Content Reuse

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about how content reuse and repurpose strategies also play a critical role for online content creators.

Creating content often is a very expensive and/or time consuming process. Hence, in order do make the most of it, reusing as well as repurposing the content many times across multiple distribution channels is one of the key strategies. Great examples for this strategy are movies and sport event coverages. Movies are an ideal content for a reuse strategy as they first get shown in movie theaters, then distributed on prominent media, such as DVD and Blue-Ray, and finally are aired on TV. Sport events are an ideal content for a repurpose strategy as an event first gets broadcasted and later on discussed in form of highlight videos and post-event analyzes.

Those strategies also play a critical role for online content creators as they allow them to reach as many viewers as possible around the world by creating content only once. This especially is important when the content creator focusses on live streaming as, due to the limitations of this distribution platform, only a limited amount of users can be reached at a time. In contrast to video-on-demand (VOD) platforms like YouTube, live streamed content is only accessible during a stream which excludes all viewers that are living in a different time zone and are asleep, at work or can not watch the stream for other reasons. Therefore, reusing the streamed content by uploading it to VOD platforms and/or repurposing it by creating highlight videos has become an important step in the content management of many online content creators.

In addition, those strategies are also important for content creators who started their career by mainly producing videos and publishing them on VOD platforms. By switching to or experimenting with a different format like live streaming, those content creators would exclude many regular viewers of their community who can not follow a stream on a regular basis. In this way, taking advantage of content reuse allows them to expand into different platforms while still keeping exisiting communities satisfied.

However, content creators need to take the different characteristics of the distribution platforms into account. Live streaming, in contrast to VOD platforms, allows a direct interaction of the viewers which can result in the content only being interesting for the live audience. Directly transferring such a direct-interaction influenced content to a VOD platform can result in regular viewers being disappointed as this type of content does not match the VOD format.