Battle at Kruger: A Tale of Two Media
Saturday’s NY Times Television story, You’ve Seen the YouTube Video; Now Try the Documentary, describes a viral video’s journey from YouTube to National Geographic Channel. It’s an extraordinary video of a herd of buffalo fighting off a pride of lions and a croc to save one of its calves, and the video’s adventure is almost as fascinating as the battle footage, with its viral popularity and National Geographic’s interest triggered by an incidental upload to YouTube because it was cheaper and easier than burning a DVD and mailing via USPS.
Battle at Kruger - YouTube Video
The New York Times story speaks to the growing power and influence of the internet and YouTube relative to broadcast television. But there’s also a meta-story that reinforces the challenge that traditional media companies face as they come to terms with the internet.
The print world has been forced to open up its content to the online world. Readers who want online news content will find it, and the print ad revenue those readers used to bring with them is being replaced by smaller online ad revenues. The only choice for newspapers has been to keep at least the online ad revenue by opening up their content and maximizing monetization, or to let their competitors take all the revenue from them.
So nytimes.com, the only way I read that paper, carries the full story online, accompanied by beautiful hires images and an unfortunately no longer functioning link to the original YouTube post. Someone in nytimes.com’s ad sales department did a great job too, as the article is surrounded by banner ads for the National Geographic Channel episode. Or also likely, the article and the advertising were planned together - in a world where content is free, content and advertising are increasingly one and the same. Either way, there is no doubt that those well-targeted ads are maximizing the revenue potential for this particular story.
Click on any of those banner ads and you’ll get a stark reminder that television and print are still in very different worlds.
The National Geographic Channel has a well-constructed mini-site for Caught on Safari: Battle at Kruger, featuring the next prime time airing and accompanied by a video short/promo, the full YouTube clip, photos, information about Kruger, and related stories. But you won’t find the the hourlong episode online. The “real” content can only be accessed through your cable or satellite feed, where Newscorp and National Geographic, who jointly run National Geographic Channel, ring the cash register.
Print, and more profoundly, music, were the first media for which the internet could deliver a competitive and over time superior audience experience at a lower distribution cost. As described above, the only response available to most outlets has been to cannibalize themselves or be killed. No surprise that shares in The New York Times Company (NYT), at $19.67, are down 57% over a five year period; other major papers are in the same boat.
The internet does not yet deliver a super audience experience at a lower distribution cost compared to television. Not yet. Most streaming, YouTube in particular, is nowhere near standard broadcast quality, let alone HD, but there are an increasing number of exceptions. It’s still pretty expensive to stream high quality video. Getting internet video into the living room is costly, kludgy and not ready for the mass market, but then again, I also prefer reading a physical newspaper over breakfast than catching up on the news with my laptop.
So the networks have benefited from the luxury of time and insight from print and music as they experiment with online content and monetization. They can still keep their highest value content available through broadcast only, where most of the money is, and use online as a tool for promotion and viewer engagement, selectively releasing episodes where doing so reinforces that dynamic. Investors aren’t betting against the networks; shares in News Corp. (NWS), at $19.35, are up 33% over their price five years ago.
In the meantime, internet video is beginning to breach the walls of the living room, and the quality / cost tradeoff of internet video distribution continues to progress along the path suggested by Moore’s law. The networks have some more time to work out how to maximize online monetization, but they don’t have forever. And while they have a big leg up on the newspapers and music labels in this game, it’s sobering to bear in mind that investors weren’t betting against those players either five years ago.
Technorati Tags: Battle at Kruger, National Geographic Channel, New York Times, News Corp
May 11th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
Andrew:
Just a quick note to say how much I enjoyed your thoughtful and well presented article “The Battle at Kruger: A Tale of Two Media.”
Two minor but related examples that your article quickly brought to mind: (1) The approach and “progress” that both Apple and TIVO have maintained in trying (as many others have) to integrate internet feeds with television viewing in order to create a new viewer experience; (2) The recent decision by HBO to “seed” the complete high definition versions online of the first 15 shows of their new hit series “In Treatment,” at the very same time that they premiered the series natiionally on their cable network. HBO has since precipitously removed those shows which had been offered by iTunes.
It’s hard to figure out where it’s all going to end up, especially as data line capacities to the home in the form of fiber optics and now much newer and probably even more significant technologies, (i.e. the recent vast and secret hardware communication investments by Google) race ahead in tandem with the laying down of fiber optics.
Again, nice work!
May 13th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
I’m glad you liked it, Julian.
Apple and TiVo are definitely out in front in trying new approaches to “living room” TV viewing. Google is also doing a lot trying new (internet-like) approaches to ad-serving in the living room, though those are in the form of trials that most of us can’t experience directly. I’m sure that HBO’s decision to seed “In Treatment” is an effort to build demand and buzz for the series. It’s become common wisdom among the networks to push out episodes in the first year or so of a series to build interest, demand, and buzz, then to pull back content once a show finds an audience, sometimes excepting the last few episodes in the case of serial dramas where viewers need to ‘catch up’.
There are definitely interesting scenarios about how things will play out in the living room (and mobile too), which range from carrier-driven (telco, cable) interactive “walled gardens” on the one extreme to fully open environements where the carriers just provide transport and aggregators ranging from dominant to niche deliver content, to points in between.
It’s interesting to note as well that Google has to invest heavily in infrastructure just to maintain growth in its core business, content search and content / application delivery, which is incredibly computationally and network-intensive. Think about all the processing and communications it takes to crawl the entire web every few days, deliver search results and stream video and other content with millisecond response times!