It's easy to think of the big television networks as the kings of the media castle. After all, CBS and NBC and Fox are giant entertainment conglomerates that pump out billions of dollars worth of "content" every year, and control (or at least act like they control) millions of eyeballs.
When it comes to the Internet and digital video, however, the networks are still largely at sea. Traditional marketing methods don't work - or work only sporadically - and what "viewers" are looking for seems to be all over the map. Do they want CSI, or Lonelygirl15?
Then there are copyright and licensing issues, and the fear (somewhat justified) that the Internet is a pirate's paradise, a lawless frontier where the kind of control the networks are used to doesn't exist.
And finally, there's the advertising conundrum: Is Google AdWords the only revenue model that actually works? Internet users don't tend to respond well to the kind of 60-minute, in-your-face advertising model that everyone has become used to on TV and at the theatre.
The TV networks have taken different approaches to competing with online video sources such as YouTube. At first, CBS, NBC and Viacom signed partnership deals with the video upstart, just before it was acquired by Google for $1.6-billion (U.S.).
Those arrangements appeared to turn sour, however, as the networks complained about YouTube's failure to produce a workable anti-piracy technology. Viacom later sued the company for $1-billion and ordered it to remove more than 100,000 videos.
Viacom, CBS and NBC have since signed content deals with Joost, a YouTube competitor that offers streaming video using the "peer-to-peer" technology originally developed by its founders for the Kazaa music-sharing service and the Skype voice-over-Internet service.
There have also been reports that the major networks (apart from Disney/ABC, which seems to be going its own way) were in talks to create a YouTube competitor, although CBS apparently decided at some point to pursue its own strategy, which included the launch of its own competing YouTube-style video hub last year, called InnerTube.
In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, CBS Interactive executive Quincy Smith admitted that the InnerTube experiment was more or less a complete failure, joking that the site's Web address should have been changed to "CBS.com/nobodycomeshere" because of the lack of traffic.
The problem for media giants like CBS and NBC, which has vacillated between threatening YouTube to remove its content and actually posting its own video clips from shows such as Saturday Night Live in order to build buzz, is that they no longer control the destination for video, which in the past was an actual physical box called the TV.
Now, video clips are embedded in MySpace pages and e-mailed or posted to blogs, or viewed on YouTube or Revver or DailyMotion, or aggregated by sites such as Viral Videos. If cable brought us the 500-channel universe, the Internet is the five-million channel universe.
Why would anyone go to CBS's InnerTube instead of going to one of those other places? The only reason would be if the network's site were the only place to get that content; but the battle to control every video clip that gets posted to YouTube or a dozen other sites is like a game of Whack-A-Mole. There is always another place to get the content.
While Viacom sues YouTube and other sites, and does deals with services like Joost - which it clearly sees as more copyright-friendly - and NBC tries to find a middle ground, CBS seems to have decided to pursue as broad a strategy as possible. The network announced last month that it will license its content to everyone from AOL and Joost to Bebo and Netvibes.
CBS is also reportedly working with Facebook, the popular social-networking site, to allow users to embed its video clips in their pages. "We can't expect consumers to come to us," Mr. Smith told The Wall Street Journal. "It's arrogant for any media company to assume that."
In effect, CBS seems to be hoping that by spreading clips of its content like seeds in various Web-video sites, it will eventually be able to grow its audience - either online or offline - and derive more revenue from both traditional advertising and Web ads.
Given the chaotic, distributed nature of the Internet, it's a smart approach. Whether it will work or not is a different question.
