The television and internet worlds are abuzz with today’s announcement from Fox and NBC of a joint effort to provide TV shows and films via the internet. Via Lost Remote:

MySpace, Yahoo, MSN and AOL have signed on as distribution partners, and each site will carry embedded video players customized to their look. “This is a game changer for Internet video,” said Peter Chernin, President and COO of News Corporation. “We’ll have access to just about the entire U.S. Internet audience at launch. And for the first time, consumers will get what they want — professionally produced video delivered on the sites where they live.”

Well isn’t that special? And let’s hope Peter has solid research to back up that “want” from consumers.

Chernin says this will be the largest advertising platform on earth and it’s hard to doubt that. There’s apparently not going to be a standalone site per se, but the content will be distributed by partners. Hence, the Chernin statement that people will get this where they live.

While everybody’s whooping and hollering, it cannot go unnoticed that the affiliates take it in the shorts on this deal (again). Oh, they have protections built in (the delay window will be several hours after shows air in Hawaii), but this is certainly a play that by-passes the affiliate system. I suppose the next move would be for broadcast companies to get in on the deal and provide their locally produced content in a similar manner.

This is a move to create the “new spectrum” for broadcast programming, but this time, it’s owned by the private sector. How will that go over with the public? Not as well as you might think.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 22nd, 2007 at 3:32 pm and is filed under Broadcasting, Disruptions, Networks, MySpace. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.