The New York Times' Saul Hansell has an interesting piece on Fox News' "Strategy Room" streaming show, and about the larger issue of web streaming in the news biz.
Streaming video is sort of the not-ready-for-prime-time of The Cable Game. As Hansell puts it in his whimsical lede:
So a television producer walks into a bar. He hears a singer crooning. Before long, the producer books the singer to talk about the mortgage market on his daytime talk show.
Maybe that’s not exactly the way things go for most bar jokes or for most talk shows. But it is standard operating procedure for Mike Straka, the producer of “The Strategy Room,” a discussion show that runs eight hours every weekday, streamed from FoxNews.com.
And thus one night at A. J. Maxwell’s, a steakhouse in Midtown Manhattan, Mr. Straka invited the lounge singer Tony D’Ville on the show. Mr. D’Ville sang a Sinatra tune and then discussed the mortgage crisis.
Streaming can be anything, from a motley crew of different guests, gathered around, Charlie Rose-style, to a deep discussion of one topic for a prolonged period. The point is, so long as web streaming is kept cheap--and the Fox effort is compared to "Wayne's World"--then a wide variety of experimentation is possible.
But streaming is no sure thing. The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, scooping the world on the retirement of ABC's Sam Donaldson, quotes Donaldson as saying jokey-ruefully about his streaming effort that he was "talking to an audience of dozens."
In other words, in cyberspace, it's easy for a streaming show to get lost. The way to make it succeed is branding, positioning, all the other components of marketing and presentation. That's not where streaming is now, but that's where it will end up.
