The buzz around online video has recently grown to a dull roar in the realm of business and finance. CNBC and The New York Times have said that they will begin contributing financial articles and video to their Web sites and Bloomberg News recently launched CEO Spotlight, a new Web video series of CEO interviews produced in Bloomberg bureaus around the world. This is Bloomberg’s first step towards bringing a vast amount of business news video clips to the public Internet. Bloomberg creates a huge amount of video content across the globe—in multiple languages—and that content is already distributed live, 24 hours a day on cable, satellite and the Internet. So what is changing? Bloomberg News is shifting gears from traditional broadcast efforts bringing quality, Web-purposed video to the forefront. At the core of Bloomberg’s strategy—and the strategy of other business and finance content producers—is the conversion of traditional, linear programming into easily consumable, searchable online video clips.

CNNMoney.com is another site making a major push into online video. As one of the most popular online destinations for financial news, last month CNNMoney had more than 7 million unique visitors, according to Nielsen Online. The site launched a broadband initiative this past Tuesday and will soon go from producing one or two original videos each day to creating about 30 broadcast-quality Web videos daily. CNNMoney’s newly designed homepage includes an embedded video player, allowing users to view video content while they follow breaking business news and streaming financial data online. Executives and editors anticipate the site’s new emphasis on original, fresh business and financial news clips will better serve users and attract lucrative online advertising.

Touting that “The future of business television is online,” CNNMoney.com Editor Chris Peacock explains,

“The audience for business and finance information migrated online very quickly…They’re at their desks. They’re an at-work audience. We have a footprint to reach more people through our distribution than I think the classic cable networks can.”

CNNMoney.com hopes their online video focus will take on financial TV networks such as CNBC and the Fox Business Network. Online video may trump TV during the business day when CNNMoney’s target demographic is at their computers and short video snippets appeal more than long form content, but how much should people worry about competition between TV and the Web for viewers and advertisers? Allen Wastler, the managing editor of CNBC.com argues that the “holy grail” of the industry is finding a complementary relationship between the Internet and TV that best serves the audience/Internet user.

Yet both Bloomberg and CNNMoney’s new video strategies come in the midst of upheaval in the media and advertising industries. While a complementary relationship between TV and the Web may be the ideal, in the current reality companies are focusing on attracting viewers to their content and subsequently gaining a greater share of potential advertising revenue. As Jonathan Shar, CNNMoney.com’s general manager declared,

“The ultimate goal is to start competing with television for those [advertising] budgets.”

While the goals may differ—“We’re not pretending that we’re trying to re-create a television channel here,” CNNMoney’s new executive producer for video, Caleb Silver, explains—media companies all want to guarantee advertising budgets factor their sites, stations, and content in heavily. With so much attention on growing online populations and user interaction with Web video, it appears the challenge will be for TV to hold onto ad dollars. Online video, however eager the business audience may be to consume it, faces distinct obstacles to monetization; content needs to be fresh, engaging, discoverable and easily navigated in order to increase views and prove valuable to advertisers.