The tone was jubilant, with the implied assumption that these two trad-media companies have finally cracked the Internet code. Indeed, they tossed around the term “Web 2.0” as if it were as familiar to them as upfronts and affiliates. Would the site include “user-generated content”—the homemade videos that rocketed YouTube to glory? But of course. Mash-ups? Couldn’t do without ’em. People posting clips on blogs? The more the merrier. Customers rating the videos? How else does one organize in the 21st century.
As always, the devil will be in the details. Nonetheless, there’s plenty to indicate that this “groundbreaking” development might be less than meets the eyeballs. Maybe it’s a problem of casting. If you sought someone to play the role of the creator of the next breakout Web site, you wouldn’t be scouting the suites of Herb Allen’s summer mogul retreat but the pizza parlors of Palo Alto or the coffee bars south of Market in San Francisco.
Chernin and Zucker indicated that the key advantage of their new alliance was the breadth of the distribution channel—between AOL, Yahoo, MSN, and MySpace, everybody is bound to stumble across the programming. A lot of the supposed value of this effort seems to be in wider availability of what is already around on the Web sites of individual networks—streamed videos with ads and pay-per-view programming. But on the Internet, distribution is not such a big deal: YouTube’s Chad Hurley and Steve Chen managed to reach hundreds of millions of people—who came to their Web site or viewed their clips on blogs—without benefit of any big promotional partners.
