NBC Universal has done a deal with Clearspring to allow users to select, personalize and post widgets on their blogs spanning content from NBC Nightly News, Dateline, Meet the Press, NBC Sports, iVillage and DotComedy. “It signifies a major shift for big media,” says Clearspring founder Hooman Radfar on his own blog. “They are officially moving away from a destination model and embracing the new model in web distribution – syndication.” You can see an example of one of Clearspring’s widget’s with the NBA here, and the press release follows below…
PRESS RELEASE — NEW YORK and WASHINGTON, June 6 — NBC
Universal today announced that it will enable viral distribution of its
popular content online by transforming content associated with news,
entertainment and sports programming into easily portable widgets, using
the industry leading content syndication and distribution platform from
Clearspring Technologies. Users will be able to personalize these widgets
and post them on their own blogs, social networking profiles, web sites,
wikis and personal start pages, allowing deeper engagement for fans of NBCU
content.
Initial launch widgets include popular content from “Dateline,”
“Hardball with Chris Matthews,” “Meet the Press” and “NBC Nightly News with
Brian Williams,” as well as content from NBC Sports, DotComedy.com and
iVillage.com. Available content will continue to expand, along with
increased personalization options and enhanced features.
“We want to create a fun, shared experience for our users and
understand their needs as they interact with our content beyond our online
properties.” said Sab Kanaujia, Vice President, Digital Product Strategy &
Development, NBC Universal. “Changes in the behavior of online users and
innovation in technology has provided us with new opportunities to grow the
reach for our content and brands online. Clearspring’s content syndication
and distribution platform provides us a robust distribution and analytics
solution for our widgets initiative.”
“We are delighted to have been chosen to deliver this start-to-finish
solution for NBC Universal,” said Chris Marentis, CEO of Clearspring. “By
using our premium hyper-syndication platform, fans of NBCU’s programming
can now easily personalize their favorite Web sites with NBCU content. This
allows NBCU to lead the shift to the new distributed web and deliver their
premium content whenever and wherever consumers chose to enjoy it.”