CBS Acquires TV Guide For Online Video Clicker, Jim Lanzone Named President Of CBS Interactive
CBS has acquired Clicker, a TV Guide for internet programming, according to a release just issued by the companies. Clicker's CEO Jim Lanzone has been named President of CBS Interactive.
Context & Ripple Effects
CBS has been assembling its web operation through small acquisitions for years — buying the Wallstrip video blog in 2007 and building the EyeLab clip studio to court web audiences — but those were content plays. The Clicker deal is different in kind: CBS is buying a programming guide for internet video, and more importantly installing Clicker founder Jim Lanzone as President of CBS Interactive, handing the network's entire digital portfolio to a search-and-discovery operator.
The timing matters because the networks have spent the past year fighting over who controls web-video distribution — CBS and its broadcast peers pulled their programming from Google TV in October 2010 over exactly that question, and a leaked 2009 email from then-CBS Interactive head Quincy Smith showed the company plotting responses to what it called 'reckless' Hulu streams. Buying the guide layer is the next move in that fight.
First-order effects
- Jim Lanzone jumps from startup CEO to President of CBS Interactive, putting a technologist with a discovery-product background in charge of the network's web properties, including TV.com.
- Clicker's catalog of indexed internet programming becomes a CBS asset, giving the network its own structured guide to web video rather than depending on third-party guides.
Second-order effects
- With broadcasters having blocked their shows from Google TV to keep control of distribution, a network-owned guide positions CBS to shape how viewers find web programming on surfaces CBS controls rather than ones owned by hardware and platform makers.
- TV.com now has a sibling discovery product under the same president, tightening CBS's answer to Hulu at the guide-and-metadata level rather than only at the player level.
Third-order effects
- If networks keep acquiring discovery and metadata assets, the industry structure shifts from 'licensing content into other people's interfaces' toward broadcasters owning the interface layer itself — an early structural step toward the direct-to-consumer control they have been negotiating for since the Google TV standoff.
- The deal also hardens the acqui-hire pattern in media: large broadcasters buying young web startups chiefly to install their founders in senior digital leadership, as CBS did with Lanzone.
The trend: Broadcast networks are moving from licensing their shows into other companies' web platforms to buying the discovery and guide layer of internet TV outright.