ITN places video at the heart of its new website

The content strategy of the site aims to place compelling video and pictures at its heart, alongside informative news text, with the vast majority of stories being video-based.

The new site will concentrate on live streaming major events and rolling news, and can be expanded to create special destination pages for specific content on events or topics.

Other new features have been added to increase utility and dwell time through improved navigation and visual cues, alongside a comment module aiming to improve engagement and interaction with opinions from users.

Advertising elements have also been enhanced and optimised for different formats and screen resolutions.

Mark Browning, managing director of ITN Productions, commented: “No other news website in the UK has introduced responsive design yet but we know that lots of organisations are looking at it and testing it so we’re delighted to be the first to market through our work with Metia. The combination of this improved user experience and our refined product focused on the video news agenda rather than a conventional news agenda positions ITN.co.uk as a video news portal delivering something different to full service news sites. This overhaul of ITN.co.uk will ensure that our content is as accessible and shareable as possible in a noisy multi-platform news landscape.”

Steve Ellis, chief executive of Metia Group, added: “Moving to an HTML5-based site will enable ITN Productions to ensure an outstanding visitor experience, consistently and cost effectively, across many types of devices. As the range of internet browsing devices proliferate, and new hardware such as smart TVs or game consoles grow in importance, ITN.co.uk’s content will be accessible to audiences via HTML5 capable web browsers, without an exponential increase in channel specific delivery systems for ITN to create and support.”