CBS is about to embark on yet another way of using the web to
promote their TV network and programmes on it.
While other major US
television networks are struggling with the whole idea of YouTube, CBS
are looking at new ways of streaming their shows online.
For example, according to a
story in the Wall Street Journal, the network is setting
up a site just for short-form video
“mashups” and other content created both by CBS
staff and by viewers.
The site, which is to be called EyeLab, is designed to appeal
to Web
surfers who have grown used to watching and sharing YouTube video clips
or user-generated tributes to various mainstream shows.
CSI Miami: Caruso One Liners
This includes the
collection of corny one-liners from CSI: Miami that a fan going by the
name stewmurray47 put
together and uploaded to YouTube. The clip has gotten more
than a million views, which is enough to get a network executive
drooling.
Steve Safran, who writes for the excellent TV blog Lost
Remote, describes the
conversation that he imagines taking place at CBS after
someone mentions the David Caruso clip:
Executive Three: “You
mean the thing I wanted pulled down from YouTube?Executive One:
“That’s the one. Anyway, it was a big
hit.”Executive Two: (Suddenly
interested) “Oh. Really?”Executive Three: How big?
Executive One: About one
million views and counting.(Executives Two and Three actually have $$ signs light up in
their eyes)
According to the WSJ story, CBS has hired half a dozen
video-editing
twentysomethings to create mashups like the CSI: Miami clip —
and the
network also plans to find and distribute similar clips created by
users and viewers as well.
Hopefully CBS has contacted stewmurray47
about a job, since it was his clip that more or less gave the network
the idea.
Behind The Scenes Of Heroes
If CBS is looking for ways of using video clips to build
audience
interaction or interest in a show, it should take a look at what actor
Adrian
Pasdar is doing with behind-the-scenes video from the TV show
Heroes.
The actor, who plays one of the leading roles on the show, has
uploaded
to YouTube (using the name “buckshotwon”) dozens of
clips of his fellow
actors goofing
around backstage, and each one gets between 15,000 and 20,000
views.
Whether CBS’s effort will be successful or not
remains to be seen,
but I think it is an interesting idea. Building a community around your
content — or making it easy for people who enjoy
that content in
different ways to share it with each other — is one of the
few tools
that the TV networks have left,
Hopefully CBS will find ways of
aggregating that content from wherever it is, rather than requiring
everyone to sign up with yet another site.
Written by Mathew Ingram, a technology journalist. Catch his views on the intersection between media and the web at MathewIngram.com. This post is licensed under the Creative Commons.
