Earlier this week, Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote about KZSW, a local TV station in Temecula, California that has started uploading news and sports clips to YouTube so that its viewers can watch them online whenever they want to. It means that viewers can now easily find and watch the clips that they used to have to request from the station, and they can take advantage of the features that are already built into YouTube - channel subscriptions, viewer commenting, video embedding, permalinks, etc.
Mathew Ingram of webpronews says it's a no-brainer, and I agree completely. While it's not uncommon for local sites to slap the odd video clip up on their home page, it's a lot more difficult to upload several clips a day and archive the old ones so that users can find them easily. The saving in bandwidth costs and website maintenance alone would make this worthwhile for a small station.
It will be interesting to see if other TV stations follow KZSW's lead. If they do, it will be interesting to see whether YouTube will treat these stations the same as they've been treating individual users, or if they'll start to charge them for the huge bandwidth that it will inevitably require as more and more stations take advantage of it.
The challenge here — and it always seems to come down to this — is how to keep advertisers happy and how to create some revenue with the free online video you're offering. Viewers who go to YouTube to watch KZSW's clips are putting money in YouTube's (Google's) pockets, and KZSW's options for advertising during a 5:00 clip are limited. Pre- or post-roll ads are an option, but advertisers would have to be assured of a significant number of local viewers in order for it to make sense.
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Article comments
1 - Marshall Kirkpatrick
I agree that excitement is very appropriate. :)
2 - Eric F.
Thanks, Marshall, and all the best with the SplashCast launch later this month. I signed up for the beta access the other day and am looking forward to checking it out.
3 - Bliffle
You'll ruin your eyes watching that youtoo crap.
Instead, dump your cable, dump your satellite and go HDTV with that old UHF tower. It's free because it's Over The Air (OTA). And it exists because the FCC requires that EVERY analog TV station MUST also transmit a digital signal or lose it's valuable FCC broadcast license. The license itself is worth over $100million. The digital signal is required because the FCC wants to grab those valuable analog spectra and resell them to Cingular, etc., and require analog OTA customers to use the new DTV via an adapter. The picture and sound are vastly better. And all you need to buy is a $100 Set Top Box (STB) receiver for your old TV. The STB receiver is already builtin to your new TV that you bought in the last couple years. The price will soon be down to about $20 for a STB receiver.
And your eyes won't start bleeding when you turn the TV on. And your wallet won't bleed green at the end of the month.
All from that old UHF tower!