Online Media Cultist

In what may be coincidental but is nonetheless interesting timing, stories involving both ABC and NBC making broadcast shows available online (at least for an increment of time after the show premieres on television) have caught the buzz over the last 24 hours.

ABC’s deal with AOL locks in distribution via AOL and features advertising embedded during shows, with no cost to viewers. The NBC deal allows people to stream shows for free for one week after shows premiere on the broadcast network. Advertising runs on shows and can’t be fast-forwarded through.

So, what have we learned here?

* Television isn’t just rushing to get online. It’s scrambling.
The days of massive traditional audiences watching TV distributed by networks on a television set are in their last throes. The networks now get this and are hell bent on finding new ways to get eyeballs in front of their shows.

* The future of television is online, free, and ad-supported.
Some people might pay $1.99 to download shows on iTunes (guilty here, when I went away for several weeks and my DVR forgot to record Lost!) but for most, they’ll sit through short, sweet, and relevant advertising.

* People are online and want entertaining content.
This is the most powerful force of all. The audience is there, and there’s a marketplace for quality entertainment content. That race is on at warp speed to fill it.

* Return of the TV?
Just for kicks, think about this: wouldn’t it be wild if the traditional TV, powered by the DVRs (digital video recorders) that networks despise, actually made a bid for people to return to their sets because it allowed people to fast-forward through commercials?

* Check the trends.
Here’s what we’re looking at: traditional TV will figure out more ways to advertise in-show (thanks, TiVo!), online TV will figure out the revenue model (think short pre-rolls, mid-roll, post-roll that allow interactivity if the user desires), and much much more content available online than ever, including original offerings such as Quarterlife.

TV is heading online, even if most people aren’t fully aware of it.

Let’s do the math while dispensing with the numbers (it’s Friday, you know?): People, and especially young people, are online. Broadband penetration is high. People watch video online. Many people spend more time online than they do in front of a television screen.

The marketplace is wide open for high quality video series to originate online. All that’s needed is for a few early experimenters to figure out the model in terms of structure and distribution and deals and advertising revenue, and the floodgates, they shall be opening quick-like.

Quarterlife, a new Internet series by My So-Called Life and Thirtysomething creative team Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick that premieres in November (full disclosure here: I’m involved on the webby end of this project), has as good a chance as any to lock down the model and signal a bevy of well funded and produced online video shows to follow in its wake.

In the end, it’s not about how much money goes into making shows, it’s about story and characters and developing a following. Herskovitz and Zwick are experts at doing just this, so if they can produce a high quality show that is easily accessible and viewable on a computer monitor (and it helps that Quarterlife will roll out its first season in 36 eight-minute episodes), it makes sense that people will tune in.

YouTube helped to ring in an era of highly popular user generated online video. If you think about it, millions of people liked watching cats fall off a table or men of all ages getting their nethers slammed by some blunt object on television via America’s Funniest Home Videos, and YouTube was a conduit to fulfilling that need, so to speak, online.

Lonelygirl15 and Prom Queen are more recent examples of online video series to earn a following, the significant difference being that these are examples of fictional episodic video content that just happen to be broadcast over the Internet.

Quarterlife, the story of a young woman who videoblogs about her friends and her life, represents the natural next step in this evolution. And if it does gain a large scale following, the way that the public thinks about and watches “television” will significantly change. Quarterlife also will offer a social networking community and invite its audience to participate and become fully immersed in the show.

Check out the trailer:

Quarterlife Trailer

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