• NewTeeVee, Monday, January 12, 2009 12 PM

CBS is revamping its TV.com site to become a video-viewing destination. The site, which six months ago started featuring Hulu content, has now added CBS shows, and is today announcing deals for MGM, Sony, PBS, Endemol, USA and Showtime, according to various reports cited by Liz Gannes of NewTeeVee.

CBS is positioning TV.com as a video portal that's already social. Gannes notes that social features have been a hard sell for competitors like Hulu, Comcast's Fancast and Joost, which are each trying to build communities around their content. Early stats show that people show up at these sites to watch videos, not to interact with others.

It's unclear how many users TV.com has, as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal each reported different figures from comScore. The Times claimed the site had 16 million visitors in November, while the Journal report said 4.8 million. Either way, Gannes notes that TV.com can claim to have a leg up on Hulu, because it has CBS content while Hulu has no such reciprocal deal with CBS. However, she says that parsing out which sites have the right to full episodes of which shows is something of a nightmare: "Networks and studios give different sites different deals--they have different selections of shows, different amounts of the most recent episodes, sometimes just clips instead of full episodes...yuck." Moreover, she says that none of the TV.com content sticks out as something you couldn't find elsewhere.

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