Apple a day won't keep NBC away

US Broadcaster NBC has started NBBC, essentially a b2b exchange market for the company’s affiliates and other partners, who can go to NBBC and find video to post on their own sites, and also post video to the exchange.

This is what the site says about how it works:

Upload: Licensors place content on the >nbbc platform
Monetize: Video is paired with advertisements
Distribute: Web publishers access content and advertisement
(or supply their own ad)
Connect: Consumers view content and advertising revenue is shared

So its funded by Advertising, idea is that affiliates etc will be able to select either (i) an NBBC video player for full service, (ii) one (or more?) channel/s to display or (iii) individual video files for their sites. Ads are initially served pre-roll, going to mid-roll as longer videos are included, and other types of advertising will appear. Some ads will be served centrally, local sites can also insert local ads

So, its the good old TV free-to-air model for the New TV World.

NBBC says that their service is different out because all players make money and have full control over what video runs on what sites. The system allows partner sites to upload video to NBBC's library, determine which other sites they want to receive their video, as well as tag the video and promote back to their own site. All video will run in an NBBC-created video player.

They claim that while everyone is getting into video, not everyone knows how to get that video into local markets. It’s the network of affiliate TV stations and their accompanying websites will help them do just that, they believe.

The whole area is hotting up.......as well as this there is Apple's play, and Viacom just announced a video syndication partnership with Google. In this play Google enables other Web sites to place clips of MTV Networks programming on their Websites and Viacom (with ads of course...). Google and the site owners share the ad revenue. CNN has also started a YouTube like service for uploaded video., and AOL and Microsoft are also making plays.

The "traditional" value chain is well known - get content at a good price, allow people to search it easily, add a social network or two, get a free ride over broadband, sell an iconic consumer device, ram in the ads and get teh analystics going at full speed.....but with all these players emerging it begs some interesting questions:

- Will people really load up on lots of unique kit from everyone who is trying to reproduce the iTunes model - will they take service through new consumer gizmos, or a Set Top Box, or just endgame it to the broadband PC?

- Will advertising be compelling enough? One of the big questions is the level of Ad interactivity here, nearly all the research shows that people like ads if they are targeted and relevant, and that increases the value significantly. It will be interesting to see how they achieve the profiling and analysis

-