Syndicate Your Content Broadly Online

There is a story on the front page of the Marketplace section of the Wall Street Journal today titled As TV Networks Use Web, Affiliates Seek Piece of the Action written by Brooks Barnes.

It’s an interesting piece because it talks about the emerging conflicts between the networks and their affiliates over the digital distribution of television content.  The example that Brooks gives is CBS’ decision to sell some of its shows via iTunes which charges $1.99 per show for download and the reaction of one of CBS’ largest affiliates, Capitol Broadcasting, which wants to offer the same shows on the website of its Raleigh, NC station WRAL.

Here’s the bottom line. In the digital medium, the content should be syndicated as broadly as possible. If iTunes wants to charge $1.99 for the shows, let them.  If WRAL wants to stream the shows with ads (and download them for a small fee), let them.

CBS should do the same on its website.  I think they should offer RSS feeds of every show in their lineup.  The service should be either subscription driven or ad supported or ideally offer both options.

This is the digital medium we are talking about.  Bits are bits.  They are going to get widely distributed anyway.  That’s how this medium works.  If CBS understands that, they’ll forget about exclusivity, which doesn’t work online anyway, and make their content ubiquitious, monetize it with whatever business models their distribution partners want to use, take a cut of the action, and they should do the same themselves on their websites and then sit back and watch the digital medium work its magic.

If you don’t get this, do yourself a favor and go do a search on SNL on google video, youtube, myspace video, or anywhere else that video content is aggregated on the web.  You’ll find a bunch of Saturday Night Live skits that have been uploaded by internet users who wanted to share them with their friends.  I did the same with the Steve Jobs SNL skit on this blog last year.

NBC needs to make SNL available on the web wherever people want to get it.  And they need to microchunk the shows down to the skit level. And monetize it with ads or subscriptions or both.  Because if they don’t others will and are already doing it.

As for the debate about subscription versus ad supported business models, I think the data is coming in pretty conclusively that the free model is where the big money will be made.  I posted the results of a survey several weeks ago on this topic that said 68% of the population prefer free and ad supported.  Yesterday, the results of another survey were published, this time by the Points North Group and Horowitz Associates.  This time 62% prefer free versus 17% who want paid with no ads.  21% are undecided which means they haven’t been asked to pay yet and hit the back button.  Either way, the digital medium has worked best with a free ad-supported model (see Google’s earnings last night $2bn in revenue in Q4 and cash flow of almost $500 million all from ads on free web content).

So back to WRAL and CBS.  WRAL has the right idea.  They are in the television content distribution business.  It’s moving to the web. They want to continue to be the one to deliver it to their audience.  CBS should let them do just that and get paid fairly for their content in the process.

Comments

[Raphy]

I totally agree. The News and Observer (in Raleigh) also had a good story about this. Decisionmark is very intriguing technology and it's unfortunate that even though there are ways to make sure local broadcasters in compliance with the law, that the networks refuse to bite. Hopefully this ultimately doesn't deter this technology.

[Raphael]

I totally agree. This is amazing technology that Decisionmark's developed and it's too bad that the networks are refusing to embrace their local affiliates, even though the networks have embraced third-parties like Apple.

[Adam Elend]

I seem to be incapable of pinging your trackback server easily through Blogger, so I thought I'd comment and let you know that I blogged about your post here.

Excerpt:

OK granted that stuff's going to be copied and stolen. That's a fact of life whether you're distributing on the web, on tv, in the theaters, or on dvd. So accepting that, but not letting it rule your distribution model, I think that where you syndicate your content is a critical element. Microchunking is fine, but it needs to be strategic Microchunking....

[innov8ordie]

There will certainly be some pain for many in the current video media distribution chain, local affiliates from the write-up above, but there will certainly be many more.

It’s interesting to me that the Telco’s think that they are the new path for delivery with VDSL and Fiber to the premise initiatives. These however have currently only been framed up as being conceptually perhaps 10% or 15% different than current distributions. Monthly payments for scheduled programming. IPTV gives a few new capabilities and a wider lineup but they and their traditional mindset are not getting very far outside of that. Such small thinking probably comes from their defensive reasons for the moves.

It seems that fundamentally “trickling” the content (bittorrent or download) rather than needing a big pipe has some fundamentally superior characteristics and represent a much bigger change than anything the Telco folks or even the cable or sattelite folks have thought up. Replay and Tivo are great but I don’t need them for that capability at all.

On a related note I noticed Slingbox and place shifting got a bunch more funding. I sort of get it but should really try one since on some level that sort of placeshifting doesn’t seem worth the effort. Sitting in a hotel room on the road it just seems easier to turn on the TV there rather than sling something to my laptop or treo. And again, isnt a little automatic RSS/torrent magic better. Wider choices and I can watch it on the plane when I am completely unconnected. I understand downloading shows, particularly automatically, takes set up but that up front cost will be driven out over time.

Actually if someone had one self configuring SW package that read the RSS TV feeds, downloaded the conent through a torrent client, resized it for the Video Ipods or PSPs of the world and then transfered it the next time the device was avaialbe, that might just give that model the chops to show its superiority. Still represents a questionable source in some senses (user redistributed shows) but wow would it be smooth. I want one!

Anyone got a spare million or two they want to give me to build the tool out and push it out into the world? Or even a few hundred thousand to prototype and assemble the POC?

[wes]

I think services like Revver.com are the best hope for us indie content creators (we used to be called artists). They add ads to our short comedy videos and not only split the ad revenue with us, but also with the site that hosts the link to the vid. All of a sudden we WANT people to steal our content and spread it all over the web. As long as they don't modify the files they can P2P them, email them, whatever they want.
The only problem is that sites like YouTube re-encode submissions so that the ad is removed. Which sucks.
Good comedy is viral as hell. The internet is finally catching up to where it needs to be for independents to be able to earn a living.