Huffington Handles: Video

Because The Huffington Post does more aggregation of news than generation of it, their layout, design and delivery methods very much resemble those of a blog. While the articles and frontpage may look like any other news site at first glance, a quick look at the bottom of each page reveals that the site is indeed powered by MovableType, a blogging platform.

Because of this, The Post is able to change things up very easily and is not stuck into a rigid content delivery system. As such, when The Post looks to include something like video, they can do so in whatever format the video was originally offered. This is beneficial to both The Post, as they can feature as much media as desired, and readers, because they can view video regardless of its source. More often than not, this means users access the video through a system they're familiar with, like YouTube.

For example, this article on students voting at Penn State simply has a YouTube video embedded. Unlike some news sites, which would only be able to show their own, original video in a proprietary player, The Post keeps viewers on their site instead of sending them elsewhere. Other video players are utilized on other pages, such as in this article and this article.

Of course, YouTube doesn't offer the high video quality that some desire, and The Post certainly loses some stylistic consistency by relying on off-site content. Then again, The Post didn't create the video to begin with; beggars can't be choosers. So long as I can quickly and effortlessly access their multimedia, I'm satisfied, and currently that is the case.