New York Times puts all online video outside the paywall

The New York Times has announced that all video content on NYTimes.com and apps will be freely available to any visitors to the site, a move that comes as part of a wider strategy in improving the New York Times's multimedia branding.

Free and unrestricted access will be multiplatform, allowing views from the desktop, mobile and apps, as will not count towards the monthly 10-article limit restricting non-subscribers.

"I think video has become an expectation among web users," said Denise Warren, executive vice-president of digital products and services group at the New York Times. "It's something our users have been demanding, so this is our response."

Warren told Journalism.co.uk that the number of video views on NYTimes.com had more than doubled over the year from the first quarter of 2012 which had prompted an investment strategy to promote video on the site. At present the New York Times produces more than 250 videos per month for the site but this is set to increase.

"We have to change perception of the New York Times as not only a place to read about important stories of the day and interesting topics, but also a place to watch."

The announcement comes just two weeks after the New York Times received a Pulitzer Prize for the multimedia feature Snow Fall, which made use of video, animation and graphics. The website is to undergo changes to give it a similar aesthetic to that award-winning presentation, and Warren explained that the "video library experience" is another area of the website that will be re-designed to make video more discoverable.

"We have a lot more storytelling tools at our disposal and we do a brilliant job with them," continued Warren, "but I think we can do an even better job and really push video as a core area."

Both live and on-demand video are available on NYTimes.com, organised in to categories such as news, world, business, science, opinion, arts and style.

Last week we reported that the New York Times is considering a cheaper subscription option. Last month we looked at the first two years of the metered paywall.

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