The Future of Internet Television
This weekend's Sunday NY Times Magazine has an interesting article entitled BrewTube. The article profiles the new Bud.TV to be launched this Monday.
When you hear Bud.TV, if you're thinking of Clydesdales and the "Wassup" guys, think again. That side of Bud will be shown during the Super Bowl. BudTV will have original programming leveraging talent from LivePlanet (Project Greenlight), writers from Da Ali G Show, Saturday Night Live and Howard Stern Show.
The initial shows will include "Finish Our Film", where LivePlanet will shoot the first and last minutes of a short film and seek community participation to develop the plot of the middle and "Happy Hour", a one-to-four minute "episode" created by a rotating group of comic writers.
Not all the material will be humor-based. One planned program is a 130-episode science fiction series called "Afterworld".
Clearly, these are the early days of Internet television, and there is no clear direction for the model. Bud.TV is an ambitious first effort at what is likely to become a compelling model - advertisers creating original programming content. The model is not new - in some ways it recalls the early days of soap operas. However, I think most people agree that the existing model of commercials will not be viable in an interactive environment. I may tolerate them in some instances (such as previews before a movie), but sitting through a 15 second advertisement before watching a YouTube clip is not going to fly.
When you think of the cost of television advertising (Anheuser Busch spent $287M in 2005), this initial foray into Internet TV programming is probably not a huge expense for Anheuser Busch. It will be interesting to see how this evolves.
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