• by adam , Shelly Palmer , October 6, 2005

Right this second, if you type "Everybody Hates Chris Google Video" into Google's search bar, you'll land on http://video.google.com/chris.html. This is a nicely designed page with a handsome graphic that tells you to "Watch premiere episode of everybody hates chris now" (Obviously, the writer and art director of this page are better at graphics than grammar.) Click on the link and you will end up on the home page of the Google Video Beta site, where you are treated to clickable thumbnails of three random videos that have absolutely nothing to do with "Everybody Hates Chris."

Not exactly a "best practices" follow-up, but that's not the point; if you performed this same exercise for four days last week, you would have been treated to an exclusive streaming video experience unlike any before it. You would have seen a full episode of a network television show legally streamed over the public Internet.

This was not IPTV. This was not file-sharing. This was not a download--it was a good, old-fashioned Webcast, and you could find it using Google (or any other search engine, for that matter).

So why should anyone care about a show streaming on the web?

Let's spend a moment and think about what had to happen before this file was made available for streaming. First and foremost, there were deals that had to be made with the actors through the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and/or The American Federation of Television & Radio Artists (AFTRA). Actors get paid residuals when shows are distributed, and these unions have the exclusive right to negotiate those fees. There is an Internet rate, but for most streaming video opportunities, the cost outweighs the revenue, so something here was different.

There were also public performance royalties for the composer and publisher of the show's music. That negotiating was most likely done through The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) or Broadcast Music International (BMI)--although they are both nonexclusive representatives for their members, so it's possible that someone made a deal with the composers and publishers directly. Then, there was the synchronous performance license for the music; that pretty much had to be negotiated directly with the publisher of the music or other representatives of the rights holders. There were other unions and guilds involved, each with their own contractual obligations to their members, including The Directors Guild of America (DGA), The Writer Guild (WGA) and even possibly, The Producers Guild (PGA). All these deals represent the part of the iceberg you can see from the deck of the Titanic; there are many more people with a financial stake involved in any major television production, and deals or waivers had to be negotiated with all of them.

Outside the box, deals must have been made between the studio, the production company, the network and the affiliate stations, because every sitcom made since Desi Arnaz invented the current format and business model has been sold with temporal and geographic restrictions--none of which apply when a piece of video is available for streaming over the Internet.

The idea that you can search for a show and see it on the Web, or that you will someday aggregate your own video playlists, is fodder for many a late-night discussion. But this was not some random file or some illegal download--it was the real thing.

Twenty years from now, if anyone is writing a book about the paradigm shift from network to networked television, this particular event will probably be cited as the actual tipping point.

Just a few days before the show premiered, Ben Silverman, principal of Reveille Productions, was on a panel at the Madison & Vine Conference in New York. Speaking about upcoming technologies, he said, "I don't go home, sit with my dad and watch my Google." It got a big laugh from the audience. Still, it's possible that Larry and Sergey may have the last laugh. Congrats to Google, to UPN and to the producers who had the vision to break out of the box. A job well done.