Turner Broadcasting (TWX) will offer its CNN news channel, Turner Classic Movies, Adult Swim and Nuts TV on YouTube, starting this month.
Turner has also inked a deal with Joost to offer content from CNN International and Adult Swim for the European market.
The company will upload video content to YouTube on a weekly basis for free viewing.
This is an interesting situation because Turner, especially its CNN unit, has been getting clobbered on TV. It barely registers against chief competitor Fox News (NWS-A). About a week ago they only averaged 80,000 viewers per hourly program on the channel. That's an unbelievably small amount.
Why I say it's interesting, is the Internet, which the entertainment industry has been so wary of, could end up being the difference between failure and success with some of these TV networks and channels, as shown in this situation.
Of course new distribution deals and strategies don't work if nobody wants to watch the content you have in the first place. It's not all technologically related, but quality related as well.
For CNN, this could give them a longer life span and larger audience, but if they don't change their content, they'll just remain an irrelevant network spread across the airwaves and Internet which nobody cares to watch.
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