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Video On The Go
Media giants scramble to deliver entertainment wherever and whenever you want. Will it pay off?
A group of money-hungry contestants searches nationwide for clues that will lead one player to the ultimate treasure. Week after week, audiences tune in as the field of competitors narrows, the clues get more complicated, and the human drama unfolds. The show is Gold Rush! created by Mark Burnett, the reality-television ratings machine behind such sensations as Survivor and The Apprentice.
But when it makes its debut later this year, Gold Rush! won't get the usual Burnett treatment: a prime-time slot on a national TV network and a huge marketing push. Instead, it will be carried on aol.com. And contestants won't be the only ones trying to unearth clues in hopes of finding a pot of gold. America's big media companies will be right alongside them searching for secrets to programming and advertising that may help them cash in on the rapidly growing appetite for video on demand.
Touted as the next big thing for so long that its arrival has become an industry joke, video on demand, which covers everything from movies that can be ordered up on cable TV to downloads of Desperate Housewives on a video iPod, may finally be closing in on its economic promise. "It has been the year for video on demand for the last 20 years,"says media analyst Harold Vogel. "But this time it might actually be real. That doesn't mean that it's going to sweep the world, but things are finally falling into place."
More than one third of all homes now have high-speed Internet connections. Cable companies like Comcast and Time Warner have spent billions of dollars putting in the pipelines to deliver video to the home, and other giants such as Google, Yahoo! and AOL are investing heavily in creating video libraries, as well as original programming that can be downloaded. Finally, TV-enabled cellphones, iPods, and other devices are making visual entertainment as portable as a paperback, moving content providers like Disney, Viacom, and NBC-Universal to get their TV shows and other entertainment before the video-viewing public as fast as they can. "What we've had is a business of people watching TV at night and some at home during the day. Now we can connect 24 hours a day on computers, cellphones, iPods, and other devices," says Jason Hirschhorn, chief digital officer for MTV Networks, whose popular MTV Overdrive became one of the first broadband networks when it launched last year. "We don't know how the business models work yet or exactly who wants to watch what on what device and when. But we're experimenting with everything."
And consumers, determined to have what they want, where they want it, and when they want it, have already demonstrated that they are willing to switch among an array of devices--television, computer, iPod, and cellphone--and to pay to customize and control their media universe. Last summer, more than 5 million viewers watched the Live 8 concerts on AOL Music, which offered uninterrupted coverage of the benefit for tsunami victims. Meanwhile, MTV and VH1 drew 22.4 million viewers for their TV broadcasts, and ABC pulled in 16 million during its two-hour show. Ratings on MTV's top-rated Video Music Awards in 2005 were down 22 percent from the previous year, but MTV Overdrive logged 13 million downloads of the show. Last month, Apple announced that it has sold 8 million video downloads of 40 different TV series, including Lost, Laguna Beach, and CSI, since it began offering them in November.
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