CBS Broadcasts on YouTube Popular with Users

After uploading over 300 clips to YouTube since mid-October, CBS's online audiences have rocketed..

by Helen Leggatt

Those 300 clips attracted, on average, 857,000 views per day. That equates to nearly 29.2 million views in November alone. Nearly 22,000 site visitors have subscribed to the CBS channel.

Programs available include "NCIS", "Late Show with David Letterman,” “The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson” and “The Early Show.”

YouTube broadcasts are viewed by millions of people, many of which live outside the U.S., providing CBS with a much wider audience base. The results from airing clips on YouTube could see CBS’s viewer figures soar as users discover programs they may not have previously seen or catch up with missed episodes of their favorite program.

"What’s most exciting here is the extent to which CBS is learning about its audience as never before," said Quincy Smith, President of CBS Interactive. "We believe this inflection point is the precursor to many exciting developments as we continue to build bridges rather than construct walls."

CBS were also testing YouTube’s “content identification architecture”. This new feature enables CBS to find unauthorized clips and allows them to remove them or let them remain available. However, if CBS decide not to remove the unauthorized clips, they will share any ad revenue YouTube receives from ads placed around that clip. Perhaps this will go some way to solving current online copyright problems, as the ad-supported content scenario is familiar territory to TV channels.

CBS’s experience may encourage more TV networks to embrace sites such as YouTube, instead of shunning them.