As a follow up to our previous post on TV network activity on the Internet and through iTunes, we’ve further explored television programming and how it’s playing out on the web beyond the major networks. I will steer clear of yahoo, google, youtube… all the sites that have been covered extensively on this site. Instead, I want to highlight a few of the less covered services. It’s hard to draw a line between the sites I just mentioned and those I’ll discuss below, as they share many features (and many use Flash as the underlying technology). One difference is the sites above don’t make programming decisions for users. The sites below do offer some form of programming – there are decisions made by someone about what to present on these sites and when to present it. There’s room for both approaches online and while most eyes and venture dollars are flowing to video portals right now, I believe we’ll eventually see a similar interest from the startup community in programming. I’m Too Old For This!!! Not surprisingly, much online programming, like MTV Overdrive, caters to an under-25 crowd, but there’s a selection of good stuff for the rest of us: BloombergTV and MLB.tv, for example, offer relevant content and strong channel-like experiences online. In the youth market, the influence of MTV is unmistakable. ManiaTV, Fuse.tv, MusicplusTV, and CurrentTV, while each certainly different in its own right, believe that some combination of music, reality, edginess, and/or political and social awareness, are the keys to success. ManiaTv So this is what happened to Tom Green? Maybe I’m not too old for this, because I like ManiaTv. Check out Freak Show! There’s enough good stuff to watch on here that I’m actually surprised it doesn’t have a bigger audience, particularly given the explosion in video sites in the last 6 months. I think there’s room for this kind of programming and while the Alexa numbers don’t suggest a flop, it’s certainly not booming. Whether or not their audience is sufficient for profitability, I don’t know. At least they don’t have to worry about huge production costs. CurrentTV Best known as the Al Gore vehicle, Current is for those a bit more politically minded and socially active. There’s a good lineup of original programming, there appears to be pretty strong community participation, and I find it to be a nice usable site, but it → Read More