TV is racing to become … whatever it will become.
I happened to actually be watching some last night – a relatively rare occurence these days – and noticed ads for this service: GlobalTV online.
Beats my expectations
I checked it out today and it’s fairly cool. Cool in that I’m “watching” TV while I’m posting this. (Survivor, actually.)
Fairly cool in that they’re using a Flash-based player, so you don’t have to download some proprietary – or worse, Windows-only – video player.
And fairly cool in that while advertising is present, it is not ubiquitous.
But it’s not perfect
While the quality is probably a bit better than your average YouTube show, it’s small. The screenpic at the top of this post is full-size. I expected a little bigger.
And a couple of times when I paused the show, I had to actually refresh the page to get the show playing again, since it refused to restart when I pressed play.
And missing a couple of opportunities
But the TV station is really missing out on a couple of opportunities.
First of: why not put a sharing mechanism in place like YouTube or Revver? Let bloggers put TV shows on their sites with some cut&paste code. This would certainly increase viewership and ad revenue from pre-show, interstitial, and post-show advertising.
Secondly, if I was putting TV show up, I’d forget the pre and post ads, and just run occasional ads underneath the show – not obscuring it, but just taking up a bit of extra space below it.
That way you can not waste people’s time, ensure that if the show is seen, your ads are seen, and (potentially) show more ads in more innovative ways than the traditional 30-second spot. Plus, you don’t have to worry about giving fast-forward and rewind control
Not a TV “station” anymore
A little more social media marketing awareness would really help this take off, but one TV station on its own will not be compelling as one place that offers all or virtually all available shows.
After all, it’s not like they can only broadcast one show at a time anymore.
[tags] tv, global, survivor, social media, john koetsier [/tags]
Yet more TV 2.0…
[Source: Sparkplug 9 >> bizhack] quoted: A little more social media marketing awareness would really help this take off, but one TV station on its own will not be compelling as one place that offers all or virtually all available shows….