May 22nd, 2007
Why ABC's time-shifting of Charlie Gibson Webcast is a seminal development
We learn from a report in Broadcasting & Cable magazine that ABC is moving its World News Webcast from 3 p.m. to 12:30 p.m Eastern Time.
Interesting backstory on the move. As B&C’s John Eggerton notes, the Charlie Gibson-anchored newscast was originally launched in January 2006 as a preview of that night’s tv newscast.
But an unanticipated thing happened. World News Webcast devoted a following of its own, with some exclusive content. And with that emergence, came some new metrics.
The move to 12:30, says ABC, is because the Web’s peak traffic is in the early afternoon.
The takeaway? This isn’t just an isolated example. I believe that more and more real-time Webcasts produced by “mainstream media” will be time-shifted to maximize metrics best practices for Web audiences.
Hey, look. Tv programmers have been using this principle for 60 years- testing, probing and shifting televisino programs to th right time slot. ABC doing this with the Gibson Webcast is a harbinger of similar practices for online media.
Full disclosure: I write occasionally for Broadcasting & Cable magazine.
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
