For years, television has been getting the short end of the proverbial stick, struggling while its content shifts more and more to the Internet, where people can watch almost anything, anytime. That shift, however, appears to be coming full circle.
Just the other day, I was watching an old episode of Transformers online — a throwback to the countless hours I spent watching Saturday morning cartoons as a kid. It was the one where Megatron tries to flee through a trans-dimensional portal and…
Anyway, I started to think about how much times have changed. Not only am I no longer six-years-old, but it wasn’t Saturday morning and this television show wasn’t even on TV — it was online. From video clips on CNN.com to movies on iTunes to entire baseball games on ESPN.com, the Internet has been stepping all over television’s turf.
An article on the topic in today’s Wall Street Journal piqued my interest.
The Journal reported that Comcast has launched ziddio.com, a website that runs contests to find homemade videos, the best of which will be put on Comcast’s video-on-demand TV service. Additionally, Verizon is working on a deal with YouTube to allow Verizon TV customers to watch the day’s most popular videos.
User-generated content is moving to television. And at least two media giants are betting that the types of movies that made a billion dollar success out of YouTube will do well on television, too.
Do you think short homemade videos will appeal to TV viewers? Will this be the biggest thing to hit television since the invention of the rerun?
Or is it too many media outlets gone amok? Will we one day watch TV shows that have been broadcast online and then re-routed back to our television sets? Can you imagine Web TV shows on television?
