Kate Bulkley, Media Analyst.

If you build it, will they come?

By Kate Bulkley

Broadcast News

For Broadcast July 09, 2009

Online success takes more than just having a site - you need users too.

Feild of Dreams Still

Remember the 1989 movie Field of Dreams? The hero builds a baseball diamond in his cornfield and his dead father (a baseball player he never knew) shows up, proving the mantra of the movie: “If you build it, he will come.”

If only life in the online world was like that. In some ways, it is: Google built a good search engine and boy, have people come. And not just for searching – in the UK, 63% percent of online video visits were to YouTube in February, according to HitWise. BBC iPlayer was a distant second, with 11.2%.

In the US, big broadcasters including NBC Universal, Fox and, most recently, Disney have built an online video destination site called Hulu; in 18 months, it has become the third-biggest US video streaming site, behind YouTube and MySpace.

Hulu focuses on long-form TV content, unlike the funny – but difficult to monetise – user-generated content that has become YouTube’s hallmark. So no wonder both are offering incentives to UK broadcasters to host their programmes.

They aren’t alone. MSN is also looking to do deals, although I’m told the boys from Redmond are offering less in terms of financial incentives.

But despite the failure of Project Kangaroo, UK broadcasters have other options than simply empowering the likes of Hulu and YouTube. Five’s Dawn Airey told an audience last week that UK broadcasters should stop fighting like “rats in a sack” and figure out how to cooperate to “build new markets” online. She’s right.

The BBC is often looked at with scepticism by other broadcasters as being too dominant and too rich. But in the online world, the playing field is global and it’s the likes of YouTube that are hogging it.

Broadcasters need to think strategically about how they want the online world to look, not just next month but in two to five years’ time, when broadband distribution is widely accepted. YouTube already has a big market share in online video, so should it be built up to the exclusion of others? I think a balance is needed – it’s not in broadcasters’ interests to create a dominant single player in cyberspace akin to how Sky rules pay-TV in the UK.

Hulu UK and YouTube are important parts of the landscape but homegrown online video service should be too. BlinkBox, for instance, last month attracted 730,000 unique users, making it bigger than 4oD for online video views. The BBC’s proposals for Canvas, which would bring broadband content to the TV, and Marquee, which would create a catch-up TV service for all broadcasters using iPlayer technology, are also possible alternatives. And Five is already being creative – using Brightcove technology, it has embedded its programmes in Five-branded players on its own websites as well as on sites such as YouTube and Yahoo!.

Airey recognises that on the web, it’s about building direct relationships, but she also realises that you can’t assume that people will come to you. You have to build it – and then take it to where they are.

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