• Mediaweek, Wednesday, September 12, 2007 10:49 AM

The networks, confused about what to do with their Web distribution strategy, are trying to make friends with the Web's major audience holders. News. Corp.'s Fox and GE's NBC partnered with MSN, Yahoo, News Corp.'s own MySpace and others to create a digital distribution venture called Hulu. CBS Corp. has also forged distribution deals with many of the same players for its CBS Interactive Audience Network, and ABC is now looking to do something in the same vein.

The Walt Disney Co. company is said to be in talks with AOL, Comcast, MSN, MySpace and Yahoo (nearly the same lineup as CBS and NBC/Fox) about distribution agreements, but an ABC Television exec said only one deal would be announced this fall. ABC's approach is to embed its media player into its publisher partner sites so viewers have the same experience on Yahoo, for example, as they would on ABC.com. CBS allows its partners to design the video experience as they see fit, but retains 90 percent of ad revenue.

One thing's for sure, the networks need a bigger audience. Go-it-alone Web sites don't generate the viewership or ad revenue the networks think they deserve for their content, and neither does selling it on iTunes. The audience network approach is all about aggregating users to get bigger audiences and more ad revenue. The funny thing is that these are slightly different distribution approaches with nearly the same end result: MSN users will presumably be able to watch CBS, Hulu and ABC content at the same place.

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