TV Experiments Just Keep Coming

Man, I just love techdirt.com. They're not always right, but there always up on the latest happenings, and they "get it' like noone else. I need not even put in my two cents on this, they just nailed it. We're definitely entering a little bit of a craze. I wouldn't even call it a boom, some people might call it a tech bloom.. I'd call it a new media bloom... that's creating a very rapid incumbent media panic. The market is exploding, I've lost all track of the number of audio and video podcasts. I think it's somewhere around 10,000 audio and 2000 to 2500 video podcasts.

There has been an awful lot of experimenting from TV executives lately. It mostly started about a year ago, but in just the last few months it's really heated up, from the Cartoon Network's streaming of Adult Swim to UPN and Google streaming Everybody Hates Chris to Apple and ABC offering $2 downloads of shows to be viewed on the new iPod to NBC and CBS selling extremely limited versions of shows for a dollar. Now we can add to the list that AOL is streaming free versions of classic sitcoms (well, depending on your definition of "classic"), with commercials. On the good side, it's clear that TV execs realize they need to do something. They need to change and they're trying out a lot of different things. That's a step forward. However, all of these experiments have problems. None of them really take advantage of the medium, and all of them practically scream out how afraid the TV execs are of losing "control" on the internet.

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