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Will there be global TV brands on the web?

Monday, August 07, 2006, posted by Tom Weiss
With more and more video available online from sites like YouTube, some say television is evolving into a global medium. Traditional television broadcasting has traditionally been restricted to national boundaries. Satellite systems, although not restricted by technology, have followed the same model.

The received wisdom about the internet is that the web is "different" and that national boundaries are broken down by easy access to content from anywhere. It's certainly true that the BBC receives a third of its web traffic from outside the UK with only minimal proactive marketing, but this does not appear to be a universal phenomenon. Indeed, the popular networking site MySpace has been overtaken in the UK because it's competitor, Bebo, has a highly localised product for the UK market, including a full index of schools and colleges. Ever since Google launched google.co.uk, the trend has been for firms with an international footprint to succeed through localised services, and there is no sign of this stopping yet.

At the moment, YouTube is still operating without any localisation, and is serving more online videos that anyone. I'll predict that within 12 months that this will be a strongly localised service. We've been building up our database of video clips for our search engine for over a year now, and have found that although a lot of video clips have international relevance - movie trailors, pop videos, and the like - a lot of content needs a local bias to succeed.

News summaries from America simply are not compelling for UK viewers, neither are previews for the next Episode of Lost on CBS when it's different from the Episode that's due on Channel 4 tonight. We have found that building a database of compelling content for the UK market is not simply about indexing all of the video that's available, it's about picking and choosing what will appeal to the UK viewer and prioritising those shows. Someone in the UK searching for Football clips, for example, will have wildly different expectations from an American viewer and this must be reflected in the search engine.

The vast majority of content in our database is international, but the most compelling content tends to be published by local broadcasters to promote the traditional TV shows, and we're seeing a move towards advertising funded shows broadcast online and paid-for programming as well. The local broadcasters are of course competing with the globally branded start-ups, but the head start that most broadcasters have in terms of both content and brand awareness seems to give them a significant advantage.

Although we're still working with the start-ups, the priority for us is local content and local brands. When you look outside the English speaking world, this becomes even more important, and we believe that if global TV brands are truly going to succeed their going to need to provide local content in each country they operate in: the internet may have made it cheaper and easier to operate on an international basis, but that's no good if people don't want to watch your content.