The player: Shoba Purushothaman, CEO of the NewsMarket, an online video marketplace for news content

The play: The NewsMarket is a Web-based service that supplies video from companies, news organizations, non-profits, institutions and agencies to broadcast and online news outlets and bloggers. The video is primarily in B-roll form so news sources can integrate the footage into their reports.

The pitch: The NewsMarket focuses on providing B-roll, rather than video news releases, so news desks can use the footage however they want. The video is delivered in high-quality over broadband. The service includes a search engine so users can search for content. The NewsMarket also provides recommendations of videos based on the user’s interest. “That wasn’t possible in the traditional world of sending out a tape,” Ms. Purushothaman said.

In the mix: The NewsMarket aggregates video from a variety of providers, including non-profits like Unicef, Greenpeace and the Gates Foundation, corporations like IBM and Microsoft and government agencies like the National Cancer Institute or National Science Foundation. As an example, earlier this month IBM was involved in the creation of the world’s largest supercomputer and provided that video to the NewsMarket to funnel to news outlets. “There is quite a lot of media interest in content like that and it’s not the kind of video a newsroom can easily get access to, but it’s major milestone in technology achievement,” Ms. Purushothaman said. The end users of NewsMarket videos are news organizations like CNN, BBC and Bloomberg and online newsrooms. About 50% of the NewsMarket users are the online editions of newspapers and magazines, such as the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and Business Week.

The backstory: The company launched in 2003 with about $1 million in funding from friends and angels.

The money guys: The NewsMarket landed an additional $19 million from Softbank Capital, Ascend Ventures and Hearst. The company has been profitable at various points, though is not currently because it’s launching new products. The NewsMarket projects steady profitability by the end of the year. The company makes money via a subscription fee that customers pay for the NewsMarket to host and deliver their videos and via a commission from media companies that sell stock footage video using the service.

The pros: Newsrooms have scaled back staff and resources, but consumers demand news and information at a rapid rate because of the 24/7 nature of the Internet. Also, as newspapers increase their video offerings online, they often need outside services like the NewsMarket for B-roll.

The cons: Online video is still a new phenomenon and can require a lot of education.

Background: Ms. Purushothaman was born and raised in Malaysia. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Monash University in Australia and a master’s degree from American University. She worked as a business journalist for nine years at the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswire. She founded a broadcast public relations consultancy before starting the NewsMarket. She lives in New York.

Who knew? Ms. Purushothaman describes herself as an obsessive cook. “Sometimes when I am traveling and in a hotel and can’t go to sleep, I will browse recipes and think about how I could cook this or that.”