Microsoft Unveils Web Series Slate
Microsoft unveiled an ambitious slate of original programming created for its multiple Web platforms, including the MSN portal, MSNBC.com and Xbox Live — Microsoft sent a direct message to the ad buying community on Thursday—everyone's software company is a hit-making digital media leader.
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2008 slate announcement is an early chapter in Microsoft's long-running bid to be treated as a media company rather than just a software vendor — a question Business Week had already posed months earlier in Microsoft as Media King?. It followed a string of content-adjacent moves, including the Skinkers live-streaming venture and the roughly $500 million Viacom ad-and-content pact, and it foreshadowed the Xbox original programming push that finally materialized when Microsoft committed to launching its first Xbox original shows in early 2014.
First-order effects
- Advertisers get a new, scaled digital video inventory across MSN, MSNBC.com and Xbox Live, as Microsoft explicitly courts the ad-buying community with original programming rather than syndicated content.
- MSN, MSNBC.com and Xbox Live shift from pure distribution platforms into commissioning outlets, giving Microsoft direct editorial control over branded entertainment on its own properties.
Second-order effects
- Yahoo, AOL and other portal-era rivals face pressure to fund their own original web series to keep ad dollars from migrating to Microsoft's packaged slate.
- Studios and production companies gain a new class of non-traditional buyer for made-for-web content, beginning to reprice digital originals away from cheap filler toward premium ad-supported formats.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform owners stop renting content and start owning it — a structural blurring of the software company / media company line that culminates years later in console makers commissioning television directly.
- Original programming becomes a strategic lever for ad platforms generally, pushing the industry toward vertically integrated content-plus-distribution models that regulators and traditional broadcasters would eventually have to reckon with.
The trend: This is an early data point in the decade-plus arc of technology platforms becoming original-content producers, from MSN web series to Xbox TV shows to today's streaming wars.