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November 14, 2005
The Evolution of Broadcasting 2.0 Continues: Warner Bros. TV Series will soon be available for viewing on AOL.com
With AOL's announcement of "IN2TV", AOL is actively leveraging assets across their own ecosystem which gives them a competitive advantage in the newly disrupted world of broadcasting, a world what some may consider to part of the "Broadcasting 2.0" space.
It makes complete sense to me that AOL would distributed full-length TV episodes of TV series own by Warner Bros...and while their initial focus is on distributing series that are currently not being syndicated, it is just a matter of time, (and not if), when they will launch new "TV series" on the broadband internet.
Looking at some of AOL's programming assets, across the extended AOL family is a vast programming library that none of their on-line rivals can directly compete against. They will try, but AOL has the initial advantage with existing content.
This is just another sign that we are on the second wave of the dot com evolution. As time goes on, many of the concepts and visions that fueled the first dot com wave back in 1998-2000 may end up being proven right. The only thing that was off was the timing of when this all was going to happen. The companies that were able to stay the course and are fortunate to be around at a time that broadband penetration has reached a critical mass number of worldwide consumers may end up becoming the winners this time around.
It is great to see AOL finally start to leverage the benefits of what many saw was possible back when AOL and Time Warner first announced their merger back in the glory days of January, 2000.
Tags: aol, broadcasting 2.0, disruptive broadcasting
Posted by jeff on November 14, 2005 03:11 AM | Permalink
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Comments
Geoff Mendelson writes above: "IMHO the big leap forward will be when someone figures out how to "PUSH" programs on to your PC using peer to peer (probably BitTorrent) technology."
Isn't that more or less what Slashdot wrote about yesterday in http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/14/150222&tid=129&tid=95? According to that article (which seems to talk about the same thing as Jeff does above) content will be freely available, although the viewer must take part in a P2P network when downloading it, to distribute the load on the network. Just combine this with a little bit of RSS and there you are.
Posted by: Hans Persson at November 15, 2005 06:42 AM
This is a great start. It shows that it can be done and it brings AOL back to where they started, a CONTENT provider. Yes, they provided network services from the begining, but it was only because it was needed to access their content.
IMHO the big leap forward will be when someone figures out how to "PUSH" programs on to your PC using peer to peer (probably BitTorrent) technology.
Obviously it will have to be someone you trust, you don't want to have Sesame Street pushed to your kid's PC and have it turn out to be X rated material as some sick person's idea of a joke.
In order to make it worthwhile the current programs will have to include commercials.
The quality will also have to be limited, 170mB MP4 per hour show would be fine. It's close enough to broadcast TV, but it won't adversley affect the sales of DVDs.
Geoff.
Posted by: Geoff Mendelson at November 14, 2005 06:42 AM
Jeff
You're right this is a big one. Interesting likely consequence as more material becomes free, like these shows, is a decline in price of the paid content. Some people, but not everyone, will resist paying $1.99 for Lost is they can see Le Femme Nikata for free.
db
Posted by: Dave Burstein at November 14, 2005 04:10 AM