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AOL to Webcast Classic TV Shows

Posted on: Monday, 14 November 2005, 06:00 CST

By Jefferson Graham

LOS ANGELES -- America Online is bringing classic TV to the Internet.

AOL today announces a joint venture with corporate partner Warner Bros. to webcast 300 episodes a month of 100 classic TV series, beginning in January.

The shows include blasts from the past such as Growing Pains, F Troop, Babylon V and Welcome Back, Kotter. They will be shown free, on demand, with four 15-second commercials per episode on AOL.com in the USA.

With the new In2TV feature, AOL and Warner Bros. are seeking to find a home for shows that have ended syndication and cable runs.

"We have the ability to take this inventory and make a new distribution model," says Eric Frankel, president of Warner Bros. Domestic Cable Distribution.

AOL will offer six "channels" of shows -- including drama, comedy and cartoons, with at least 10 episodes of each show.

The shows are streamed and can't be downloaded to a computer hard drive. AOL will package each episode into several segments, and include games and trivia contests.

Entertainment companies have begun embracing webvideo as a viable medium. Apple recently began offering reruns of hit ABC TV shows at its iTunes Music Store for $1.99 a pop and quickly sold more than 1million downloads.

When AOL merged with Time Warner in 2000, executives touted the potential synergies between Warner's entertainment properties and the growing Internet audience. Beyond making Time Inc. magazines available online to AOL subscribers, little synergy has been seen until now.

AOL this year put most of its content on the Web for free to appeal to the booming online advertising market. Now, Time Warner is entertaining offers from Microsoft and Google to buy a portion of the newly desirable AOL.

A focus on video, primarily at AOL's popular music section, has been a catalyst to the comeback, says Kevin Conroy, executive vice president of AOL Media Networks.

Todd Chanko, an analyst with market tracker Jupiter Research says the odds of AOL and Warner Bros. attracting TV-size audiences online is remote. "But they should generate sufficient numbers for advertisers," he says. "Everyone will be watching to see how it does."

AOL and Warner Bros. wouldn't discuss terms, but they're sharing ad revenue, and AOL is paying an undisclosed license fee to run the shows. The online advertising market is expected to grow from a projected $14.7billion this year to $26billion by 2010, says market tracker Forrester Research.

(c) Copyright 2005 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.

Source: USA TODAY

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