Update: My real time notes from the media conference call are here.
The rumors of a joint venture to counter the perceived Google-YouTube threat, dubbed “Clown Co.” by Google executives, are now confirmed, although the name of the new company is not yet available. In a press release, Peter Chernin (COO News Corp.) and Jeff Zucker (CEO NBC Universal) are announcing “launch the largest Internet video distribution network ever assembled with the most sought-after content from television and film.” Content from at least a dozen TV networks and two major film studios is promised. Initial distribution partners include AOL, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo.
Chernin says they will have access to “the entire U.S. audience” at launch. The service is promised for this summer, with “thousands of hours” of full length televisions shows and movies, as well as shorter clips. Users will have unlimited and free access to content on the site.
Good content lineup:
At launch, full episodes and clips from current hit shows, including Heroes, 24, House, My Name Is Earl, Saturday Night Live, Friday Night Lights, The Riches, 30 Rock, The Simpsons, The Tonight Show, Prison Break, Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader and Top Chef, plus hits from the studios’ vast television libraries, will be available free, on an ad-supported basis, within a rich consumer experience featuring personalized video playlists, mashups, online communities and video search. Plus, the extensive programming lineup will include fan favorite films like Borat, Little Miss Sunshine, Devil Wears Prada, The Bourne Identity and Bourne Supremacy with bonus materials and movie trailers. Post-launch, plans will be considered for acquiring additional content as well as producing and licensing original programming for the new site’s audience.
The content will be provided through distribution partners through a customized embeddable player.
The new company will be located in New York and Los Angeles. NBC Universal’s Chief Digital Officer, George Kliavkoff will transitionally head up the new entity at launch, with permanent management coming soon. No word on capitalization, other than “each company will devote a significant marketing and promotional budget to the new site’s launch.”
There is a media conference call today at noon with Chernin and Zucker to discuss the announcement. Hopefully more details will emerge then around the new company, and we’ll get a better understanding of how this thing will compare to YouTube, Joost, Netflix’s recent offering, and other IPTV offerings.
Things we don’t know yet:
- delay if any from TV broadcast to content being on the site.
- will there be a centralized site for the service, or will this only be distributed through partners?
- Will users/viewers be able to upload their own videos as well (lots of this on MySpace Video already, could be incorporated)?
- format and “skipability” of advertising
More as this develops and more details emerge.
See all
Post
“Adding details now…”
You REALLY need to break this news don’t you, Michael? LOL.
…and despite Google’s comments to the contrary, this IS a big deal and WILL have a major impact on SueTube…
Wow it does sound awesome. But lets reserve the judgment for when this thing launches. Networks are notorious for saying something else and launching something with only half the features.
Did the TV networks not get the other memo that stated that most of the stuff Youtube users watch is UGC video. I have never watch a TV, movie, or anything from a major network on Youtube. So just cause they dump a whole bunch of reruns on a site doesn’t mean we are going to flock there to watch it.
I don’t understand why people, even on this board, seem to think this will flop. Get some common sense people! The networks already have a sizable userbase watching the shows they air on their independent websites, MySpace Video is the 2nd largest video site on the net, and this is the first time full movies will be available online for free. You really have to be kidding yourself to have this attitude “oh, these old media dinosaurs don’t know what’s up”. I am quite sure between Yahoo!, MySpace, and AOL they can assemble a team who knows how to implement a nice, slick, user friendly interface that people will like. And attracting users, how would that be hard? Aside from the fact that this gets enormous 3rd party media attention, the networks have the myspace video platform as well as traditional TV platform to market this…but will not likely have market much as all. As soon as all of this content goes up in a centralized source in a higher quality than youtube people will flock. Just look at the popularity of deep link sites like yourtvlinks, tv-links.co.uk, and peekvid. Google surely should be concerned about this, especially with their interest in entering non web advertising platforms and their current inability to monopolize youtube.
I don’t think that’s always true Mike. I usually watch Comedy Central clips and stuff like that on YouTube. I don’t like to watch Amercia’s Funniest Home Videos on my free time.
Sorry, I meant to say monetize not monopolize.
Well spoken in #5 & #6. I lost a lot of interest in YouTube once Viacom started to strip the site of it’s content.
I guess a guy blowing up a can of coke with a mentos gets old no matter how many new people post a video of it …
Definitely big news.
I wonder how it will affect smaller video sharing sites.
Did anyone in Google or Youtube comment about this development?
This could get ugly. http://www.thefamousguy.com
“Call it a ‘trial separation’ or a full-on divorce, but it certainly feels like this is the beginning of User-Generated Content and professional productions going their separate ways.”
http://blogs.zdnet.com/social/?p=119
The anticipation is over, this is huge in terms of the content and even more so the distribution partners. Every major internet company except Google is involved. The mix of amazing content and distribution will make this a true category killer/changer.
“U.S audience” what about the rest of the 880 million internet population around the world?
phhfffttt
Ultimately it will be content that’ll drive people to one or the other.
It’ll be great to see how this interacts with Apple’s iTV that just shipped today.
Dan
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnRw0-d3lJw
Wow full episodes of Heroes! I’m in and I don’t care how much
@ #4 - mike street
Is that a fact? The majority of the watched content on youtube is UGC?
I don’t think so.
Personally the majority of the clips I watch(ed) and saw posted to forums and going around by email were clips from tv shows and other outside sources of content.
Youtube deserves this. I guess the media companies don’t like the idea of a 1.6 billion dollar company having been built on their content without permission.
This is the kind of content vehicle that’ll further drive placeshifting, accelerate adoption of devices such as Apple TV and ads targeted to such devices. It is a very easy way for the folks without TIVO or hard drive cable boxes to now have the luxury of watching whenever whereever.
When it comes to tech, people like things simple, and one easy destination to view this content will be bigger than anyone thinks. I bet the ads will go for a nice premium over regular cable!
This is definitely a big and high impact news. The key though is execution. If it’s easy to use for distribution partners and users alike, it will fly and become an 800lbs gorilla in the IPTV arena. On the other hand, if too much restrictions are imposed to partners, if users are bombarded with ads or if they feel pushed towards paid content (e.g. premium account for access to recent content, otherwise wait two months for free access), then success of this would be much more limited.
There is no doubt this is a serious threat to Youtube. It is simply ridiculous to think that Youtube’s success was mainly due to user generated content; quite the opposite. Just look at all the fuss generated each time they sign a deal with a content creator (NBA, BBC, etc.)
*yawn*
I look forward to consuming their content after its been ripped & posted to youtube.
rumour has it that Google is part of the partnership….
Could this news be related to Snaphsop.com
Henry, do you have a link for that or are you just starting a conspiracy theory?
eh, I prefer http://www.cavenger.com
it’s on like donkey kong. if they can launch with a realllllly good user experience with community features, then they have the content to compete. if they throw up some crap site/experience like i don’t know….abc did with amanda congdon’s content? not so much.
@ #20 earbudace:
LOL. You should look to “This account has been suspended.” on Youtube instead.
Youtube is dead.
Sure people will still visit youtube for some vids but with things like prison break, and whatever else on offer people are going to flock there.
I for one will sure visit.
Hopefully the site will allow non US visitors . Especially with US episodes coming out in the UK and the rest of the world months after its going to rock
commenting on #9 “Definitely big news. I wonder how it will affect smaller video sharing sites.”
This is evidence of the new shift in a more sophisticated video distribution experience. This is afterall supposed to be the year of the widget, right? The team at my company recognized the impending video distribution shift last year and changed course accordingly. We think it’s a very exciting time ahead for all companies in the online video landscape.
(embarrassingly shameless plug from a cofounder)
“Look out for our new video distribution platform - PLADEO.com - launching soon…”
And I guess the world starts and ends at the US, right? Nothing beyond those pretty borders?
Don’t screw it up, don’t screw it up, don’t screw it up.
This has the potential to be absolutely amazing if they do it right. Is “old media” finally understanding how to give people what they want over the web? Let’s hope against hope that ViacomTube isn’t an overcontrolled, Windows-and-IE-only, DRM clusterfuck.
They’ll probably screw it up.
In spite of this competition, I think that youtube will always have its great place on Internet. the power of youtube is users are deep of youtube. what gives pleasure there is to put to oneself videos from anywhere.
I don’t sure if into this new joint venture platform, the user could have great posibilities, otherwise the awaiting success will be difficult to reach.
This isn’t as big as people are making it out to be. Many of those shows are available for free weekly on the major networks’ websites. The major change is that it will now be embeddable. As for people mentioning the placeshifting or user submission possibilities, that all depends on how they and/or the distributers decide to allow use of it.
And I’d guess there will be no skippability of advertising, just as there isn’t now with episodes of 24, 30 Rock, and all the others on Fox, NBC, and other websites. (Unless there’s payment involved - then it’s a different game)
If I ever thought anyone could compete against; Google. I would said that the (3) major TV companies could do it.
- Combine the (3), Their assets and cash have to be bigger than (1) Google.
- They have the Money, Motivation and Google hasn’t taken up 100% of all smart people just 70%
-Rbowles
Well, it sure will be interesting to see how these media companies get this joint venture off the ground. Who’s in charge here? Lot’s of big entertainment egos in the kitchen. Good luck.
Clown Co.! This from the brainiacs who spent $1.6B to buy GoneTube and then pee’d away any chance of doing licensing deals with major content owners.
If I was Eric Schmidt, I’d be polishing that resume…
Not going to work - can you imagine how difficult it is to manage all those egos and make everyone happy?
Cases in point: Symbian, Movielink, United Nations….
@30 - They already screwed it up, Microsoft’s in on it. Boy, I can’t wait to see episodes like Heroes messed up by buffering because god knows they won’t allow Flash to come anywhere near it.
This will go down to execution. I sincerely hope they are doing this to get more money and not do it out of spite. If they have the right motivation to make it what the people want, it will work. If they are doing this to beat GooTube just for the sake of taking them down a peg and throw in a boat load of ads then it will fail.
It doesn’t matter what all NBC and the rest have in their library, the users make it a success just like Google didn’t make YouTube worth $1.6 bil, the users did.
I understand Microsoft is in as well. Now, will that mean they’ll use WPF/E instead of flash for their player? Should Adobe be worried?
Wow. This is great news, in a sense. More competition and more content. On the other hand, I have to question the networks’ decision to form a new company rather than utilizing the numerous existing networks already available.
So 3 companies pissed at the world decide to from Voltron and make on company…doesn’t mean a thing. Now that people have the means to power their own media we would we all drop off the ugc sites to watch the same crap py show we saw on TV and I can’t believe the would let us embed a whole free 30 minute show on a blog. People are still under estimating what people really want. They don’t want to be force feed their content anymore. Content is active and people want to remix, create, and do with that content what ever they want.
But at the end of the day the business models are different. But youtube/google = innovation while 3 TV powers forming the 200th video website = a catch up job.
@37: You’re jumping to conclusions, not doing which was exactly my point.
I’m hoping they don’t use some embedded WMP crap, but it’s far too early to assume that just because Microsoft is involved, they’re guaranteed to screw this up.
Isn’t this collusion?
Also: It seems to me that the whole point of YouTube — which these guys seem to be missing — is that it’s user-driven.
This means:
-YouTube doesn’t have to pay a hundred employees to truncate and upload all the content
-There’s stuff on YouTube that the networks won’t touch with a ten-foot pole, such as obscure music videos, mashups, and general interest content
And generally speaking, anything taken directly from TV is either really old or really new. In other words, a new episode of 30 Rock is only going to be up for a couple of weeks anyway, before everyone has moved on to the next episode.
And you won’t find the whole episode on YouTube, either — just the highlights. Is there really any more efficient method of audience testing than to have the audience select their favorite bits and upload them? It seems to me the networks are overlooking a *huge* opportunity to improve their programming.
This is going to be awesome! I can not wait.
I hope they can get Survivorman and Jericho on that list
Hey I heard of Google buying LinkedIn.. any info on that?
This reminds me of Fandango versus Moviefone. Moviefone gets bought by AOL and theater chains don’t see a dime, so they build their own and shut out Moviefone.
i think i like this