CBS’s New Eye on Video

The much-hyped CBS strategy to hyper-distribute its video far and wide will get a boost when a new video player launches in coming months. Promising new features that lets users embed CBS premium content across social networks and personal sites, the company says it fully embraces an “open approach” to redistributing content wherever the user wants to plant it. In addition to easier sharing and embedding, the new player will allow video search as well as higher quality H.264 video playback for near-HD quality. We are already starting to see CBS videos embedded at some blog and news aggregation sites. The clips carry with them ad pre-rolls that CBS hopes will monetize the effort so that someone somewhere can actually make some money off of this digital video craze.

We are on the cusp of a video tipping point online as more and more sites start redistributing branded media. Video is now as easy to cut an dpaste into an article and a blog post as an image. that means we start using video differently. Years ago, I recall the forward thinkers at Slate “revolutionizing” media reviews with actual audio clips embedded in the articles. The publisher at the time complained to me that rights issues were making a headache out of trying to make this obvious next move in the use of multimedia online. Now, finally, everyone is wising up to the benefits of letting people use and resuse your content easily so long as a sensible business model is attached to it. Don’t touch that dial. The metrics we see in the next few months about hyper-distribution and its effect on brands will be very important.