Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Can A-B really distribute Bud.TV content?
Anheuser-Busch has gone on the record with The Wall Street Journal this morning about the future of Bud.TV (it's free WSJ content), and I'm sure I'm not the only one who remains a skeptic. Seems the folks at A-B discovered that people are into shorter form content (as in one minute films as opposed to six minutes films), and further that people like social networking, which will now become a component of the site. Bud.TV will also aggregate video from elsewhere, and, in addition, hopes to disseminate its content to places like YouTube. But there's one problem here that A-B may never be able to bypass—as we know, various and sundry attorneys general have had a lot of problem with the Bud.TV site, coming down on it for lax age-verification tools and so forth, so disseminating Bud.TV content to other sites seems like a no-go, particularly since much of the content is so clearly branded Bud.TV (as in the clip "What Girls Want" above). This has already been happening by the way. At least on YouTube, someone by the name of SideLot, who mostly posts Bud.TV content (with a sprinkling of Axe and other frat-boy fare), has been posting for awhile. Since there are no age-verification tools on the sites Bud would disseminate to, it shouldn't be long before someone stirs up the pot.
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2 comments:
Cathy,
You're dead right about the conflict with the government, but I'd argue there's a simpler, more fundamental problem in today's digital video age: even the slightest barrier to discovery and viewing will result in your death. I'm not talking about Bud.tv, specifically, but when you've got barriers of distraction, government, regulations, qualifiers to entrance, lack of searchability, incompatible formats, etc....even a few of those challenges, let alone the aggregate, mean that you can't compete for attention in an information-overload world attention nuggets.
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