“Wow! Holy Cow, that was a large airburst, filling the sky.”
That
outburst more than a decade ago from CNN reporter John Holliman and the
blow-by-blow coverage of the first Gulf War helped put Ted Turner’s 24-hour
cable television outlet on the world map.
Now, with another Gulf War on the horizon, Disney-owned ABCNews.com is taking a page out of CNN’s
book, announcing the launch of a fee-based 24-hour news service — available
only to users with high-speed Internet connections.
The ABC News Live webcast launched Wednesday for subscribers to its
existing ‘ABC News On Demand’ service, which charges $4.94 per month for
access to delayed news clips and other programming. In what amounts to
another big client win for Seattle’s RealNetworks, the
24-hour news stream will be hawked exclusively to paying members of its
$9.95 a month RealOne SuperPass service.
With Yahoo on the verge or rolling out a competing
fee-based online video service, the exclusivity of RealNetworks’ content
partnerships has emerged as one of its most crucial chips.
ABC News Live, an Internet-only cross between CNN and C-SPAN, is being
targeted towards a daytime audience with access to broadband connections at
workplaces. “At a time when more people are getting their news online
during the day, it is critical that we make more content available to our
audience,” said Bernard Gershon, general manager of ABCNews.com.
The Internet-only service will offer share content with the ABC
television outfit and ABC News radio partners around the country. It won’t
be exclusively focused on war coverage but will intersperse sports news, the
financial markets and entertainment news.
A company spokesperson said the launch of ABC News Live was timed to
coincide with the looming war. “The
focus will be on live events. It’s really for people who want to check in
and see what [White House spokesman] Ari Fleischer is saying at the White
House or to see and hear what Donald Rumsfeld is saying at the Pentagon
briefings. We will have live shots from street of Kuwait City or Bahrain,”
the spokesperson told internetnews.com.
Immediately after the events of September 11, the huge flood of visitors
to online news sites slowed page loads to a crawl and ABCNews.com is hoping
similar demand once the war begins will drive paid subscriptions to its
24-hour news service.
“We see spikes in usage that are driven mainly by news events. Whether
it’s Powell speaking to U.N. or the Columbia shuttle disaster, those news
events drive tons of traffic to our site,” the spokesperson explained.
But Jupiter Research analyst David Card is skeptical about the value
proposition for ABCNews.com. “Video news during wartime may be somewhat
compelling, but the primary audience is at work, so I’m still pretty
skeptical,” Card said, noting that ABC News had set its expectations fairly
low.
“Consumer survey data suggests that demand for paid online content is
very fragmented — there’s no killer category,” Card said, nothing that the
fragmentation makes programming like RealOne SuperPass and the coming Yahoo
Platinum appealing. “They aggregate a lot of different content – news,
music, movie clips, games even – at a relatively low price, so customers
don’t have to pick and choose a la carte,” he added.
With the market for online multimedia content maturing, Card projects
companies like RealNetworks, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft’s
MSN will be “well positioned to
offer this kind of aggregated content.”
For ABCNews.com existing On Demand subscribers, the addition of ABC News
Live is a major carrot (there won’t be an increase on the $4.95/month price
point) and industry observers believe Real’s $9.95 per month fee is in line
with what consumers are comfortable with.
“Consumers appear to be comfortable with most generalist paid content
packages at a $1 (American Greetings) a month to $10 (RealOne) a month
range. Consumer Reports and the Wall Street Journal may be able to get away
with more, but I am dubious that news will command a premium,” Card explained.
Wednesday’s launch of ABC News Live has set tongues wagging that the
cable outlets — CNN, MSNBC and Fox News — would follow suit. Officials at
those companies could not be reached to comment on its online premium plans
and Card believes CNN and MSNBC are “more likely” to launch its own Web-only
live stream.
“CNN is better as a package within AOL or Real. In fact, everybody is,” Card
said, noting Fox has been conservative with its online rollouts. “It’s also
a big question mark whether their [Fox’s] talking heads approach will do
well during wartime, or whether they’ll move more to a hard news approach.
I’m especially skeptical of opinionated talking heads for at-work audiences,
but who knows, it hasn’t been tried,” he added.
In its announcement, ABCNews.com rolled out research from eMarketer that
showed about 37 percent of the U.S. workforce (50.1 million people out of a
total of 135.1 million) go online at work, and 86 percent of at work users
have broadband access in the workplace. In the last year, the company said
almost 70 percent of its visitors accessed the site with a broadband
connection, making it a logical step for the 24-hour all-news service.
ABC News Live will also introduce subscribers to “virtual control room”
for special events where users can choose from watching up to four
simultaneous feeds displayed in a quad-screen format. Live briefings, major
headlines, and related reports from ABC News will accompany breaking news
footage.
