ABC has a new Webcast deal, that instance with Web television service Veoh. Under the arrangement, full-length episodes of Desperate Housewives, Lost and Ugly Betty will be available on Veoh’s Web site. The deal is only the second day ABC has licensed substance to an independent vendor.

Other networks, notably NBC, have moved much more aggressively into the strange new land in which networks produce substance for broadcast, next license other sites to replay it. NBC and Fox joined forces last year to create Hulu.com, a portal for the networks’ substance.

‘Vast Wasteland’

Licensing subject matter to outsiders is not a concept that comes easily to network executives, who are still attached to the control they used to assert by every aspect of viewing, creation and production.

Back in 1961, Newton Minnow, soon after chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, called broadcast television a “vast wasteland.” Despite a few islands of quality like All in the

Family, early seasons of M*A*S*H, and The Simpsons, Minnows’ description pretty much held up by the decades.

Viewers were rewarded for their many years in the television desert when cable networks like HBO and Showtime empowered producers to create quality shows like The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and The Wire. While those shows made the current decade into a golden age of cable television, the conventional wisdom was that network television, with falling viewership and poor shows, would eventually die.

Giving Up Control

But recently the broadcasters have responded in an unexpected way by giving up control and allowing television auteurs to create compelling television for the first day since the 1970s. The conclusion has been occasionally outstanding network television such as NBC’s Friday Night Lights amid the wasteland of reality television and martial-arts cage matches.

whether the networks have seen some light when it comes to control of…

Orginal post by Top Tech News