• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, February 9, 2015

As online video grows up and out, a Web news site asked some of the big players a good question: Is being called a “multichannel network” a bad thing?

StreamDaily’s Melita Kuburas explored that theme in a piece last week titled “MCNs: The Stigma And The Evolution” in which she noted that some of the top execs at MCNs are coming to believe they’ve outgrown the phrase.

Among the other descriptors these operators/overseers of hundreds or thousands of YouTube channels are using other phrases to show that really, they’re content developers, just like all the other ones driving television and movies into existence, except, I suppose that they use lots and lots of avenues to make that trip.  

Machinima, for example, sometimes refers to itself as a “many-to-many-programming service” Kuburas notes. And “reps for companies like Maker Studios, AwesomenessTV, Collective Digital Studio, Fullscreen and Machinima assert their companies should be referred to as studios, or multiplatform creator networks, or global youth media companies,” she writes. “It seems like most will bend themselves into pretzels trying not use ’MCN’ as a descriptor.”

(“Global youth media company” sounds Iron Curtainish. Maybe anything that twins “global” and “youth” does that for me.)

There is a good bit of self-consciousness in this what-shall-we-call-ourselves posturing, and that’s probably mostly a good thing. It suggests that the multichannel networks of the world are being invited to sit at the grown-up table more and more often, and that they want to make it clear they have matured.

At the point that cable channels actually started to make much of their own programming, they were so impressed with themselves they touted their new “original series” to distinguish those new, rare homegrown efforts from the loads of network reruns they otherwise carried.

“Original series” more or less lingers to this day, but it also has an ersatz air to it -- like, I suspect, “multichannel networks” do to the deep thinkers at Makers Studios and Awesomeness TV and other places.

“It has a stigma attached to it,” Gary Binkow, chief creative officer and co-founder of Collective Digital Studio, told StreamDaily. “Because it seems like the MCN model is, how can we rope as many creators as fast as possible (for) leverage, then sell our company to a big media company?”

It seems more like MCN describes a content-producer’s origins than its current reality.

For example, a story at The Daily Beast last August said MCNer StyleHaul, now owned by RTL Group, consists of 4,600 YouTube channels reaching across 62 nations. Today, its corporate Web site says it has 5,200 channels. Other MCNs can report channel numbers just as fluid, which says to me that most of MCNs are made up of a lot of nothing and, apparently, a little bit of very successful.

But really, maybe they have just gone beyond the title. StyleHaul considers itself more in the business of creating campaigns for cosmetic and clothing brands than, strictly speaking, a programmer operating on several platforms. So do other MCNs that are just naturally going from aggregating space for certain advertisers to taking those audiences to different platforms, where, sometimes, the advertising is just baked into the content from the get-go.

Calling themselves anything but MCNs would not be a bad idea. It seems to me that MCNs shoot themselves in the foot every time a reference is made to just how multi they are.