News Corp. and NBC Universal have signed a deal to create a web site, or ‘YouTube Killer’, that they will use to allow users to view selected television shows free of charge. This is one step I have been looking forward to for some time. They have already posted a number of television shows that will be on the site, such as 24, Heroes, House, and The Simpsons. I highly doubt that they will be available until the day after they’ve aired, but to have a centralized location for all of the content will give them an edge.
I wouldn’t doubt that whatever bandwidth they expect to get in the first few weeks of start up will be too little. If they surprise me there, it only makes the experience that much better. Although, streaming content has been around for a while, so we may have some people with experience on the launch team.
They have also stated that movies will be available on the site for free, including the Bourne Movies (Identity & Supremacy), Borat, and The Devil Wears Prada.
Post-launch plans are to acquire access to more content once the site has been established. The site will be ad-supported… I’ve found myself at a loss for words. The best part is that they will be launching the site this summer.
Many of these shows have been available online already. However, to watch 24, you’d have to go to fox.com and go to their myspace page to be able to view the content. If you wanted to watch Heroes, you’d have to go to nbc.com and find it in the videos section. Once all of the networks have taken the plunge to create centralized viewing sites, the problems with unauthorized media distribution will take a natural plunge. When I only have to visit 2 or 3 sites that each have easily accessible content, the networks should be able to make more money than they ever could have on television, and therefore be able to produce better/more content.
One more thing before I shut up… they’re going to allow you to insert the media from their site on your myspace or other web pages. This apparently means that the advertising will be embedded in the content. ABC does this with the content they have. They include 4 commercials in each episode of Lost. I don’t know about the other shows, but I’m fairly sure they do the same with them.
On ABC, you can watch a 42 minute show with 18 minutes of commercials in 1 hour. On their web site, you can watch a 42 minute show with 2-3 minutes of commercials in 45 minutes. CBS has 5 commercials on each 42 minute show, but the time to watch it is about the same. If they’d just release the content with the same amount of commercials for free on iTunes, they could make a killing on that advertising income.
This announcement is exciting news for me. I’ve been looking forward to this type of announcement from one of the major networks for a few years now. I can’t wait to test it out… wouldn’t it be neat if they just went with a content provider that’s already in development, like Joost?
Online Television Shows
2 responses to “Online Television Shows”
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Hi Brandon, Joost is cool yes, also there’s a new free live internet tv service called http://viewmy.tv – an excellent website that allows you to watch internet TV from all over the world, you can create your own personal page and there are tons of features, like multi-lingual descriptions, channel bitrate quality monitoring, rss feeds of saved channels blogs, full screen and mini screen options…
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Yes, but viewmy.tv looks like one of those other streaming media sites, though. All you have to do is google online tv or streaming tv to find several dozen sites that all have the same channels. The extra features are kinda nice, but when the content provided stinks, it’s still smells the same in any package.
Content that is good enough for people to pirate and causes the studios to panic trying to protect their “intellectual property” will have more traffic in a day than any of those sites in the same entire month.
At least you did plugged the site yourself instead of with a bot. That’s probably the only reason I’m leaving it up.
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