NBC, News Corp's Answer to YouTube
As mentioned in the Wall Street Journal on the 23rd (subscription required) NBC and News Corp have entered into a joint venture to one-up YouTube, making network television programming and movies available to the public. Using the syndication approach of spreading content across at least four major sites, AOL, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo! these companies hope to capture some of the 1 billion streams that YouTube saw in a single month in January of 2007 for example.
New Corp President, Peter Chernin said in a statement
“This is a game changer for Internet Video, We’ll have access to just about the entire U.S. Internet audience at launch”.
Certainly, the current trend with media companies is to syndicating media across their sites for example; Viacom plans this approach across 44 of their domestic sites. I guess my question is do people really want to visit ten or more sites to view content, or use fewer ITV sites like YouTube, Joost, or IPTV solutions like Akimbo or Apple TV? However, according to eMarketer, users actually consumed fewer streams in 2006 verses 2005. They suggest this is due to a flattening effect with more competition as people visited more sites.
Of course, on one hand Viacom sued Google last week over illegal content showing up on YouTube while at one point considering collaborating with them, according to what I have read they did not want to grant exclusive rights, this is certainly something as a small producer I would not want to do.
The dance is on and the boys and girls are hooking up, those who are shy and waiting in the wings are going to miss out if they wait too long or may go home alone or with the wrong partner.
Below is an interview with Tuna Amobi, a Standard & Poor’s media analyst.
