Thursday, April 24, 2008

HULU & new trends in program distribution

This report on ABC Radio National's Media Report on Thursday 24 April 2008 segues well from the previous post on the future of television.
Anthony Funnell talked to James McQuivey, a senior media analyst with Forrester Research in Boston.
James recently attended the 2008 conference of the National Association of Broadcasters. He came away feeling that the organisation should be renamed something like the National Association of Video Programmers because that's what the so-called broadcasters are now doing - they're getting into internet-delivered television (IPTV).
So what's HULU? Well, Wikipedia already has an entry for it so you can get an idea there of what it's about. It's a combination of shows from multiple broadcasters (with ads, which helps to pay for it). Users can share videos, or just the bits of videos that they want to share. This in turn gets more people interested in the shows and makes them want to look for and try more, and ... viral marketing takes off.
Anthony and James then moved on to the deal between MySpace and a British-based production company that allows users to post their own home-grown videos. The production company then picks up on any that it thinks have potential as the basis of successful professionallly produced shows. It makes them up and then users who've seen the original think, "Oh, there's a show now based on that video I saw? I must try it." Result? Viral marketing takes off.

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