Earlier this week, in yet another example of the colliding worlds of media, Thomson Reuters launched a finance-news streaming video service, Reuters Insider.  Heralded as the YouTube for the financially interested, Reuters Insider is a Web-based video service that captures myriad streams of information produced by the company’s reporters and 150 partners.

Devin Wenig, chief executive for the markets division of Thomson Reuters, attributes the new strategy to a natural evolution of the visual Web.  He tells the New York Times’ David Carr:

“The trend that we are seeing in professional information is not all that different than consumer media. 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.”

Reuters’ largest competitor Bloomberg has enabled this since 1994 when it launched BloombergTV, but has done little with video.  It’s acquisition of BusinessWeek in October of last year further expanded its financial news empire.  Reuters Insider is part of the company’s response to this heightened competition, as are rumors of its potential acquisition of Newsweek.

One area where Reuters Insider truly excels is the amount of consumer engagement it offers.  Subscribers can navigate content by sector, date, markets or region, or apply filters to create their own personalized channels.  It also provides near real-time transcripts of the video through voice recognition technology, which then get cleaned up a bit and get tags, links and other relevant information added.

That metadata, along with specified search terms, allows end-users to jump to the exact moment in the video when the term is mentioned, saving them from watching the rest of the video that’s irrelevant to them.  Users can also clip and share certain parts of the video that are of particular interest.

It looks like RAMP (formerly EveryZing), is providing Reuters Insider’s content optimization and search capabilities.  I did PR for RAMP a couple of years ago when it was EveryZing, and I have to say, I wish every company that had online video used it or a similar technology.  As an end-user, being able to get a full-text output and search within the video content is a huge benefit.

I’m interested to see what kind of reviews Reuters Insider gets over the next several months.  At first glance, I think it’ll be a successful move.  If you want to check out the demo, visit here.

For anyone that has tried it out, what are your thoughts?