prices songs for download at less than a dollar as a way to get consumers used to paying for what can easily be found for free from peer-to-peer websites. The company also captures the mobile phone number of users, a valuable and sought after piece of data for Web site operators looking for ways to monetize content with various services linked to smartphones like the I-Phone and Blackberry. Initial reaction has been positive, says Lee, who claims that visits to Apple Daily's mobile web site doubled this week as a result of the videos. The key to making the service work, Lee explained, is the complex relationship of the traditional news reporter to the animation team – and getting the reporters "to become obsessed with details." Reporters have had to learn to note the finest details of a crime scene or a police report and to grill cops and witnesses for information on such things as the exact height of someone, the color of shirt a man is wearing or the length of a knife or shape of a weapon. "It is not enough to say someone is young or old, tall or short," Lee said. "We need details, details, details." The process of making the animations begins when a reporter logs on to a video conference with a producer at the Taipei animation farm. The two collaborate on story boards for the videos and when they are satisfied that they have the facts right, a "modeler" begins assembling bits of existing video and animation for the story – finding cars, streets, clothing etc that match the facts of the case. Finally, the animation team gets to work making the parts work together. What is new in all this is the speed of turning around the product. What might take days or weeks to produce elsewhere is being done by Apple Daily in just two hours. "It has to be done fast and we are doing it fast," said Lee. The two newspapers and their shared animation farm are currently doing about twenty videos – ten for each market – every day, with uploads completed by five am. For now, Lee said, the videos will be confined to the bread and butter themes that have fueled Apple Daily's traditional success – crimes, car accidents, fires and other kinds of mayhem, along with graphic depictions of medical procedures that seem to hold a particular fascination for readers in Taiwan and Hong Kong. And politics? Despite Lai's reputation as a thorn in the side of the mainland's communist mandarins, Apple Action News has no plans to put up videos of political events.
Set as favorite
Bookmark
Email This
Comments
(0)
|
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Show/Hide comments
Show/Hide comment form
Alice Poon
| Freedom of Expression Too Precious to Throw AwayThursday, 04 February 2010 | Alice Poon
In a free society, there will always be more than one single opinion. In a free society, it is accepted that everyone should have an equal right to express his/her opinion without fearing... Full Story |
| Previous posts: |
John Elliott: Riding the Elephant
| From vultures in Delhi, to coups in Pakistan, a journalist's un-edited take on current events |
Donate to Asia Sentinel
