Interesting to see the progressive minds at NCAA, CBS Interactive and CBS Sports stream March Madness online. In addition to NCAASports.com, they’re extending the courtesy to Joost, too. Of course, CBS is an investor in Joost; CBS pays billions to the NCAA for the rights to the March Madness tournament.
Mind you, when you take such risks, you sometimes do get burned. Apparently, CBS’ NCAA March Madness Facebook App is not doing too well… but I much rather see a media company try and learn from missteps than clam up and not give new media a try at all.
I should state that Joost is one of WatchMojo.com’s distribution partners (our channel), and we have partnered with NCAA on our own classic college basketball programming. See more of that here.
Should Live Sports Live Online?
With live sports, there are arguments to be made for and against putting the content online, let alone live streaming… big media remains very lukewarm to the idea of opening up their premium TV content programming and putting it online, where the dollars are much smaller. I ran some numbers outlining the rise in revenue CBS has made from NCAA online, with the growth in online advertising web video advertising. For that, click this.
The Web Shrinks TV and Print Ad Revenue
We’re still away from the days when media companies pony up 100% of their new, fresh content online. In fact, that day might never come, because the Web shrinks advertising revenues for big media companies… you saw what it has done to print media companies, TV companies will suffer the same fate, if not worst, for two reasons:
- broadband video is digital and as such, boundaryless.
- in many ways, video content is easier to syndicate than text content (I know it sounds crazy but that is my observation after working in text publishing from 2000-05 and in video production since 2006).
Back to big media:
Yes, we are now seeing more and more media companies tap into their archives and publish it all online. This is the kind of thinking that indeed makes the Web open up new markets and new revenue streams. This is especially true with print media where online advertising has already surpassed print advertising. But what about TV, where online remains less than half of TV and online video remains less than 5%, at best?
Leadership from NY Times
NY Times did this last year, it’s pretty cool to read the article talking about the Titanic sinking, for example, when it happened in 1912.
But therein lies a challenge, with print content, moving online poses a challenge in data transfer and formatting. Current archives might be digital and thus easily transferable online, but an article from 1912? I doubt that is the case.
NYT scans the article and publishes them as pdf’s, with the first paragraph being in html format.
Time Warner’s SI Vault
For sports lovers, it’s worth noting that Time Warner opened up Sports Illustrated’s vault yesterday, literally, with 54 years of articles, images and what not, on SIVault.com. We covered this a bit on our sports blog, check out SIVault.com for yourself.
Sports Illustrated is of course part of Time Warner, a company with extensive TV DNA (via cable properties) but whose SI is a unit of Time, a magazine company.
This begs the One has to wonder, would SI.com’s competitor ESPN.com - a largely TV-driven media company - would be so receptive to taking their content and putting it online? In theory, it should not matter… but TV is a $75B ad market and all offline sales of video (TV, Theatrical, Home) is a $250B market… so there is clearly an opportunity cost in doing so.
Speaking of Time Warner, check out our company profile on the venerable media company here, from one of our many distribution partners: News Corp.’s MySpace.com:
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