Online video: Networks play musical chairs
Posted on September 23, 2007
Filed Under TV networks, iTunes
A lot of spinning and dancing in the past week as the Big 4 TV networks try to find promotion-friendly digital outlets for their content.
Some of the activity no doubt is linked to the beginning of the fall season, and some comes in response to the NBC Universal feud with Apple. Change is good — at least for online downloaders and streaming video viewers.
- ABC (Disney) teams up with AOL for free online viewing of the alphabet network’s top shows. New and current primetime series will go online a day after they air. Up to four episodes of a shows will be up for viewing at a time. Anne Sweeney, president of the Disney-ABC Television Group, told the Wall Street Journal that the move would protect the network’s shows from piracy and appeal to both advertisers and affiliates. The scheme allows for insertion of a local ad or two along with the network’s national pitches. This calms down affiliates, who are good and worked up over alternative digital distribution channels.
- NBC creates NBC Direct, which makes the network’s hit programs available for downloading the same day they’re broadcast. Computer users can have the programs sent to them. The online network TV service looks like it’s up and running.
- Fox routes season debuts of its shows to iTunes for free downloading. Making the premieres available as a one-off is a bid to woo iTunes customers to Fox for future episodes — or to get them to pay for them online. Freebie shows on the iTunes store as of this morning include pilots for “K-Ville” and “Back to You.” No expiration on these episodes and users are free to route them onto their iPods.
Network TV chiefs insist that what looks very much like a Keystone cops routine, perhaps inspired by NBC’s petulant pullout from iTunes, is in fact a sea change in the way networks look at distribution.
Fox’s William Bradford, a content strategy suit, told AP: “I wouldn’t call it fumbling around. We are trying a lot of different things and there is a lot of learning that the TV industry is going through.”
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