Turner Entertainment Shares Online Video Experiences

Linear TV giant Turner Entertainment Inc. is forging ahead with Internet video, confident that its learn-by-doing strategy will eventually provide it a sound offering built atop a business model that will make it a profitable undertaking.

While many companies have opted to stand on the sidelines and watch the action, Turner has put its content and its business brains where it sees a good chunk of the video market headed – to the Internet.

“We’re working to drive ad revenue across alternative platforms with properties such as TBS and CourtTV,” said Chris Pizzurro, vice president of product integration at Turner Entertainment. The company firmly believes both subscription and ad models will work online, he added.

One ongoing project deals with the company’s CNN.com property. Users can now, from their PCs, select any one of eight concurrent news feeds. “The economics have worked for us since we own all the footage, which drives down production costs,” said Pizzurro.

The capability has been well received, which makes Turner confident that revenue models will not be heavy lifting. “We’ve tried some subscription models with some working and other not. Advertising will come because the audience is there,” said Pizzurro of Web site visitors.

He did not details web video plans for its many others assets including Nascar.com, Cartoon Network, Turner Classic Movies or PGA.com. The company has also created Super Deluxe, a portal for comedy content.

Change is something of a constant on the Web, cautioned Pizzurro, admitting that as of late October, Super Deluxe had already underwent six redesigns, with the length of the professionally-produced comedy segments driving much of the work.

“We thought the right length would be six to eight minutes,” Pizzurro said. “But after reviewing feedback, we knew we had to cut that down to two to four minutes.”

Turner took an innovative approach to covering live college sports on the Web. The company sent special production kits to folks at universities to help them cover their events, which than were distributed, starting in August, as streaming media by a division of Turner Sports.

Content companies know best the expense of producing coverage and that making the economics of this function work is a big key to the success of online video ventures. As a result, on the service provider side, telcos typically prefer to produce little or no content themselves, opting instead to cut carriage deals with content owners like Turner.

But when it comes to online video, telcos lag far behind the content owners who have the wherewithal to do it themselves.

That’s precisely the case with the sports unit.

Sports and the Atlantic Sun Conference announced a partnership to provide exclusive online video streaming of all sports for nine of the A-Sun member institutions.

Play ON! Sports now powers a new Web service that hosts a minimum of 540 regular-season and championship games across a variety of A-Sun sports, including men's and women's basketball, soccer and volleyball, as well as baseball and softball throughout the 2007-08 academic year.

Going beyond the live-only model some prefer, all events are available for viewing both live and on-demand replay to fans.

Turner Entertainment Inc. www.turner.com

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