Development Seed Blog

Yesterday NBC Nightly News started posting its broadcast online -- in it's entirety.
This is the first nightly news show, or any tv show as far as I know, to put an entire show online and commit to do it every night. And what's even cooler is they did it for the right reasons. As anchor Brian Williams wrote on his blog (another good move!):

"While I'm just old enough to believe there's a certain magic that comes with that moment when our studio digital clocks hit exactly 6:30:00 eastern time each night (when the three network evening newscasts come on the air), not everyone is able to give us their attention at that exact time. And so here we boldly go." Read the rest.

That's totally true. And even though they may still get most of their viewers from TV, it's very nice to have other ways to watch the program. I can't tell you how many times my friends and I talk about how great it would be if entire episodes of The Daily Show were posted online (the clips are nice but just leave you wanting more). Well, we're one step closer. More importantly, it goes with the new trend in the media to try to grow with technology. After being a little late to jump on the blog wagon, they're on the right track with this.

And it's not just the news media. ABC is now letting you download episodes of some of its TV shows to your iPod, for a price. And yesterday CBS and NBC followed in ABC's footsteps and announced that they will sell some TV episodes after they've been aired. But this move wasn't quite as innovative as ABC -- instead of downloading the episodes you can get them through your cable provider and may need special equipment. Sounds more like Tivo or "on demand" cable than anything groundbreaking to me. But anything that gives you options other than scheduling your life around a TV schedule has got to be a
smart move.