CBS's Online Video Network Targets Advertisers, Not Audience: One of the big differences between new media circa Web 1.0 and new media circa Web 2.0 is that this time the big boys get it, or at least the big boys get that they need to do something different quickly.
Consider the CBS Interactive Audience Network-a cross-platform programming network announced yesterday. The gist of the plan is for CBS to distribute video content it owns on the Internet wherever and audience may be looking for it-that means AOL, MSN, CNet, Comcast, Joost, Netvibes, just about everywhere EXCEPT YouTube (after all, Viacom, CBS' sister company, is still suing YouTube).
Henry Blodget credits CBS Interactive president Quincy Smith with smart deal making. Smith, who helped sell YouTube to Google as an investment banker at Allen & Co., really gets it, says Blodget, laying it on thick. You can decide for yourself about Smith thanks to Staci Kramer's interview with the man at PaidContent.
After reading the interview I was left wondering just what's going to be so interactive about the CBS Interactive Audience Network. It won't offer wide open VOD. Instead, according to the company "a rotating list within a specified viewing time frame of programming from entertainment, news and sports will be offered."-sounds like a semi-traditional TV schedule to me. There MAY be sharing and embedding but that will depend on how well those features serve advertisers, Smith tells Kramer. And classic CBS programming will be made available to the extent that its content that CBS owns free and clear (which means, basically CBS News programming).
Maybe the company is just doing a poor job describing the idea, but the CBS Interactive Audience Network sounds to me like it's being driven more by the sales department than anything else. From the Kramer interview:
"Advertisers deserve mass out of CBS, the largest television network on the planet and we should second that with on line mass." He offered as a scenario taking a Monday night comedy, then creating an audience for it that's bigger than the Super Bowl by Friday. Smith: "This is a real chance to make numbers matter and at CBS that is what moves needles."
It's hard to imagine what's in this for the distribution partners. According to yesterday's Wall Street Journal:
CBS has been asking to keep 90% of ad revenue generated by its videos; the other 10% would go to distribution partners, according to people familiar with the matter. That payment structure is identical to the one secured by NBC Universal and News Corp. A CBS spokesman declined to comment. A spokesman for the NBC-News Corp. venture wasn't immediately available to comment.
Maybe those companies have secured that kind of revenue split, maybe not. But at ZDnet Larry Dignan points out that the biggest winner in all this may just be Akamai-which will benefit from serving all this new Internet video the way UPS benefited from e-commerce.
Rex Hammock is skeptical about the whole Internet video thing:
 I think when given an option, people will view programming on those nice, new expensive big-screen HD TVs. (Granted, the programs will be recorded and the commercials zapped, but still, we'll still need those friendly local affiliates.)
Rex may be correct in the near term but as an investor I wouldn't be long on the TV station owners. With something like 90% of Americans getting TV through cable and satellite distribution, local broadcast affiliates have become living anachronisms. And with the ability of programming networks to go direct to consumer over the Net, it looks to me like TV station owners are on the verge of being disintermediated. And who says you can't watch IP video on a big screen TV?
If you want a gauge of the trend watch political ad spending. Presidential election years are to TV station owners what the Christmas buying season is to retailers, and, with the Feb 5 super primary coming up next year should be a banner one for people selling broadcast ads. But my guess is that it will be the last of these such national election cycles. A comparison of the online political ad spend vs. TV in 2008 and 2012 will tell the tale.
Poking Jann Wenner: Talk about a soft launch, apparently Keith Blanchard, Wenner Media's executive director for online media told a group of journalism students at NYU that Rolling Stone plans to launch a social network for pop music fans build largely around user created best of lists.
It's hardly a unique idea. MOG already offers a mix of social networking, social discovery, and traditional editorial together with lots of streamed music. Rolling Stone has a marketing advantage over start ups like MOG, but not much else.
Blanchard plans to launch a separate site that will be a social network for music fans, complete with profiles and the ability to have a say in their "Best of" lists. Blanchard called it the "American Idol version of lists."
The digerati were quick to pile on the idea well in advance of it being more than a twinkle in Blanchard's eye. At Mashable Pete Cashmore announces "Rolling Stone Social Network Bound to be Lame".  Cashmore and others like Michael Arrington at Techcrunch repeat the old saw that Rolling Stone can't compete in social networking because it's neither young nor hip like social net audiences are. But Pramit Singh at Mediavedia points out some interesting numbers:
Comscore analysis shows that,
- More than half of Myspace visitors are now 35 and older.
- 71% of the Friendster's 1 million user base is 35 and above.
- 50% of Facebook users are 25-plus, despite that it has now almost become mandatory for new college and high school students to register there.Aiming an aging demographic is a smart idea. They have the buyer and stating power, vis-Ã -vis the fickle younger crowd.
Adult-oriented social networking sites are already up and running, Multiply for example.
Next up: A social network fro Esquire and New Yorker magazines, perhaps?
Gosh I hope so, there are few better reads than the personals in The New York Review of Books!
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