Right off the bat, let me say that all three media companies are fantastic companies.
They’re not going anywhere (as in they won’t disappear), and if their TV executives can get over the reasonable envy and angst fearing that what happened to print media companies can happen to them, they will definitely be going places (as in growing and thriving)…
But it’s very interesting to see just how differently CBS is handling things versus. News Corp. and NBC. News Corp., by the way, was my former employer. I’m not sure if there is any one way to proceed, but while News Corp./NBC have been planning a YouTube killer for months and spent one year fine-tuning it (effectively giving YouTube and Google one full year to ramp up further, create new features etc.), CBS has proceeded to adopt an open strategy. In the words of Quincy Smith, CEO of CBS Interactive:
“CBS is all about open, nonexclusive partnerships,” CBS Interactive president Quincy Smith said. “Just CBS.com is not the answer” to reaching viewers, he added, so the network is devoted to going out where the viewers are, not forcing them to CBS.com.
The network already partnered with 24 sites including TV.com, Comcast’s The Fan, Slingbox and Brightcove to offer clips and other CBS content.
Those have already resulted in a huge lift in unique viewership to CBS.com — from 21 million unique users per month in May to the current 134 million — from people linking in from partners.
To be fair, Smith is widely hailed as a dealmaker from venerable Allen & Co., but before that he was at Netscape when Netscape was morphing the Web experience. He has also lured in Patrick Keane from Google and Mike Marquez from Yahoo! Those two hires get less media attention but make no mistake about it, CBS Interactive is “outwebbing” both News Corp. and NBC in many ways.
The one thing that I find most interesting, in all of this, is notice the word Web in “CBS Aims to Spread Web Content”. While many people jump on the convergence of media on the Web bandwagon, I for one do not see that happening any time soon.
In other words:
- the content you see on TV will look different than the content you see on the Web, mainly due to economics and partially due to technology.
- the content you see on the Web will look different from the content you see on Wireless, both due to economics and technology.
TV is a $75B ad industry in the US, if you add filmed entertainment and licensing, it becomes a $250B industry. Why on earth would the TV networks cannibalize all of that for the Web’s $17B ad industry, of which 40% comes from search?
All to say, I fully expect TV companies to adopt a strategy of taking morsels of content and putting it online, but keeping the meat on TV:
Smith added that the network may reach out to fan-site producers to program CBS’ Web-site content. He cited a fan clip he admired: a digest of every season of The Sopranos in seven minutes, now available on YouTube. That clip might be too long, violating guild contracts and causing rights issues, but the network might take such an example and create a version running two minutes, he said.
Seven minutes? Two minutes? Close, but no cigar. In my daily position at web video producer, publisher and syndicator WatchMojo.com, I’m starting to think that the Web vs. TV tug of war will probably see the better web video content producers take the offensive to the TV producers. Economically, it makes sense for us to extend our distribution to TV, whereas it makes little sense for TV networks and cable companies to extend their actual content (noy 2 or 7 minutes folks) to the Web where they splinter their TV audiences and shrink the advertising revenue they can covet.
This is something that I only realized now - 18 months, 4,000 clips and 100 hours of programming later - not only do web video producers have a cost advantage, we also have a distribution advantage and by virtue of being digital and not in a 22 minutes out of 30 minutes format, we’re simply leaner and more agile in this contest…
Any thoughts.
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