CBS made Katie Couric the anchor of their evening news because they’ve been stuck in a dismal third place in the nightly news business and they know that she’ll create a buzz. But they also understand that the nightly news business as we know it is fading rapidly away.
That’s why I think it’s brilliant that they’ve decided to stream the evening news with Katie Couric live online. What’s even more brilliant is that each episode will be offered on demand after the fact, both as an entire episode and as individual segments on different topics.
This will allow bloggers to link in to a specific story the same way we currently link to a video on YouTube. It will bring the evening news into the 21st century in a way that NBC and ABC have yet to accomplish.
ABC was the first television network to stream ad-supported episodes of its television shows for free from their website. The problem with this initiative is that they didn’t provide for the kind of bandwidth that the site would require. I hope that CBS is better prepared for the kind of demand they’ll be experiencing once Ms. Couric takes to the Web on September 5.
We’ll be talking more about how businesses can provide content and products in formats that allow people to enjoy them how and when they want at our upcoming conference this October.
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