There’s plenty of buzz today in the trades and online about new distribution deals by NBC and ABC. NBCU has announced a new ad-supported download service that’s described in detail by Staci Kramer at PaidContent:

If all goes well, viewers will be able to sign in at will and download current episodes of NBC Studio-owned prime-time and late-night shows. It’s an example of increasingly ubiquitous professional video—and of a strategy being embraced by NBC and others that makes the network provider, distributor and retailer.

Meanwhile, ABC is delivering a shift in strategy to stream its shows via AOL. Here’s David Kaplan, again from PaidContent:

The shift reflects the stepped up syndication moves from rivals CBS…which created its online distribution network this past spring, and NBC Universal…which earlier countered its outside distribution deals by saying it would beta test its own desktop video download service called NBC Direct starting next month. Also in October, NBC and News Corp. will release the private beta for their online video jv Hulu.

So the turd in the punchbowl in all of this is what it means for the affiliate system of television distribution. It’s in a death spiral, folks. Put a fork in it.

And here’s the thing. Everybody in the business knows it, but we all seem to be paralyzed, frozen in space as we await the next knife in the back from “our” network.

This seems somehow trite at this point, but the only option that local television stations have is to be local. The sooner, the better.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 9:16 am and is filed under Broadcasting, Disruptions, Networks. 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.