The Day TV Died

Siguiendo el hilo de mi primer post me gustaría recomendaros dos artículos sobre empresas pioneras que siguen los modelos de negocio que comentaba

Online Video Goes Mainstream, Sparking an Industry Land Grab (Free Press)

Brightcove’s technology makes it easy for any producer — from home-movie buffs to television networks — to distribute their videos to multitudes of Web sites. All three parties — the video’s maker, the site that shows it and Brightcove — often will share revenue from the resulting advertisements or sales.

“You become a little multimedia or cable company yourself,” says Kevin Aylward, who runs Wizbangblog.com1, a political Web log, or blog. On its homepage is a link to the “Wizbang News Channel” that activates a Brightcove player featuring a choice of 15 Reuters news stories.

As Internet TV Aims at Niche Audiences, the Slivercast Is Born (NY Times)

ANDY STEWARD, a successful London computer consultant and sailboat racer, became exasperated when trying to watch his favorite sport on television. There were a few half-hour recaps of some major sailing races, but they were always shown late at night.

Mr. Steward looked into creating a sailing channel on the Sky satellite service in Britain, but his idea was soon dead in the water. He would have had to pay £85,000 (nearly $150,000) to start the channel and £40,000 a month (nearly $70,000), as well as the production costs. That was a lot of money for an untested concept.

But in January, he did introduce a sailing channel, one that is rapidly filling with sailing talk shows, product reviews, programs on sailing techniques and, most important, intense coverage of the sort of smaller races that don't make it onto traditional television.

His new channel, however, will not be available over the air. And it won't be found on cable or even on satellite, at least not yet. The channel, called Sail.tv, is broadcast only on the Internet, which enables video to reach a much larger worldwide audience at a much lower initial cost than a satellite channel. Because "we didn't have any idea how big the audience would be," Mr. Steward said, he wanted to keep his expenses as low as possible. "Internet television is an investment we can grow into," he said.

Ambas noticias describen los primeros pasos de muchas empresas; parece que tenemos "early adopters". A ver que ocurre en los próximos meses. Yo apostaría a que dentro de nada podremos leer historias de éxito de startups dedicadas al tema.