CBS sitcoms get the Yahoo streaming video treatment for a week, while NBC posted a free video clip from “Saturday Night Live” to iTunes.
Yahoo provided a video stream of the debut episode of WB’s “Supernatural” in September. Now two CBS shows, “Two and a Half Men” and “How I Met Your Mother,” can be viewed at Yahoo’s website.
Dubbed the “CBS Comedy Bowl,” the promotion makes two encore episodes of each show available for a week, ending on January 2, 2006. CBS advertises it on Yahoo as “a time-out from the big games.”
NBC placed a skit called “Lazy Sunday” from “Saturday Night Live” on iTunes recently. Included in the skit, where Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg wander New York and rap about movies and cupcakes, is a bit about which online mapping service is best.
The SNL skit followed another piece NBC made available on iTunes, a behind-the-scenes look at “Battlestar Galactica”. That program is also free, as NBC begins to place more video on iTunes now that, like ABC, it has partnered with Apple to do so.
All of this effort demonstrates the recognition by the major networks that their viewers have moved ever-increasing portions of their media viewing time online. CBS has been actively pushing a “broadband-first” focus to its news programming at CBSNews.com, but hasn’t been linked to iTunes yet.
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David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
