Can AOL Video Make User-Generated Content Viable?

"If you look at the duplication numbers that you would see between the top video sites," McIntyre noted, "what you see are, people are moving around those sites in kind of a low-friction way. So if you do the best job, if you take as much friction out of the equation as possible, and you do the best job of making whatever you present to the end user relevant, then you're going to grow your audience, you're going to grow your engagement, and you're going to be more successful, and that's really the bread-and-butter of what we are. [What we're] most focused on right now, is how we can make this experience very, very frictionless for users, really make it work in the most simple and elegant and don't-even-have-to-think-about-it sort of way."

The underlying search engine - what McIntyre described as "the DNA of AOL Video" - will help provide this frictionless gateway. The hope, now that the viewer has entered the front door, is to entice her with something more, particularly in response to a query. And that query won't just lead the viewer to new material, hopefully from Segment One of the industry, but will also give AOL Video a new iota of information about what one part of its broadening audience is interested in.

This is the plan, at least for now. It's a bit of virtual Rube Goldberg machine, but here is how it works: A Bravia viewer has a remote control. Somehow, in changing channels, he's found what I call "possums chasing squirrels." And somehow, by way of an important message or an on-screen enticement, the viewer is enticed to search for something else. Ads can attach themselves contextually to that "something else," and AOL Video makes a sum from them. Then more ads are already attached, both pre-roll and inserts, into the programming they eventually discover.

I wanted an explanation, and I got one. But what AOL Video may yet have to consider is the following: The 38 million unique visitors per month McIntyre cited are nearly all refugees from commercial television. As a consistent provider of entertainment, commercial TV, while not exactly failing, is succeeding far less than ever before. And the service which AOL Video sees as the grand payoff, the jackpot, is based largely on what's provided by its content partners: commercial television.

"We work with Warner Bros. with In2TV, as an example," McIntyre mentioned. "We also work with Sony, and we've got lots of their classic television programming - 'Starsky & Hutch,' 'NewsRadio,' 'Charlie's Angels,' a whole bunch of stuff from Sony - we've got pay-to-download stuff from NBC and A&E and MTV Networks, and we've got over 25 networks we've been working with today."

With all the audience dynamics and behavioral analysis this system will entail, it may not yet confirm the answer to the big question which, to some, seems obvious: Why, in the midst of the greatest push toward high-definition, long-form, six-channel audio, fully orchestrated, quasi-interactive programming ever developed, tens of millions of individuals are flocking en masse, to watch the lowest definition form of video ever conceived - some of it good, some of it not? A frictionless return path to commercial video may not be enough to bring back what commercial broadcasters are now experiencing as an expedited exit.