PBS Starting To Make Big Moves in Video

There have been two recent news items about PBS making strong moves in video distribution of great interest.

The most recent was an announcement that they would be distributing content, such as episodes of NOVA, Wired Science, and other programming through Hulu, a company created to stream video, mainly TV and movie, content. Read more at NY Times technology blog.

The other piece of news was that PBS has recently signed up with thePlatform, a media management company that is a subsidiary of Comcast. By adopting a central video management and distribution platform PBS will manage the broadband video back end for both the main PBS portal and distribute video to station sites, help stations publish local content on their own sites and let stations share videos with other stations’ sites. Read more at Current.org.

Two major moves in the matter of a few weeks? This is an interesting set of aggressive moves that somewhat seem at cross purposes. On one hand they are making a major investment into a media platform for aggregating content across their national and affiliate sites, and then a new push to syndicate content onto a separate channel. And Comcast and the News Corporation to boot.

I am looking forward to watching these developments.