Report: NBC to take over O&O sites

isn’t the web a wonderful place?

there’s been a whole raft of stuff happening over the last few weeks, you can get it all online if you know where to look (and keep digging).

there’s almost no need for costly press releases anymore.

Didn’t we establish a few months ago that NBC is leaving IBS or am I missing something?

But NBC’s O&O sites suck…

That’s too bad for IB, but I wonder if they’ll take the opportunity to revamp the sites that still have their old designs from years ago, such as wftv.com and the rest of the sites for the Cox-owned stations (as well as channel3000.com, channel4000.com, and, rather inexplicably, WEWS).

A couple of caveats. I used to work at IB and early in my tenure there, I was the managine editor of one of their O&O sites. That having been said, I don’t really know what’s going on from the IB perspective (and wouldn’t share it if I did).

But this move is probably the least surprising story of the week. NBC has long wanted more control of their digital assets, but have waited until they felt more comfortable with the tech and organizational challenges.

It makes a lot of sense in one way. Having as much control as possible over all your digital assets gives you many more chances for cross-promotion, integrated sales opportunities and other cost-sharing ideas. My hunch is that this move is driven as much by the advertising needs as anything else. NBC can roll all this inventory into a larger NBCU ad network, which seems to be the way most larger companies are moving.

But the challenge for NBC’s digital division is that many people at NBCU still think primarily in TV-centric terms. It’s not as bad there as it was during the old TVSD days, but it would certainly be an issue. One advantage to having an independent partner is that someone is there to say ‘maybe this isn’t such a great idea.’

@Dude: Quite the contrary. I prefer when a company takes control of its own businesses. I don’t hate this at all. NBC could structure this so that its stations *do* have autonomy, even if they are given a common platform from which to work. It’s all in how they decide to run things – whether every decision must be run through a corporate entity or whether the stations will have freedom to experiment. Moving the operation in-house could be an excellent first step.

Centralization accomplishes 1 thing:
Bureaucracy

You can’t be locally relevant from a centralized location miles away. You also can’t be locally responsible.

Why aren’t TV stations & newspapers ran from an ivory tower hundreds of miles away?

And the argument about cost savings is a joke. You can hire 2:1 on the local level for every inflated salary, useless corporate bureaucrat working in a vacuum building ‘one size fits all’ websites with no local level experience.

second

Folks, IB has its issues (mainly due to an influx of AOL refugees) but the ugliness of the NBC sites is solely due to the previous TVSD regime. IB is a vendor. It did whatever its biggest customer told it to do. The real question is whether NBC will now proceed to lose millions of dollars on its websites. Its ability to accomplish that feat is what sent the Peacock stations into IB’s arms seven years ago.

Sorry for going old-school, but it continues to amaze me how often themes of sales/ad revenue/technical gadgetry dominate the comments here. Not that they’re wrong at all, but one time I’d love it if Big Media Company XYZ made a big-dollar decision that derived at least in one small part from its desire to write good stories.