• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer, October 29, 2008

In a poll that has correctly predicted the winner of every presidential election since it began running in 1992, classroom video news network Channel One has Barack Obama trouncing John McCain by a 17-point margin, with 58.5% of the vote to McCain's 41.5%.

Several million teen voters have Obama taking every single swing state except Missouri, including Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa and New Hampshire.

As part of its election-year package, Channel One also created a Web site for citizen journalism by a group of high school students covering various aspects of the election, including their personal impressions and hometown local color during campaign season.

In addition to forecasting doom for McCain, the Channel One poll is part of an interesting new trend that's seeing digital out-of-home video players expand their platforms with online destinations, and vice-versa. Two months ago Captivate Network, which delivers news and information to thousands of digital screens in office building elevators, said it was launching a consumer news site. Captivate.com will be a site where viewers can learn more about the 15-second stories appearing on elevator screens. To coordinate programming and content across multiple platforms, Captivate has hired Deanna Murray, formerly director of programming for AOL, as director of content.

More recently BuzzDash, an online polling site, announced earlier this month that it had partnered with Transit TV to introduce a trivia game for bus passengers in Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Milwaukee and Orlando using its in-vehicle digital network. The daily feature will quiz riders about poll-based data derived from BuzzDash's online social polling forum.

In another spin on the cross-platform approach, ON Networks announced that it has created a multiscreen video distribution network reaching over 100 million viewers in the U.S. and Europe with syndicated TV shows and accompanying advertising. Claiming this is the largest such network ever built, ON says about two-thirds of the viewers are reached via the Web and one-third are offline, including out-of-home viewing as well as video-on-demand, IPTV, and mobile.