For those of you who don’t follow the Bits Blog by Nick Bilton (and others) at the NYT, you should start. Today he made a post that was both interesting and incomplete. He asked, “What if Conan said, “Bye, NBC. Hello, Internet?” It’s a great question. As Bilton points out, our generation (18-34 year olds) are looking for a URL not a time slot and channel. Conan has so many followers 18-34, that he may well be more appealing to an internet company then a network. The question is, what internet company.
Myself and a colleague have discussed thoroughly and we have three ideas:
- Boxee – This is the most adventurous of the suggestions and probably the most unlikely. It also has the most chance to revolutionize TV the fastest. A company like Boxee would have to offer Conan equity, maybe as much as 20 to 30%. They would then roll out Conan exclusively on Boxee and many of the 18-34 year olds who have been on the fence about technologies like Boxee start to adopt it. It would have the potential to give Boxee an insurmountable lead and make them the default system for watching URL driven rather than broadcast driven TV.
- Apple – The iTunes store hasn’t yet debuted “exclusive” content, but this would be a great first venture. It would probably coincide with a revamped, renewed version of Apple TV. With the already existing iTunes library it could change the way we consume television. Instead of watching whatever was or we had DVRed for $100 per month from the cable company. We would buy seasons of our favorite shows for $2 or $3 per show and watch them whenever we wanted. We’d buy the next one when we were done with the previous one.
- Google – The Google model would likely be ad supported. They would post a new Conan show every night at 11:30 and you could watch it whenever you wanted. If you chose to watch it in full-screen or embedded on another site, they would run a 30 second commercial. Perhaps as NBC and other networks started to crumble, Google could cherry pick other shows until content was produced entirely for Google. Googles’ huge lead in videos watched would allow them to quickly create the world’s first (and only) webwork (like network, but on the web).
We are not sure any of them could afford the rate Conan is being paid now (certainly not Boxee). However, he could be to the internet (from TV) what Charlie Chaplin was to the movies (from Vaudville).
