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Video Visionaries Meld Traditional TV and the Web
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When CBS launched its channel on YouTube just over a month ago, the 300 video clips from its shows featured on the site got nearly 30 million views. Since then, ratings for the network have gone up, and viewership of "The Late Show with David Letterman," which got the biggest boost, was up by 200,000 over the past month.
"We're getting people who don't watch the show routinely to say, 'I'd forgotten how funny Dave is, I've got to go check him out again,' " said Dana McClintock, vice president of communications at CBS. "It's about exposing your content to new audiences -- and, of course, thereby making more money from it."
But putting TV shows on the Internet is only one part of the equation -- the easier part. Getting shows downloaded or streamed over the Internet to play on living-room sets has been more difficult.
Apple Computer is expected to announce a device early next year that will plug into a television set and pull in video from computers via home networks. Josh Bernoff, a technology analyst with Forrester Research, said he expected to see at least four new products that perform similar tricks at next month's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
"Now that there's all this video content on the Web, everyone is trying to figure out if there's any way to get it onto the television," he said.
These first attempts at melding TV and Internet video are a little lackluster; put a grainy video clip from YouTube on a television screen and it doesn't necessarily make for must-see TV, Bernoff said. And, while some TiVo owners may enjoy the TivoCast offering, so far the six-month-old service hasn't been compelling enough to sell new TiVo units for the company, he said.
"For any of these things to get interesting, you have to have access to a large catalogue of content," Bernoff said. "This is going to happen, but it will be quite a while before any of these collections are more than a curiosity."
Already, companies that offer niche programming -- such as National Geographic and Discovery -- are talking to companies such as Brightcove to explore the advertising network that could become available through new technologies. The business models are still being fine-tuned, but ad revenues are growing for online video content, Berrey said.
"This is not just another way to watch 'South Park,' " he said, "It's a way to watch a whole bunch of stuff you were never able to watch before."
