2006 - The Year of Online Video pt. 2

The Establishment Goes Online

The online video revolution goes a lot further than the YouTube phenomenon. If anything, 2006 may be remembered as the year that the Internet became an official outlet for mainstream, big-studio product. This has come in a variety of different forms:

• Full episodes available online - Over the past 12 months, the major US television networks had a revelation. Rather than fighting all the file-swapping of TV shows they could embrace the new medium. In quick succession, NBC, ABC, and CBS started offering full episodes of their shows on demand. On their official websites no less.
  
  If you think about it, this is a complete revolution in thinking. And yet it makes a lot of sense: instead of the show being broadcast once, you can broadcast it hundreds of thousands of times. You can build your show's brand and add your network's own advertising. In the future, you can also greatly increase the amount of advertising you broadcast by monetizing each of those shows on demand. A win-win all around
  
• Added features - In addition to broadcasting full episodes of the shows, the networks have also started utilizing the Net to provide bonus material for fans. Reality shows like Survivor now feature behind the scenes footage, deleted scenes, and interviews with participants. Even more interesting is the creation of "webisodes" short (2-3 minute) Internet-only video clips like those recently created for the shows The Office and Battlestar Galactica.
  
  These webisodes, which focus on secondary characters, not only help enrich the viewer experience but they also give the viewers something to look at while the shows are on hiatus. I am betting that we will see a lot more activity like this in 2007
  
• YouTube as a marketing channel - I touched on this before, but the networks have realized that it's better to use YouTube than fight it. If you need any more proof of this point, compare NBC a year ago -- when it forced YouTube to take down all clips of "Lazy Sunday" -- with this year when the network utilized YouTube for an uncensored version of the Christmas Present Song.

I think we will see more of all this in the new year.