Every day, there seems to be a new story about one company or
another trying to get in to the old television game, but not on the
talking box (as Forrest Gump called it) — rather on the web,
where all the cool people play.
In some
cases, TV networks are trying to take the Web and turn it into
television. Good luck to them I say.
News Roundup
Here’s a quick roundup of some of the latest online
television news:
— News Corp. unit Twentieth TV
is working with Yahoo on a
“Web on TV” show, which will no doubt
feature the latest hilarious clips of skateboarders hurting themselves
or kittens on an icy pond.
— Lifetime Networks is
launching a TV-style platform as part of its relaunched website, and
will create new
shows just for the Web as well as streaming Lifetime content.
— Newsweek says it is
going to create a
political talk show that will run weekly on its website, and
the magazine has hired the former producer of Hardball with
Chris Matthews on MSNBC to put it together.
MSNBC Redesign & More
In other media-related announcements, MSNBC’s
redesign is live (just
in time for Rex “Fimoculous” Sorgatz to leave and
an old friend of mine
to arrive) and it has a very cool
Ajax-y feature that lets you move chunks of the page up or
down depending on your interests.
And in the old-time newspaper world, a number of chains have done
a deal
with real-estate site Zillow to put their ads on the Zillow site and
use Zillow features on their newspaper websites.
For more, see this
piece of commentary on CNET about newspapers and the
classified conundrum, and see Don Dodge on The
Next Big Thing for a post on the Zillow deal.
Written by Mathew Ingram, a technology journalist. Catch his views on the intersection between media and the web at MathewIngram.com. This post is licensed under the Creative Commons.
