The major U.S. television networks plan to test pilots for series for the upcoming TV season on the Internet, according to an industry insider.
Harry Gruber, president and CEO of InterVU, said his company is talking with "all the networks" about testing TV pilots online by next year's spring pilot season.
InterVU, which is part-owned by NBC, is a "full-service Internet video solution" provider to a variety of TV networks and other clients, including NBC and CNN, Gruber said.
Testing popularity
What InterVU has in mind, Gruber said, is to create a method for testing the popularity of TV pilots via the Internet. The company would create a test site that would allow viewers to download a half-hour pilot and then register their opinions.
The Internet could be a much cheaper way to test the popularity of TV shows than the current broadcast method. But not everyone believes that the Internet would be an appropriate way to test TV show popularity.
Bob Pittman, president of AOL, is wary of the concept.
"Nobody wants to watch TV on their PCs. Shoot me if I'm wrong," said Pittman, a former CEO of MTV and head of a TV production company, Quantum.
But Gruber disagreed -- arguing that video quality has reached an acceptable level in a "56K world." He said InterVU, which provided the video feed of John Glenn's recent space flight to MSNBC on the Internet and CNN, among others, recorded 50 million individual attempts to access its feeds. In September, InterVU delivered more than 500,000 video streams of President Bill Clinton's Grand Jury video testimony to CNN Interactive.
Some TV pilots are pre-tested in much smaller samples than InterVU is capable of delivering, Gruber said, although those samples are generally pre-screened carefully to fit a particular demographic.
Volatile stock price
InterVU has been a fairly volatile stock recently, partly on rumors that such major industry powerhouses as Microsoft and Amazon.com might invest. Gruber said that a Microsoft investment is "possible" -- adding that "there was an Amazon rumor, but no, we're not doing anything with Amazon."
InterVU works closely with Microsoft and its NetShow product, but also encodes its feeds in all major digital multimedia formats, including AVI, InstaVU, JPEG, MPEG, QuickTime, RealAudio and RealVideo. Gruber said his company has a very good relationship with Microsoft, based partly on the fact that, unlike Real Networks, it isn't competing with the software giant and is platform independent. "Real Networks and Microsoft were always on a collision course," he said.
