Disney Proves Me Right and Wrong

Wow. 

Disney will announce today that they are making "much of its newest and most popular programming on ABC and other channels available free anytime on the Web", according to the Wall Street Journal which does not make much ot its newest and most popular stories available free anytime on the web so I can't link to the story.

This is big, big, big.

It means they get The Future of Media. They are freeing their content and monetizing it on the web. It looks like they are microchunking it, but it's not totally clear.  And I am not sure about the syndication part.  But it doesn't really matter. They get it, they are leading they way.

But it also means they are not deliberating, they are obliterating. They proved me wrong about big companies, at least one big company.

I am so impressed.

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis adds his two cents to this story and its well worth reading.

Comments

[Erik Schwartz]

There are some subtleties here...

The programming includes commercials that the viewer cannot skip.

I'm also guessing this is a streaming service, not a download service.

On the whole this is a very cool thing, but I don't think it rises to the level of "media wants to be free".

[Jerry]

I wonder if they would have done this under Michael Eisner. I doubt it.

[steve]

It is a streaming offering. No downloads.

[Brooks Jordan]

That is really quite amazing. I've read Jeff Jarvis' post twice now and both times I got a little rush of euphoria. That's it: we're living IN the movie. Hollywood can't make anything better.

One thing I love about the model is creating community around the content. From Jeff's post:

"As part of an effort to engage the online community, viewers from around the country will be able to gather in “rooms” online to watch an episode of, say, “Lost” and chat about it."

I caught the NCAA's "Sweet Sixteen" round of college basketball online this year on the CBS website. That's almost exactly how I want my content, fully archived with highlights and the "buzzer beater" broken out. If I could have remixed and shared it and invited friends in to watch with me, that would have been ideal.

[simon]

that is just amazing ..... incredible !

[Dan Malven]

One of the most interesting things to me about the WSJ article was that credited the new organization design as making this possible. I bet that the majority of media executives at all companies "get it" in terms of the big picture of what the digital world is doing to media just as much as the execs at Disney do. But what Disney did was create an organizational structure that let them act. Without the right organizational structure, even if everyone in a media company buys into the big picture vision, the details of a major move like this are just too hard to work out among the different groups (as they all worry about their own "stuff" like employees, budgets, influence, bonuses, etc) so they don't get done. The real visionary thing that Disney did, IMHO, is when they re-did their org structure, and this move is a byproduct of that.