Local TV Gets Social

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece (sub. required) about how local TV stations are launching a “blitz” of Internet initiatives to strengthen their audience share. I’m glad the Journal picked up this story, because I think we’re going to see a lot of long-overdue creative activity going on in this area over the next year. While most local TV sites have streaming video and text commentary, they’ll increasingly find that capturing and retaining an online audience takes a full range of community-building functionality.

Two KickApps affiliates come to mind here: WUAB and WOIO, both local TV stations in Cleveland. (No coincidence, it turns out. They’re run by the same team.) My43.net uses our platform as the basis for a youth-oriented community site—kind of a hip, hyper-local MySpace. 19 Action News uses KickApps to drive rich-media discussions around programmed content and citizen journalism. Both sites represent different, equally progressive takes on what we’re starting to see in the industry, and both have reported strong results with the platform. Exciting times.