I saw "Iron Man 2" about a week ago and was not able to get the Black Sabbath 70's hit "I am Iron man" out of my head While the song was not actually in the second "Iron Man" film aside from its trailers, the tune came to mind again as I read the Video Insider article "Content is King -- Sort of" by Break Media's Andrew Budkofsky. At first, I thought Budkofsky supported my own view of this idiom, in that there are other elements equally as worthy as content to its king entitlement. Budkofsky expands on distribution and …

The dirty little secret in the online video business is that almost no one has been able to crack the code when it comes to creating successful, recurring online shows. Yes, there are a few shows with millions of "followers" on YouTube and the occasional mini online celebrity. There are even some shows that have moved on to TV, but these have largely been failures. Essentially there have been no online-only shows that have been sustainable, multimillion-dollar successes.

Some time ago, I examined how successful online marketing requires some kind of balance between the expectations marketers have and the promises some salespeople make. In the online video space in particular, it is becoming clear that balance is required to achieve any modicum of success. This balance needs to be manifested in multiple ways, including:

As methods of connecting TV sets to the Internet gain traction, public television will face two significant challenges. One will be the relevance of local affiliates. Except for news broadcasts, most popular PBS shows are prerecorded. Internet distribution is ideal for pre-recorded shows because it permits viewers to watch any time, as opposed to a scheduled broadcast time. A second challenge is that the Internet can provide even higher quality programming than PBS.