Australian workers are using lunch breaks as an opportunity to keep up with gossip, goings on and breaking news via video streams on Australia's largest news media sites. So much so that lunchtime is becoming the new primetime.

I presented at the Frocomm New Media & PR Summit in Sydney recently, and one of my fellow speakers was Pippa Leary from Fairfax Online (one of Australia’s largest media groups, owners of broadsheets Melbourne’s The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, among others).

She described the huge growth in video delivery over the Fairfax Online network, from approximately 500,000 videos served in January 2007 to over 4.5m videos served in the month of January 2008 (with a particularly big spike when Heath Ledger died). The biggest spike, however, was during lunchtime, which Pippa described as the “new prime time”. She described how many people watched their short videos over lunchtime at their desks – when they had a spare 10-20 minutes.

People aren’t getting home in time to watch the six o’clock news, so they’re watching it when they want, and have the flexibility to watch what they want at that time. Another sign of the decline of appointment based media.

Other interesting points:

All Fairfax journos and sub-editors are being trained in Search Engine Optimisation – so that their opening paragraphs and headlines are search engine friendly. They’re also being encouraged to write tags for many of their articles which are incorporated into the meta tags for the page.

There is only a 20% crossover of readers between print and online for Fairfax.

Fairfax Online is relatively unpopular amongst people aged 55 and over, mainly because that age group assumes that the online version of the newspapers shows what’s already been printed, rather than breaking news. As most of them have already read the paper in the morning, they don’t think the online version will add anything new. An interesting perception issue – and something I’d assume would be similar to other traditional print brands around the world?