Yahoo TV: Streaming on Yahoo, It’s ‘S.N.L.’
By BRIAN STELTER
When they were performing on “Saturday Night Live” three decades ago, Al
Franken, Bill Murray and Eddie Murphy surely didn’t expect they would
ever be streamed on computers and phones. In fact, they probably would
have made fun of the idea.
Yahoo
announced that it had acquired the exclusive rights to classic clips
from 1975 through 2012, effective in September. The clips will be
removed from Hulu and NBC.com, where they currently reside, and be shown instead on Yahoo, which wants to share in the buzz the show creates.
The deal between Broadway Video and Yahoo highlights the jockeying among
companies that want to have a library of online videos to call their
own. A dizzying number of online video producers are pitching their
programs to advertisers this month, ahead of the traditional television
upfront sessions in May. While these Web programs’ quantity and quality
are increasing quickly, there are doubts about whether the advertising
dollars are.
“On one hand, digital video advertising is growing fast and its
prominence is increasing,” said Clark Fredricksen of the research firm
eMarketer. “On the other, compared to television, online video is an
incredibly competitive market, where you have more companies fighting
over far less.” Mr. Fredricksen’s company estimates that $4.1 billion
will be spent on online video ads this year, in contrast to $66.4
billion on television ads.
“There are a handful of major conglomerates who split revenues from the
huge TV-ad pie,” Mr. Fredricksen said, “while the digital video world
features hundreds of companies fighting, comparatively, for scraps from
the TV table.”
Attaching, barnaclelike, to television might be a way to stand out from
the crowd. Yahoo, which is trying for a turnaround under its chief
executive, Marissa Mayer, has content-sharing relationships with many
major media companies, but its video hub, Yahoo Screen, has lagged
rivals like Google, which owns YouTube.
Erin McPherson, a Yahoo vice president who oversees the company’s video
business, said the company jumped at the “S.N.L.” opportunity. She said
the “S.N.L.” clips would be “widely distributed” across Yahoo,
suggesting a strategy that will go beyond the current Yahoo Screen site.
“Rather than competing with Hulu, Netflix or any other platform, we see
this as a step toward adding scale and breadth to the great content we
are already offering users,” Ms. McPherson said.
Yahoo and Broadway Video declined to comment on terms, but people with
knowledge of the arrangement said access to the “S.N.L.” library had
cost upward of $10 million a year in the past.
Hulu, the online video Web site owned by Comcast, The News Corporation
and the Walt Disney Company, enjoyed an immediate bump in traffic when
it added “SNL” to its collection. These days, however, Hulu — which its
owners are considering selling — is concentrating on other content. It
will promote several of its forthcoming original series at an event for
advertisers next week.
Under the deal announced on Wednesday, Hulu will still stream clips and
full episodes from the current television season. Yahoo will be able to
do that, too. But Yahoo will have the old “S.N.L.” clips all to itself,
giving it something special to show off — although only for one year.
The deal will be up for renegotiation at that point.
Jack Sullivan, chief executive of Broadway Video, said the deal would
let “S.N.L.” increase its distribution internationally, since the clips
of classic episodes have generally only been accessible in North America
in the past.
For a company like Yahoo, “having TV-like offerings is really
important,” said Mike Vorhaus, president of the digital media consulting
firm Magid Advisors. That’s because online video ads have partly taken
the place of Web display ads, sometimes called banner ads, in
advertisers’ budgets; as Mr. Vorhaus put it, “You can only take so much
banner money away before there’s no banner money left at all.”
“Now they kind of have to pursue TV money,” he added.
Along the way they’re becoming more like TV. Earlier this year, a sendup
of dating reality shows created by Yahoo, “Burning Love,” was deemed
worthy of running on the cable channel E! as well. Sony, another company
that will be presenting to advertisers next week, was recognized for
treating Jerry Seinfeld’s experimental Web series “Comedians in Cars
Getting Coffee” like a TV series when it ordered a 24-episode second
season.
And Netflix, the ad-free streaming service that so many other companies
want to resemble, was praised for commissioning “House of Cards,” the
Washington thriller that could have fit right in on HBO or AMC. On
Wednesday night, Netflix released a long-term vision statement for
investors that summed up why it and so many of its competitors are
optimistic about their chances: “While Internet TV is only a very small
percent of video viewing today, we think it will grow every year,” it
said, citing faster Internet speeds, sales of Internet-connected TV
sets, improvements to TV apps and the possibilities for personalized
online video ads.
The competition for Internet TV viewing, it concluded, “is just beginning.”
You can see them on Yahoo at: http://tv.yahoo.com/shows/saturday-night-live/
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/25/business/media/saturday-night-live-archives-moving-to-yahoo.html?partner=MYWAY&ei=5065&_r=0
