Media Wonk

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Destinations unknown - April 29, 2008

Oh, good. Another destination site for streaming popular TV shows on the Internet. In this case, TheWB.com, introduced yesterday by Time Warner, which will serve as the ad-supported online home for once-popular series on the now-defunct network, including "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Dawson's Creek" as well as other Warner Bros. Television-produced series such as "Friends," "The O.C.," and "The Gilmore Girls." The Web site will also showcase original series produced under the Warner Bros. Studio 2.0 banner.

Media Wonk wishes the well, but wonders why they're bothering. After all, you don't have to build and maintain your own web site, market and promote it, incur the bandwidth costs and all the rest of it just to distribute some old TV shows online. There are plenty of sites out there already, streaming away and hungry to license content. Warner Bros. already has such a deal in place, in fact, with the News. Corp./NBC joint venture Hulu.com. Why not just license the old WB stuff to Hulu?

"The opportunity to bring the WB back as a digital destination just falls in line with our overarching strategy," Warner Bros. TV Group president Bruce Ronsenblum told Daily Variety.

What he means is: "We don't want to have to share advertising revenue with Hulu. We'd rather cling to our old broadcast model where we owned and maintained the infrastructure, you came to our channel for the programming we were serving up and we monopolized the ad revenue.

"Sure, we had affiliates and syndication deals, but the deals were exclusive and the terms were always ours and we liked it that way. Never mind that the Internet is not a broadcast medium. Or that it's built on shared, non-proprietary infrastructure. Or that its value to the end user--and therefore its ultimate source of value for us--lies in aggregation, customization and community. We don't know how to operate in that sort of environment.

"Our business is monetizing access to exclusive content. We know how to compete for eyeballs in a multi-channel world. Non-exclusive, user-driven aggregation just doesn't compute, so let's just not go there. "

But the Internet is not a multi-channel world. It's an infinite, protean channel world. Some day, one way or another, they're going to have to make that compute.


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