Wow.  Wow in italics.  That’s how the NY Times’ Virginia Heffernan recently described the availability of vintage Warner’s/WB Network content on the recently launched thewb.com.  And we’re talking vintage: ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’, ‘Felicity’, ‘Friends’, ‘MadTV’ – shows many years out of production.  Although a very limited amount of fresh programming is also promised, to the extent the site is primarily about exploiting Warner’s more stale content as fully as possible (and from a quick visit to the site, it sure looks that way), I would disagree with Ms. Heffernan.

Strangely, the article fails to even mention hulu.com, the NBC/Fox joint venture that predates thewb.com by about a year and a half now.  And not only was hulu first on the scene - it’s also more noteworthy for being a joint venture between two broadcast competitors, for offering a wide selection of current broadcast content, and for making several NBC shows available before their fall 2008 premieres.

Add to that the fact that Comedy Central has been making its current content (including ‘The Daily Show’) available online imediately the morning after airing for months now, and it becomes clear that theWB.com is not exactly wow-worthy – on the contrary, the exclusion of current broadcast content and the general age of what is available on the site indicates something of a hedged bet on the part of Warner’s.

In any event, hulu.com would have been the service to write about.

I imagine professionals in any field wince when they see their field covered incompletely or misleadingly in the general media, but Ms. Heffernan’s article misses a more major point: any Flash Player/browser-based video over IP solution (even those offering content from this century) will ultimately be limited by its dependence on the PC – because when it comes to content much longer than the 90-second long tail videos we all snack on from youtube, what’s commonly known as ‘watching TV’ is (and will continue to be) done in front of a coffee table, not a desk.  That’s not to say the paradigm shift to video over IP is not inevitable and already well underway - it is.  But what it’s first going to take is an innovative hardware solution to get that television onto the home network (either a dedicated set-top box or an Ethernet-enabled TV, DVR, or DVD player).  Only then will video over IP services (even the more viable ones such as hulu.com) have the opportunity to really change the game.