• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, October 17, 2006

Yahoo today will begin offering news clips from 16 local CBS television stations as the Internet portal continues to expand its lineup of professionally produced video.

Through the deal, Yahoo will post 10 to 20 local news videos a day from each of the CBS-owned TV stations, which cover the country's major markets including New York and Los Angeles. The clips will be available from the Yahoo home page and throughout Yahoo News, with links back to the stations' Web sites for viewers seeking more video and news.

Yahoo and CBS will split revenue from pre-roll advertising and banners that accompany the news clips. Yahoo will offer the local video inventory only to its national advertisers to prevent conflict with the CBS stations' local ad sales efforts.

The addition of local news video is an outgrowth of Yahoo's launch of local news last spring, mostly in the form of text stories from wire services and local newspaper and radio and TV outlets. By entering their city or ZIP code on the Yahoo home page, users can access news from multiple local sources. Yahoo's deal with CBS comes at a time when video is taking on increasing importance for Internet companies, underscored by Google's purchase last week of video-sharing site YouTube for $1.65 billion.

"As we continued to grow the local product with local news video, it became logical for them to partner with us," said Neil Budde, general manager of Yahoo News, of CBS. Yahoo already shows clips from CBS' "60 Minutes," as well as from national and international news outlets including CNN and ABC News and Reuters.

That latest pact with CBS reflects Yahoo's decision to pursue content deals with big media companies rather than relying on original programming or user-generated video for traffic. Budde said that Yahoo News alone had generated 50 million video streams in September, compared to 3.5 million a year ago.

Overall, nearly 38 million U.S. visitors streamed videos on Yahoo in July--just ahead of MySpace and YouTube, according to the latest figures from ComScore Media Metrix.

The addition of local video would also help Yahoo to solidify its leading position in local online search. "Yahoo is far and away the leader in the local Web market, and this deal provides them more local content," said Barry Parr, a media analyst at Jupiter Research, a division of JupiterKagan Inc.

CBS, meanwhile, gains access to Yahoo's vast online audience. "Yahoo has one of the largest collections of online users for news and they're not necessarily the same people who regularly use our local station sites," said Jonathan Leess, president, CBS Television Stations Digital Media Group.

He emphasized that the syndication deal with Yahoo would help to expand the audience of the local TV Web sites, rather than cannibalize traffic. That would be especially true in the case of local video clips with national interest, such as the Corey Lidle plane crash last week or the final concert at CBGBs on Sunday.

While CBS already distributes local video through search engines and other online outlets, Yahoo will be the first Web property to actually host its content on their site. "This will create for [Yahoo] additional inventory to sell to their national advertisers," said Leess.

CBS isn't the only network moving to boost traffic for local news video. NBC Universal began adding video-sharing sites to the Web sites of its local TV stations during the summer to tap into the user-generated content craze. It plans to roll out the video sites to each of its ten owned-and-operated stations by next year in partnership with Web video company Motionbox. In a more ambitious step, NBC last month created the National Broadband Company, or NBBC, which will syndicate video clips from a variety of sources including NBC local news.

"We have definitely come to the conclusion that for news organizations in the future, syndication is a really important part of expanding on the Web," said Jupiter's Parr. Local news Web sites, in particular, need to connect with big Internet companies because their own Internet audiences often aren't comparable to their local TV audiences.

Though CBS will be the exclusive local video provider in its markets, Yahoo plans to pursue additional video syndication deals with smaller-market TV stations owned by companies such as Hearst-Argyle and Gannett, according to Budde.