‘Be indexed or be forgotten’ seems to have been part of the message delivered by Terry Semel at the UK’s Royal Television Society 2005 convention.
At the RTS convention, an exclusive media event held in Cambridge, Mr. Semel advised executives to crack open the archives, dust off the old programs, and let them be indexed properly by Yahoo’s video search crawler, according to Reuters UK.
“Video search is a way to monetize some of the stuff that’s lounging around in warehouses and hasn’t made a dime for years,” he said at the conference. The BBC has begun to make some content available online, but no one in Britain yet has made a great quantity of content open to indexing by any of the search engines.
The BBC situation differs from that of other broadcasters in that it is funded with public money. Private broadcasters in the UK, and in the US, have shown a preference to keep content locked away rather than potentially share in an alternate revenue stream with an Internet presence like Yahoo.
While Yahoo has worked with TV networks like the WB to promote shows, Mr. Semel said to attendees Yahoo has no desire to become a TV network: “I don’t think that Yahoo or any other Internet company should try to become a television network. We will be nowhere if we have to create our own content.”
The first episode of the WB horror series Supernatural was broadcast on Yahoo for a week before its broadcast debut. And later in September, Yahoo will indeed help create content when it launches “Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone” as it sponsors and posts his war zone reporting from various global conflicts for a year.
David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
