Back to blogging. Sorry I have been out for so long. I promise that I will be blogging on a regular basis…
One very interesting development this week is the bold move by Viacom, the media powerhouse that owns the right to the popular Comedy Central TV show as they launched a new web site for The Daily Show to where they publish every minute of the show in the past 13 years online free and accessible to all users. I tried the new site and it is incredible as you can search through past shows and get to see any one of them. Looks like they spent quite sometime tagging all this content so it would be easily searchable. This was interesting to me as I recalled a friend of mine mentioned to me recently about a very funny John Stewart joke he did last month during the Iranian President Ahmanidjad visit to the United Nations in New York. I was able to go to the site search for the tag “Iran” and access that specific clip in less than 10 seconds of search time. I found that pretty amazing as by bringing all this mass content online and making easily searchable by tagging it properly, we are getting closer to an age where every form of digital content will be accessible online . Furthermore, seems like this move is supported by advertising. I saw an ad for Hyundai running both as a pre-roll and as an overlay on the screen while I was watching a clip. I dont know the economics here but it is my guess that advertisers would be willing to pay for such premium inventory but especially as users are really engaged as they are searching for particular content which can result in very high response rate tot he advertising. Finally, as I never really used to watch this show on a regular basis, I think just by bringing this complete show archive online, this opens up to a whole new target segment that is currently not addressed (just like people like me) and this should build more traffic and increase the audience of the show to a whole new population beyond of the regular TV watchers of the show. Seems like a home run to me.
For some more coverage about this see this Boing Boing post
