In the earliest days of television, broadcasters pointed a camera at a performance stage and made opera, theatre, and symphony music accessible to anyone with a television set. It took time for television producers to recognize they had a unique medium on their hands and to create the iconic Ed Sullivan Show and I Love Lucy, programs that demonstrated that this new medium could be used to entertain and engage and which drove adoption of televisions into the millions.
That’s always the way with a new medium. It is applied like old models until someone conceives a breakthrough idea that demonstrates the unique abilities of the new media to communicate, entertain, enlighten. And so it is with the Web.
For much of the last dozen years, the Web has emulated books, newspapers, television, and even radio. The page metaphor had lead to bookmarks, video players put a TV-like window on the page, and links jump from one source material to the next, much like flipping through the pages of a book or clicking through the channels on a television. For all the progress and improvement in Web applications, bandwidth and reach, Web-based content isn’t consumed all that differently from the content found in books and TV.
Enter Apture. The San Mateo, CA.-based startup has given publishers new tools to create a better content consumption experience. Without ever leaving the source page, readers can dive deeply into a topic, read related articles, watch videos in place, listen to relevant music, and even make purchases. For the publisher, integrating Apture’s link tools is a relatively simple; a code snippet is added to the page template. No changes are needed to the content management systems or production processes. Editors use the Apture Innovative Media Hub tool to identify and insert links into stories. Apture supports content from Wikipedia’s open-licensed reference library, the largest video libraries in the world including YouTube and other providers, Flickr’s library of photographs, Imeem’s library of user-embeddable music and video playlists, Google Maps, and the Scribd document library, among others. Apture links are noted by an icon next to the link, indicating rich content is available.
The Washington Post has been testing the technology since mid-April. In this investigative story, the Post uses Apture’s deep link capabilities to provide background information and supporting documentation. You don’t need a plug-in to access these links, and each link is opened in context and with supporting commentary to enrich the primary story, rather than distract the reader from it.
In the Washington Post trials, Apture-supported links drove a longer engagement with an article; readers spent an average of 90 seconds with each link window they opened.
Even with a premier lighthouse customer as the Washington Post, however, the startup knows that its tool needs wide distribution to spur adoption and innovative applications of its deep links. So today, the company is making the Apture Innovative Media Hub freely available to bloggers and other Web publishers. To add the tool to your site, just visit www.Apture.com.
Apture, I think, is transformative in its most basic application, providing a platform for a richer engagement with content. As more and more creative publishers use the tool, I’m confident – and eager to see – Web media will take on its unique qualities.
