Thomson Reuters is changing the channel when it comes to business news. The financial information company is launching a Web-based, video-on-demand service for clients.

Instead of building a television network complete with pricey on-air talent, expensive sets, 24 hours a day to program and the toughest task of all – negotiating a place on the crowded TV dial, Thomson Reuters will produce on demand clips to be viewed by clients only.

“We’ve created something completely new here,” Devin Wenig, chief executive of the company’s markets division, tells the NYTimes‘ Richard Perez-Pena. “This is meant for the 550,000 financial professionals who have a Thomson Reuters screen on their desks.”

Perez-Pena took a test drive at Thomson Reuters’ Times Square headquarters this morning:

The service has features that allow especially fast access to specific pieces of video, whether produced in a studio or recorded at a conference or a hearing. Each video is accompanied on screen by a searchable transcript, with a set of key words highlighted at the top. Clicking anywhere on the transcript causes the video to jump to that point.

A user can search the entire database of videos for any that mention a particular topic, person, industry or company. And the service can compile a montage that pulls out the quick bits of relevant video on a subject and strings them together.

The company has built bare-bones television studios in its offices in New York City, London and Hong Kong, and is training its news staff to produce short video reports on the topics they cover.

The service should be up and running this summer, but a few hundred clients have been already begun using a test version (below).

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