That was fast. After just five days on YouTube, Easy to Assemble has been picked up by CBS in a deal that will have new episodes of the show running exclusively on TV.com for a week after each release, starting Monday the 29th. The IKEA-backed show created by and starring Illeana Douglas racked up over 300,000 views since its debut Monday. This will mark TV.com’s first foray into original scripted content.
Downside to this, the TV.com player doesn’t allow for embedding the videos. That means for one week the only place to view it is at the site itself, which of course is probably why they signed the deal in the first place. CBS picked up the TV.com property as part of its recent $1.8B acquisition of CNET back in May. Speculation arose over how it planned to integrate the easy-to-remember-domain into its web TV strategy. Looks like we are now getting a glimpse of their plan.
The question is whether CBS will start pushing its original content out through the site or stick to snatch-and-grab route taken by sites ike MySpaceTV. My guess, we may start seeing some web originals coming from CBS as it warms to the idea of launching content on the web. Les Moonves, CEO of CBS, emphasized CBS’s new initiative of creating original web content at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Mixx Conference saying “the future of internet content is as a lab for the network”. [Thanks to Maria Russo at the LA Times for first picking up this story.]
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