• The Wall Street Journal, Thursday, July 16, 2009 1:30 PM

CBS Corp., Time Warner, Inc. and several other media companies will participate in a Web-TV trial with cable operator Comcast Corp. later this month. Their aim is to make more TV shows available online, but only for subscribers of Comcast's cable service. The idea here is to preserve a lucrative business model for content producers at a time when some viewers are canceling their cable subscriptions to watch free TV on the Web.

It's also part of a broader push by media companies to put more ads inside Web videos. According to the Wall Street Journal, Web versions of TV shows like TNT's "The Closer" will carry their full load of ads from traditional TV-more than four times the ad load on many Internet sites, where a single 30-second spot during five or six commercial breaks has become the norm.

"We spend billions of dollars buying and making these programs. And if we give this stuff to consumers for free with limited ads, it'll go away," says Andy Heller, vice chairman of Time Warner's Turner Broadcasting. "It has to get there to sustain what it costs to make premium shows," adds Vivi Zigler, president of NBC Universal Digital Entertainment, which has started streaming episodes of series like "The Office" with two ads per break.

Network execs are hopeful that consumers and advertisers will accept increases in the number of ads inside Web videos. But more ads means more clutter: "It's beneficial for me for my ad to be in as low-clutter an environment as possible," says Sharon Gallacher, managing director of global brands at Neo@Ogilvy, a unit of WPP Group's Ogilvy & Mather. "But I would also like this medium to flourish. It's in my interest to make sure that balance is hit."

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