Streaming on Yahoo, it's 'SNL'

When they were performing on "Saturday Night Live" three decades ago, Al Franken, Bill Murray and Eddie Murphy surely didn't expect they would ever be streamed on computers and phones. In fact, they probably would have made fun of the idea.

But it is reality now, as the owner of the "SNL" archive, Broadway Video, tries to wring a profit out of the old episodes. On Wednesday, Yahoo announced that it had acquired the exclusive rights to classic clips from 1975 through 2012, effective in September. The clips will be removed from Hulu and NBC.com, where they currently reside, and be shown instead on Yahoo.

The deal between Broadway Video and Yahoo highlights the jockeying among companies that want to have a library of online videos to call their own. A dizzying number of online video producers are pitching their programs to advertisers this month, ahead of the traditional television upfront sessions in May.

While the quantity and quality of these Web programs is increasing quickly, there are doubts about whether the advertising dollars are.

"On one hand, digital video advertising is growing fast and its prominence is increasing," said Clark Fredricksen of the research firm eMarketer. "On the other, compared to television, online video is an incredibly competitive market, where you have more companies fighting over far less."

Fredricksen's company estimates that $4.1 billion will be spent on online video ads this year, in contrast to $66.4 billion on television ads.

"There are a handful of major conglomerates who split revenues from the huge TV-ad pie," Fredricksen said, "while the digital video world features hundreds of companies fighting, comparatively, for scraps from the TV table."

Attaching, barnaclelike, to television might be a way to stand out from the crowd. Yahoo, which is attempting a turnaround under its chief executive Marissa Mayer, has content-sharing relationships with many major media companies, but its video hub, Yahoo Screen, has lagged well behind rivals like Google, which owns YouTube.

Erin McPherson, a Yahoo vice president who oversees the company's video business, said the company jumped at the "SNL" opportunity. She said the "SNL" clips would be "widely distributed" across Yahoo, suggesting a strategy that will go beyond the current Yahoo Screen site.

"Rather than competing with Hulu, Netflix or any other platform, we see this as a step toward adding scale and breadth to the great content we are already offering users," McPherson said.

Yahoo and Broadway Video declined to comment on terms but people with knowledge of the arrangement said access to the "SNL" library had cost upward of $10 million a year in the past.

Hulu, the online video website owned by Comcast, News Corp. and the Walt Disney Co., enjoyed an immediate bump in traffic when it started to stream old episodes of the series in 2009. These days, however, Hulu - which its owners are considering selling - is concentrating more on its own original series. It will promote those series at an event for advertisers next week.

Under the deal announced Wednesday, Hulu will still stream clips and full episodes from the current television season. Yahoo will be able to do that, too. But Yahoo will have the old "SNL" clips all to itself, giving it something special to show off - although only for one year. The deal will be up for renegotiation at that point.

Jack Sullivan, chief executive of Broadway Video, said the deal lets "SNL" increase its distribution internationally, since the clips of classic episodes have generally only been accessible in North America in the past.

For a company like Yahoo, "having TV-like offerings is really important," said Mike Vorhaus, president of the digital media consulting firm Magid Advisors. That is because online video ads have partly taken the place of Web display ads, sometimes called banner ads, in advertisers' budgets; as Vorhaus put it, "You can only take so much banner money away before there's no banner money left at all."

"Now they kind of have to pursue TV money," he added.

Along the way they are becoming more like TV. Earlier this year, a sendup of dating reality shows created by Yahoo, "Burning Love," was deemed worthy of running on the cable channel E! as well. Sony, another company that will be presenting to advertisers next week, was recognized for treating Jerry Seinfeld's experimental Web series "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee" like a TV series when it ordered a 24-episode second season.

And Netflix, the ad-free streaming service that so many other companies want to resemble, was praised for commissioning "House of Cards," the Washington thriller that could have fit right in on HBO or AMC.

On Wednesday night, Netflix released a long-term vision statement for investors that summed up why it and so many of its competitors are optimistic about their chances: "While Internet TV is only a very small percent of video viewing today, we think it will grow every year," it said, citing faster Internet speeds, sales of Internet-connected TV sets, improvements to TV apps and the possibilities for personalized online video ads.

The competition for Internet TV viewing, it concluded, "is just beginning."

© 2013, The New York Times News Service