“Kill Your Television,” the slogan aimed at getting people to kick the TV
habit, is in need of an update. It should now read “Kill your Television,
PC, Laptop, PDA and Web-enabled phone.”
As faster broadband and better compression make the stuttering frame
delivery a distant memory, ISPs are moving more video content online. The latest example is Yahoo , which today said it will
provide CNN.com and ABC News video news clips free to visitors beginning
next month.
“We’ve done a great job of pulling the best news from around the Internet
from wire services or newspapers or other sources,” a spokesman for the
Sunnyvale, Calif., Internet giant told internetnews.com. “This is an
extension of that with video.”
The ad-supported content will be integrated through Yahoo’s news section
pages and featured on its own as well as in packages with news from across
the Internet.
Yahoo also will make ABC and CNN clips available to its Yahoo broadband
service subscribers through co-branded pacts with SBC, Rogers Cable, BT and
Verizon.
In a recent Yankee Group forum on TV and new technology in Boston,
industry-watchers said there’s been a lot of momentum in video going online
in recent months.
“Look at the Live 8 concert and how successful that was in delivering
video,” Mike Goodman, a Yankee Group senior analyst, said in a presentation
at the event.
Goodman called Live 8 a coming out party for online video that could shake
up the relationship between traditional content providers and ISPs.
Yahoo has also been savvy in looking at TV and Internet convergence, Goodman
said. It opened an office in Hollywood and went to reality TV show producer
Mark Burnett to sew up digital rights to Donald Trump’s “The Apprentice.”
Currently, Yahoo is partnering with NASA to continuously broadcast images from the Space Shuttle Discovery
mission. Anyone with a Web connection can check in on the astronauts, any
time of the day or night.
Yahoo and its rivals have also been working
on their video search offerings in preparation for an expected boom in
online video.
The Yahoo spokesman declined to say whether additional deals with video
content providers are in the works. “We’re always looking at various options
for our site, video or print or other content for our site,” he said.
