Local TV Stations Fight for Relevancy
In this digital media era, the media properties with the bleakest outlook are local television stations. They cannot provide hi-quality VOD like their local market cable competitors can. They do not own the most coveted content like the broadcast networks. Indeed, the experiments by the broadcast networks to air their content on cable VOD will only exacerbate local stations' problems. And if all that was not bad enough, younger viewers seem to prefer the Internet.
So what do you do to remain relevant?
One thing they are doing is that TV stations across the country are offering video and exclusive online newscasts online. Says Broadcasting and Cable:
Indeed, many stations say they are just beginning to flex their broadband muscles, offering rich video clips of dramatic news and displaying real-time traffic reports and weather by a local meteorologist. … Three Washington stations are experimenting with video podcasts, short programs for playback on computers and MP3 players.
The market for online news is exploding. Twenty-nine percent of Americans say they go online regularly for news, up from virtually zero a decade ago, according to the Pew Research Center. The migration has caused tectonic shifts across media sectors, shrinking the audience for TV news-both national and local-and sending shockwaves through the newspaper industry, which has seen readership tumble sharply in the past decade. According to the Pew study, 71% of adults 18-29 say they get their news online, yet only 46% say they regularly watch local TV news. In the early 1990s, 75% of Americans said they watched local news.
News has never been cheaper or easier to find. In an instant, a hunt on Google or Yahoo! search engines calls up headlines from bloggers, networks, newspapers, magazines and countless sites. For all their losses, newspapers have moved aggressively on the Internet, drawing new readers and attracting new advertising revenue.
Another effort that I find interesting is taking place at ABC. The network is aggressively putting up broadband VOD content at its Web site and selling advertising into that content. ABC local stations are a natural portal from which many viewers link to network shows. So, they are trying an experiment in giving the portal station 1-minute of advertising that they can sell on the network show.
This move is reminiscent of local cable's 2-minutes per hour of local insertion from the cable networks. But the twist is that the network is performing the ad insertion and sharing revenue back to the station.
Posted by admin on January 2nd, 2007 :: Filed under Internet TV
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