Friday, September 28, 2007
Would you rather watch a clip?
CBS Creates 'EyeLab' To Woo Web Surfers - WSJ.com
The Wall Street Journal reports that CBS is betting that you would rather watch a short clip from a TV show than the whole episode. Reporter Rebecca Dana writes that CBS has decided
The Wall Street Journal reports that CBS is betting that you would rather watch a short clip from a TV show than the whole episode. Reporter Rebecca Dana writes that CBS has decided
It sounds like TV is being Youtubed. CBS has seen the popularity of the clips on YouTube and decided to compete. Here's the question: Are these clips promotional or are clips the new content for a generation with a short attention span? Why bother with a lame 30 minute sitcom when you can see the best three minutes and skip the rest?"To cater to what it believes is the short attention span of online audiences, the network today is launching CBS EyeLab, a digital-production studio that will create and distribute short clips cut together from the network's most popular shows."
"CBS says the EyeLab-produced clips will both entertain viewers and serve a marketing purpose. "It turns our promotion into content," said George Schweitzer, the president of CBS Marketing. "The clips about 'CSI' or something from how a director shoots a scene in the show 'NUMB3RS,' these are all things that link back to our shows." The network also plans to sell ads that will be embedded in the clips."Online video is fast becoming the new TV and content will have to be reformatted for the constraints of the new medium and the limits of the audience. All that is old will be repackaged as clips for a distracted population.
This approach is something of a return to an older Internet strategy for TV networks. Until 18 months ago, most of the networks only made available short clips from their shows, seeing them as a promotional tool. But the explosion of interest in online video, driven by the popularity of video-sharing sites such as YouTube, helped prompt most of the networks to put full-length episodes of much of their prime-time lineup onto the Web last year."
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I think this is an interesting post, but i don't agree with the basic idea of it. I think people would rather watch the whole show online rather then a few clips put together. Wouldn't that be considered just a promo? I think if i remember correctly NBC offered its shows online free for a while and still may offer some of the less popular shows online for free, but the popular shows like "The Office" for example can be bought via i tunes and then watched online. I think short clips of shows are just as good as commercials for shows, and we all know that people buy TiVo and things like that to skip over commercials. A lot of people don't have time to catch the shows when they first air so showing the whole thing online for FREE would be nice.
There is a major difference between the youtube videos and clips of television shows. They both may be short in length but the youtube video will supply with a begin, middle and end. I agree that today's generation has a short attention span but if CBS really wanted to cater to them they would make shorter shows and commercials. These clips are simply a marketing tool to get viewers to watch the show at its regularly scheduled time.
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