ABC Joins Rush To the New World of Internet Videos

ABC has a new Webcast deal, this time with Internet television service Veoh. Under the arrangement, full-length episodes of Desperate Housewives, Lost and Ugly Betty will be available on Veoh's Web site. The deal is only the second time ABC has licensed content to an independent vendor.

Other networks, notably NBC, have moved much more aggressively into the strange new land in which networks produce content for broadcast, then license other sites to replay it. NBC and Fox joined forces last year to create Hulu.com, a portal for the networks' content.

'Vast Wasteland'

Licensing content to outsiders is not a concept that comes easily to network executives, who are still attached to the control they used to assert over every aspect of viewing, creation and production.

Back in 1961, Newton Minnow, then chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, called broadcast television a "vast wasteland." Despite a few islands of quality like All in the Family, early seasons of M*A*S*H, and The Simpsons, Minnows' description pretty much held up over the decades.

Viewers were rewarded for their many years in the television desert when cable networks like HBO and Showtime empowered producers to create quality shows like The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and The Wire. While those shows made the current decade into a golden age of cable television, the conventional wisdom was that network television, with falling viewership and poor shows, would eventually die.

Giving Up Control

But recently the broadcasters have responded in an unexpected way by giving up control and allowing television auteurs to create compelling television for the first time since the 1970s. The result has been occasionally outstanding network television such as NBC's Friday Night Lights amid the wasteland of reality television and martial-arts cage matches.

If the networks have seen some light when it comes to control of...