Interesting article in Sunday’s New York Times entitled, “Lots of Little Screens: TV Is Changing Shape,” tells about new TV and video production companies that are forming to take advantage of a growing demand for video on the internet.
The articles says, “According to Move Networks, a company based in Utah that provides online video technologies, more than 100,000 new viewers jump online every 24 hours to watch its clients’ long-form or episodic video. During the first two weeks of November alone, more than twice the number of Americans were watching TV online than in the entire month of August.”
And, the article says, “Inexpensive broadband access has done far more for online video than enable the success of services like YouTube and iTunes. By unchaining video watchers from their TV sets, it has opened the floodgates to a generation of TV producers for whom the Internet is their native medium.”
Excerpts from the article:
- The command-and-control economic model of traditional television is being quickly superseded by the market chaos of a freewheeling and open digital network.
- The shift is proving quite inspirational to digital media entrepreneurs. “What absolutely convinced me to start a company in this area was when I realized just how large the disruption was,” said Kip McClanahan, the co-founder and chief executive of ON Networks, an online studio in Austin, Tex. “It touches everything — how video content is created and monetized, how it’s distributed and consumed. And it’s a half-trillion-dollar market, if you include the advertising that supports it and the revenue associated with subscriptions, tickets and so on.”
- (The huge internet market) provides plenty of room for experimentation. Many flavors of technology and programming are being tested, as are some changes in traditional revenue models.
- Vuze, based in Palo Alto, and Joost, based in Leiden in the Netherlands have developed proprietary software that must be downloaded to view their video programming. In addition to providing programming from established brands like PBS, Showtime, the BBC and A&E, the start-ups encourage new producers to make deals with them and upload new programs to their sites.
- Vuze, Joost, Blip and ON all share as much as 50 percent of their revenue with the content producers, regardless of distribution medium. “If that model existed today, writers wouldn’t be on strike,” said Mr. McClanahan.
“Lots of Little Screens: TV Is Changing Shape,” was written by Denise Caruso and appeared in The New York Times, Sunday, December 2.
