Friday, November 10, 2006

Viacom Refocuses Online

The parent company of MTV and Comedy Central sees the future, and it is online. According to MediaPost, Viacom wants to make half a billion dollars per year in online and download sales and ad revenue.

Viacom's stable of properties, which includes iFilm, DreamWorks, Nickelodeon as well as the extensive music video library, are ripe for selling or ad-supported short videos that can be viewed online or downloaded to mobile devices.

Setting up the video servers (hello Brightcove) that can deliver content on demand through cable or online should be the first order of business. Next, the company should set up personalization services that enable delivering matching content across all of its properties so that you can get everything the company has (movies, videos, interviews) about a celebrity like Jon Stewart at once.

Network programmers such as Viacom are slowly getting past the idea that distributing their content online is a threat to their TV revenue. Regardless of their actions, "scheduled" TV revenue is going to be replaced by on-demand video, so opening the keys to their kingdom and working with and not against YouTube gives them the best chances of success.

Posted By John Gartner at 02:27 PM
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