ClipBlast! announces that news-related video is the fastest-growing category on the Video Web. Video news now accounts for 32 percent of all the video ClipBlast! indexes – up from only 15 percent in January.

Local TV stations are primarily driving this explosive growth, according to ClipBlast! Over the last four months, hundreds of local-affiliate websites have begun augmenting print stories with video clips and implementing video streaming.

According to Hitwise, the amount of traffic leaving news and media sites to watch presumably related video on entertainment - multimedia sites increased 196 percent from April 2006 to March 2007. The report also notes that search engines played an increasingly important role in driving traffic to news and media websites.

ClipBlast!, which indexes more video content and content providers than any other video-search platform, routinely sees its site traffic triple or quadruple in response to major breaking news.

“In the immediate aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings, ClipBlast! linked viewers to live video feeds from the local Roanoke and Richmond TV stations,” said Baker. “Online video is no longer the exclusive realm of the big national news organizations.”

Based on ClipBlast! indexing and traffic, the following trends are emerging:

• TV stations that were previously limited to posting static text on their sites, such as news-story transcripts, are increasingly adding video. “We’re seeing migration from text to video faster than ever before,” said Baker.
• The number of video streams from national, local and worldwide news organizations is rising rapidly. Some stations opt to simulcast live on TV and across the Web. Others stream prerecorded programming or time-delayed newscasts. Still others offer streaming as a paid-subscription service.

ClipBlast makes it easy for viewers to search, browse and personalize the news stories that interest them with its groundbreaking Video Navigator platform. Specifically designed for the video-viewing experience, it crawls the entire Web for all available video content.

Viewers can browse for news in several different ways: via a real-time ticker that highlights breaking news from across the Web; via functionality that makes it easy to find specific news-organization content providers; via an “On Demand” link that showcases streaming video; and via “Top Web-Wide Video Searches” that highlight popular topics.