TV finding a home on the Web
ContentAgenda.com
By Paul Sweeting -- Video Business, 11/19/2008 4:48:00 PM
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Leading off the Future of Television conference here this week, a panel of top network execs said the Internet is becoming a friendlier place for professionally produced content and that meaningful monetization models are gaining traction.
“Seventy-five percent off Internet-active people now stream some video from the Web each week,” longtime head of research at CBS David Poltrack said. “More and more of that is professionally produced, broadcast and cable content. They’re viewing on the four major network sites plus [Fox/NBC Universal joint venture] Hulu, which is starting to rival YouTube in terms of time spent.”
More important for the networks, that spent on Hulu and other network sites is having a beneficial effect on overall TV viewing, according to Poltrack.
“TV viewing up in the 18-34 demo this year, due to enhanced engagement across platforms,” he said. “It’s also expanding the audience. For the show like How I Met Your Mother, the median age on TV is 41, the median age online is 28. So the platforms really do work together.
Advertisers, too, are starting to treat the Web as a true platform, rather than as simply an addendum to traditional television, according to JB Perrette, president of NBC Universal Digital Distribution.
“Hulu has over 100 content partners. It’s not just Fox and NBC content,” Parrette said. “The vast majority of the ads on Hulu are 100 percent Hulu sold, they’re not just bundled as part of a traditional [network] buy. People are buying Hulu.”
“We think we’ve figured out how to monetize our content across the ecosystem,” added Fox Digital Media president Dan Fawcett. “Our content is on over 30,000 sites through embeds. We’ve figured out how to get our content out there and monetize it wherever it is.”
Not doing so well are local network affiliates and owned-and-operated stations, which are largely cut out of the online bonanza.
“Local stations really having a tough time,” National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences president/CEO Peter Price said. “They used to have 50% profit margins, which funded a lot of content production. But those margins are getting eroded now because they’ve lost their bandwidth monopoly to the Internet.”
