The Associated Press was a bit late to video.

TV news has been around since the 1950s, but AP didn't get into video until 1994 when it formed London-based Associated Press Television to provide video coverage of world news for clients around the world. Following its merger with Worldwide Television News in 1998, it was rechristened Associated Press Television News (APTN).

Quicker (but not quick) to recognize the demand for video news from Web site and mobile operators, AP two years ago expanded its domestic video news gathering to become a full-service provider to those platforms.

With the domestic content, it launched Online Video Network, a turnkey video player that allows users to assemble their own Web newscasts from dozens of fresh clips each day.

Today, the video player resides on some 1,900 Web sites (including TVNewsday), attracting between 75 million and 100 million unique viewers each month. The service is ad-supported with revenue-sharing opportunities.

AP says that it supplies its clips to another 70 clients for use on proprietary video players, mostly newspapers and the big Web portals. Its No. 1 client today: Yahoo!

Currently responsible for assembling all the domestic video and much of the new media push is former broadcaster Kevin Roach, the acting head of domestic broadcast news operations. Prior to joining AP at its Washington broadcast news center in early 2007, he was news director at LIN Television's WDTV Dayton, Ohio, and a regional director of Internet Broadcasting, the TV station Web service provider.

In this interview with TVNewsday Editor Harry A. Jessell, Roach says that AP can be more than the supplier of rip-and-read stories for TV stations as it is now. With its growing domestic news capabilities, he says, it can be a reliable and immediate source of video news for all station platforms — Web, mobile and broadcast.

An edited transcript:

How do you see the marketplace evolving for your video product over the next three to five years?

I absolutely see it growing for both online video and for mobile. Frankly, the advantage that we have is that we have relationships with just about everybody in the business. That's a big help for us in terms of being able to offer new products and also work with our customers to create the kinds of products that they want.

Right now, most of your business is with these big newspapers and portals. Do you see the customer mix changing with more demand coming from the TV and radio sites or from independent sites like blogs and Huffington Post?

Absolutely. We're providing content across all genres. The bread and butter is the hard news and the breaking news stuff, but we launched an entertainment vertical and a sports vertical recently to beef up our efforts in those areas. We obviously have some customers that might be attracted to those kinds of products.

TV station Web sites seem to be running behind their newspaper counterparts. What are TV stations going to have to do to close the gap?

We're in this period where the revenue isn't there yet for Web sites for TV stations. Where TV stations have failed is not being committed to putting the resources that are needed towards their sites. That goes not just for editorial resources, but also for sales and technology resources. These are tough economic times. I get that, but this is the direction that things are moving.

It's a matter of time till those traditional TV [advertising] dollars shift more and more over to online dollars. So, if you don't have enough folks that are focused on original content for the Web, fast delivery of the content, meeting the customers' needs, then you're not going to be successful.

In all the traveling I do, I always flip on local stations and I often hear — still after all these years it just blows me away — the line that drives me crazy, which is, "For more on this story go to our Web site." What does that mean? To me, to the customer, to the viewer, I think it means nothing. It means a whole lot of nothing.

What should they be saying then?

They have to start with a commitment to original Web content.

So the Web site should be its own thing. It shouldn't be a supplement to the broadcast.

It should be both. The way people consume news and information varies. For those folks that are still watching you on TV, you can provide the same stories so they can see them when they want and additional content for stories where that makes sense. But you also have to provide original material and you have to have the people, the resources, to do it.

You were an executive at IB. Do you think that TV stations have relied too heavily on IB, WorldNow and other national Web services? Do you think they would have been better off setting their own courses for the start?

No. At the time that IB and WorldNow came into existence, they were smart choices. They got [stations] in the game and IB does provide some original content and, of course, platform technology that helps them.

But, at the end of the day, it is about local and that can't come from IB. The responsibility still lies with the stations to make the news and information in particular markets relevant to those consumers.

I think stations are getting serious about improving the content on their Web sites. Other than video, what are you doing to help?

Our wired copy is becoming more Web friendly, I guess you could say.

What does that mean?

Meaning that we're looking at how we write our copy. Are there ways for us to write our copy where it might serve the needs of a producer putting together a broadcast as well as putting it onto the Web site?

So you're talking about richer text, something between broadcast and newspaper?

Yes. The broadcast wire has been traditionally written in such a style as to accommodate rip and read. We're testing the waters in terms of changing that style a little bit where it still could work for rip and read, but it also could work for being cut and pasted onto your local Web site.

The other thing that we're doing is making sure we're the fastest in delivering national and international spot news video stories. We set ourselves up that way. We follow the same wire model in terms of how we move our video stories.

We have the radio network and, as you know, we can get audio pretty darn fast. That audio is not only obviously going out right away on our radio newscasts and our radio feeds, but we're also taking that audio and using it in video pieces with graphics and photos.

If we don't have any [video] images right then we'll send out that out real fast. As the story develops and we get video, we will add that video and build on the story much as we do with a breaking news story on the wire.

So, if you can't get video, you'll couple graphics with photos with audio and push that out.

Yes. It's all about now. Consumers want to know something as soon as it happens and, if they're interested, they want to drill down as much as possible. That's the mind set that we have. It's the same as the wire.

What else are you doing for news-oriented Web sites?

We're working on setting up an operation that will allow us to produce videos of some of AP's exclusive stories. They're called either AP enterprise stories or AP impact stories — the kind of stories that end up on the front page of newspapers. A year ago, we weren't doing too many video versions of these stories. Now we are.

Can you give me a recent example?

I'll give you one that was widely received and used by all the networks. It was basically everywhere: the pharma water story. We took a very detailed look at what types of pharmaceuticals are in the water in various areas across the country.

There was an accompanying video version and there was a multimedia interactive graphic that made it relevant to local markets where you could drill down and find out just what kind of drugs are in your particular area's drinking water.

So you took what in the past would have been strictly a print story and turned it into a multimedia story.

Yes. No one can do it like we can do it and that's the fun part about my job: harnessing this great journalism and putting it out on multiple platforms.

I have to ask: TV has been around since the 1950s and the Web since the 1990s. Why are you just getting around to this now?

Here's a company that has been traditionally serving TV and radio stations and newspapers with the written word. That was it. Now, we're in the middle of a huge transformation.

Will you be making the domestic video available to stations for broadcast in competition with the affiliates' news exchanges?

We do put some of this stuff that we're doing for online on the APTN feed.

So stations have access to it for broadcast.

Not all of it. That's something that we're still trying to sort through here because now we have the ability to add a whole lot of domestic content to that feed. The business folks are trying to figure out what to do about all of this additional content we get.

Broadcasters tell me that they need to get more local, particularly on their Web sites. That suggests that they're really not interested in national and state news, which is AP's forte. Is this a concern?

The pharma water story is a good example that we can help them become more local. We do have other things in the works, but I can't really get into them right now for competitive reasons. And, remember, we've got bureaus all over the place.

How has the push into domestic video changed the way AP operates?

We're really getting to be better coordinated as a company in terms of covering the news. For example, for our Gustav coverage, we had daily, sometimes several-times-a-day conference calls with all platforms about how all platforms were covering the story and how we could work together, not just on logistics, but also on the important editorial part.

We had the newly appointed person for Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in this morning for what we call a newsmaker interview. Now, we're saying we would we like a camera in there too, and sometimes the response is, "Well, I didn't know you guys did video; you're the AP." You know they still kind of have this traditional view of us as only being a print company. But we're going to continue to forge ahead there and work the stories across all platforms.

To wrap up, you joined AP last year from WDTN in Dayton, Ohio, where you were the news director. Now that you have a little distance from that job, what would you say are the big challenges facing the TV news directors these days?

Tight budgets, what to do about online and mobile and getting staff who think they're there just to serve TV to understand that it's not just about TV anymore. It's about what's on the Internet and it's about what's going on your cell phone.