Internet TV networks fighting it out. Who is top dog?
The recent opening of the Hulu website which is a portal for NBC Universal News Corp. TV sites are fighting it out for the audience for their streaming TV episodes.
The audience for said sites dipped a little in February compared with the previous month according to data from Nielsen Online. The top was filled by AOL Television having 10.5 million unique visitors for the month. Next was Yahoo TV which had 9.6 million and MSN had the largest drop receiving only 6.8 million visitors.
Reed Price the editor in chief for MSN entertainment and video said his website was hindered by the effects of the WGA strike. He said that the recaps, news and photo galleries of popular shows are consistently the biggest draw for MSN TV, which distributes Hulu and CBS content, and because of the strike new episodes of many of these shows were not available in February and therefore the audience dropped.
The Tonight Show With Jay Leno was the top Hulu show on MSN and Jericho was the biggest CBS show streaming on MSN.
Over at AOL TV the streaming of TV full episodes is a new feature. The Time Warner owned site which is the only website portal that offers ABC prime time TV shows in addition to Hulu and CBS content only started streaming on February the 14th and AOL TV and Moviefone publisher Kristin Rolla said ’30 Rock’ and ‘Jericho’ had been the most popular shows up until now.
Although you cannot view full episodes on the website, the section that related to Fox ‘American Idol’ was the most popular area in the month of February, Rolla said. She also said that the bulk of the traffic to the site had come from general TV news.
Karin Gilford, the head of Yahoo entertainment, said the American Idol section was the top draw for her site for February. She also mentioned that CW’s “America’s Next Top Model” and a condensed version of E!’s “The Soup” also were also very popular on the site, which streams Hulu content but not shows from CBS.
The audience viewing figure wars are now getting into full tilt online as well as off.
Chart data provided by Nielsen Online
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