Video-laced websites evolve into pseudo-TV stations
By Jefferson Graham, USA TODAY
Posted 10/2/2005 6:29 PM Updated 10/2/2005 7:15 PM LOS
ANGELES — Don't touch that mouse. Online news and entertainment video is booming, says market tracker Forrester Research, with video traffic doubling every six to eight months on average at websites that offer sight, sound and motion.
Tyler James Williams stars as Chris in Everybody Hates Chris.
By Robert Voets, UPN/CBS
America Online next month introduces a celebrity journalism series that will offer video-on-demand stories about Paris Hilton, Tom Cruise and other stars. Yahoo recently hired independent journalist Kevin Sites to file video news reports from Iraq and other war zones. World Wrestling Entertainment just moved two long-running shows from cable TV —WWEHeat and WWEVelocity — to its wwe.com site.
"There seems to be no way to quench people's thirst for online video programming," says Chris Chambers, WWE senior vice president.
A few weeks ago, the first hour of WWE's Friday Night SmackDown series on UPN was pre-empted by Hurricane Katrina coverage, so WWE put the show on its website. The show averages 5 million viewers weekly, and WWE thought it might attract 250,000 viewers online. Instead, there were 500,000.
Watch on the web
Yahoo
Pepsi Smash (pepsismash.com): The former WB summer TV concert series now webcasts on Yahoo.
Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone (hotzone.yahoo.com): The independent correspondent is traveling with digital video equipment to global areas of strife, filing video, audio and text reports. His first stories have been based in Somalia.
America Online
The Biz: The Battle for the Best Job in Music (www.thebiz.com) is an online reality series pitting eight contestants who are competing for a job to run a music label.
Project Freshman: (www.projectfreshman.com) another reality series, showing six college freshman and how they're faring. The students are shooting their own footage and writing blogs for the site.
TMZ: (Coming later this month, www.tmz.com) is hosted by Harvey Levin, formerly of TV's Celebrity Justice , and promises to offer video-on-demand access to stories about entertainment and celebrities. AOL also has gained access to the video vault from TV's Extra for older clips.
Google:
Video.google.com now hosts mostly home videos and documentaries submitted by users, but Google hopes to eventually put up on-demand TV shows users could watch for a fee.
World Wresting Entertainment:
WWE Velocity and WWE Heat (wwe.com) have moved from Spike TV to the Internet.
"That was with no promotion, without people knowing that the show was there," Chambers says.
In the dot-com bubble era, there were lots of grand plans for the Internet to replace television as the viewing medium of choice. But slow Internet connections made the shows practically impossible to watch, and advertising support wasn't there.
Now, Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff says, "The viewers are there, in a big way, and so are the advertisers." Online advertising is expected to grow to $26 billion by 2010, from $14.7 billion, Forrester says.
"I can envision a day when we'll all be watching our flat-panel TVs and will Google the TV to figure out what to watch," says Sarah Kim, a vice president at advertising agency AvenueA/Razorfish.
Indeed, Internet giants Google, Yahoo and America Online all are investing heavily in video.
Google last week presented the pilot episode of UPN's Chris Rock series, Everybody Hates Chris, on its Google Video project.
Google Video director Jennifer Feikin says the online airing was clearly promotional, designed to get people to tune into UPN, but she says the next phase of Google Video will be about offering shows on demand, for a fee. "Let's say I missed an entire season of a TV show and now would like to catch up. There may be an opportunity for a TV producer to say, 'Let's put it on Google, and receive a payment in return.' "
Yahoo has big plans to expand, under the leadership of former ABC programming chief Lloyd Braun. He was hired last year to oversee Yahoo's original programming. Kevin Sitesin the Hot Zone, which made its debut last month, is the first original effort from his team.
Furthest along is Time Warner unit AOL, which used video as the cornerstone of its re-launch as a free Web portal in June. AOL recently began two original, online reality series —The Biz and Project Freshman— and has more in the works. AOL will begin webcasting classic TV shows intact in the coming months.
Video is an integral part of AOL's new look. AOL is bankrolling new shows because, "We wanted to make a statement," says Jim Bankoff, AOL executive vice president. "The new AOL is optimized for today's high-speed (Internet) user."
usatoday.com |
