Bulk breaking Long Form Media

One of the big shifts in value in the music world was when Napster, and almost all Web services that followed, broke the music "bulk package" - the album - into its parts (songs) and distributed them separately, letting them find their own value. Work we have done in the Future of Online Video implies that a similar practuce has to occur for it to take off (and to an extent it has, via YouTube but search and legality are both dubious) and be usable. The question is, who will do it andhow will it be paid for?

Thus this post from the NYT about Discovery Chanenls re-purposing of its media into clips is interesting:

Discovery owns the global rights to the content it broadcasts. Because the company owns 13 networks in the United States, including TLC, Animal Planet and the Science Channel, it has untold thousands of hours of footage. And because many of its TV episodes are timeless, the clips can still be relevant to Internet users years after their original broadcast.

“Cheetahs are still killing gazelles the same way they did 3,000 years ago,” Doug Craig, the senior vice president for digital media production, said, “and on top of that, we don’t have to pay residuals.”

To that end, Discovery has added six temporary employees to “maximize the library,” Mr. Craig said. They are repackaging old shows into short clips for the how-to Web site HowStuffWorks, a recent acquisition by Discovery, and Discovery’s other platforms.

Two important points here - timeless content retains its value over a longer sales cycle, and it is emerging that "inform" and "educate" are key usages of online short form media, as opposed to the TV mantra of "entertain". Also, Clips and Ads go together even in tough times:

While the online advertising market has slowed considerably because of the weak economy, the executive vice president for digital media at Discovery, Josh Freeman, said advertisers’ demand for video remained robust. Asked whether the ads were lagging behind the content creation, he responded: “In video? Not a chance.”

Next steps are better metadata and search, and we would postulate the emergence of trusted New Media channels to watch (and take Ads) rather than the cr*pshoot that is YouTube in its current format.