The online video business is a marketplace still in formation and it shows. Nobody knows just how to make money off web-delivered TV shows and a lot of scattered experiments are underway.
Nobody, it seems, is more scattered than NBC-Universal. Less than a month after it finally gave a name to its joint online video syndication venture, Hulu.com, NBC-U announced today it will offer content directly to viewers on a downloadable basis under a new service called NBC Direct. The programs, including hit "Heroes," will be available for one week after their initial airing and will have non-skippable ads embedded within them.
This move also comes less than one month after NBC announced it would stop selling commercial-free TV shows via Apple's iTunes and instead sell them via Amazon's Unbox service for the exact same price, $1.99/download.
So, in an effort to navigate the web video waters, NBC plans to syndicate content via Hulu.com, sell commercial free TV shows on Amazon.com and offer ad-supported downloads directly to consumers. Granted, these varied efforts each may reach a different kind of viewer with different kinds of content.
Still, it's kind of a mess, which is not surprising given that there is no magical business model for web video. Apple's iTunes, on the other hand, is not a mess.
iTunes serves today as the closest approximation to a widely known and utilized video middleman that exists on the Internet. In the old days, we would have called this middleman a TV "network."
Indeed, Jeff Gaspin, the president of NBC's digital division says that the NBC Direct experiment is a direct move to "eliminate the middleman." What remains to be seen is if Internet video shapes up to be a true direct-to-consumer business, at least in a big way, or whether after all the skittering to and fro, content providers will gravitate back to the web era's version of a TV network.
Cynthia Brumfield at 8:54 PM|Comments(0)
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