TVSquad

(Part 3 of 5) In our review of the top television stories of 2005 former TV Squad scribe Ryan J. Budke said this about TV on the Internet, "If you think that 2005 was big, wait 'til 2006 -- you ain't seen nothing yet." Boy howdy, was he correct! If 2005 was the year that TV came to the Internet, then 2006 was the year that it bought a home, settled in, and joined the local PTA. From pilots and first-run episodes to classic and canceled shows, television and the World Wide Web took one step closer to being officially married in 2006. And, we have one site on the Internet to thank for this explosion . . .

YouTube.

Okay, maybe YouTube isn't the only site we should be thanking. I mean, according to Ryan, the networks realized back in 2005 that this newfangled technology called the Internet wasn't going away any time soon, so they began to utilize it. However, it was the utterly huge popularity of YouTube that pushed the networks into getting their collective acts together to get their content onto the Web.

Not only was YouTube popular, but it was highly influential as well. Here are some examples:

• The Saturday Night Live digital short "Lazy Sunday" was viewed extensively on YouTube before NBC clamped down on their appearances and began airing them on their own website. By the time "Dick in a Box" came out a year later NBC realized the power of YouTube and struck a deal with YouTube to have its own channel. The uncensored version of the digital short appeared on YouTube's NBC channel as well as the network's own site.
• It was, and still is, the home for videos from the cast of Nobody's Watching, a pilot that was rejected by the networks but has since been picked up by NBC for a potential future series (which will probably air on the Internet) due to its broadband popularlity.
• It aired an early preview and the full pilot of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip before it was ever shown on television.
• Steven Colbert of Comedy Central's The Colbert Report maximized YouTube with his "Green Screen Challenge".

This emergence of YouTube as a huge power on the Internet was not ignored. There were several rumors of it being purchased by CBS or Yahoo. Eventually, YouTube was purchased by another Internet powerhouse, Google, for the paltry sum of $1.65 billion in stocks. Not bad for a company that was started in February of 2005.

With the huge YouTube gorilla breathing down their necks the networks had to do something to get people to visit their sites as well. So they began to air not only show clips on their websites, but full episodes as well. And not only episodes of shows that were currently on their schedules, but ones that were canceled. Shows like NBC's Kidnapped, CBS's 3lbs, and ABC's Day Break, which were removed from on-air broadcast, appeared on the Internet (although, at this time, Day Break still hasn't shown up at ABC's website).

The networks also experimented with Internet-only episodes, known as webisodes, of some of their more popular shows. For example, this past summer NBC aired a series of webisodes for The Office. The SciFi channel aired a series of Battlestar Galactica webisodes prior to the third season premiere. There were plans to air a series of The Shield webisodes as well, but it is unknown as to when this is going to occur.

The networks weren't the only ones to get into streaming TV shows online. In fact, Adam Finley wrote a post about all of the online locations where you could view television programs (which is updated regularly). The major supplier of downloadable programs was iTunes. Over the course of 2006 a number of networks and studios made agreements to add their content to the iTunes website. By allowing their programs to be downloaded (for a fee) many networks saw a bump in their ratings for their most popular shows.

So, the question is this: will 2007 be the year that TV and the Internet truly combine into one entity? Probably not. While more of us have broadband Internet access and portable devices like iPods, there are still plenty of people out there that still believe TV is TV and a computer is a computer. That doesn't mean that the industry won't stop the trend of further TV-Internet integration. In fact, Adam Finley (he's so prolific) mentions in a recent post that the goal this year is for "whole home media distribution" . . . whatever that means. How that will affect you, the honest and beautiful TV Squad reader, is unknown. What I do know is that there's a good chance we'll be mentioning TV on the Internet again in our "Top TV Stories of 2007".