National Geographic Channel Beefs Up Broadband

Five New ‘Channels’ to Compete with Discovery

By Anne Becker -- Broadcasting & Cable, 2/2/2008 12:00:00 PM

In a bid to grow Web traffic through better organization, National Geographic Channel is launching a broadband-video Web site with six subdivisions by genre.

The ad-supported site is launching with 1,500 clips grouped into "Animals & Nature," "Exploration & Adventure," "History & Events," "People & Places," "Science & Technology" and “Nat Geo Wild.”

The channel previously grouped its online video by show but found that traffic on NGC Wild -- a separate site devoted to wildlife -- outdrew that of the show-grouped video on its main site by about 3-1.

"What we really saw was users were looking for an easier way to navigate the clips we had," NGC vice president of research and digital media Brad Dancer said, adding that the NGC Wild site will now also be a channel.

While nearly all of the videos in each category will come from the network’s shows -- either straight excerpts or extra content -- there will be some additional footage from the National Geographic Society, which co-owns the channel with Fox Cable Networks. And while most of the video will be clips, each channel will feature a new longer video -- from 15 minutes to one hour -- each week. The site will also begin letting users post clips to their own sites or share them via e-mail.

NGC -- which plans to add four new video channels to its Web site each year -- is changing its Web approach in the face of competition from the similarly themed Discovery Communications networks and The History Channel. Both have invested in online improvements in the past year as all networks try to figure out how to best exploit their video online.

NGC’s main site averages about 1 million unique visitors per month, while Discovery Channel’s drew more than triple that last year, Omniture said. Combined, the Discovery channels’ sites average more than 12 million uniques a month.