updatediWidgets, a San Francisco company that offers a way for publishers to distribute content to social networks, has signed a deal allowing CBS to offer its television programming on popular social networks.
It allows CBS' audience to watch full episodes of television programming directly within native applications on popular social networks like Facebook and MySpace, as well as on home pages like iGoogle. [Note: iWidgets has since changed to just running clips and not full episodes, which is rather less interesting.]
CBS becomes the first network to stream their content into social networks. Everyone else, including Hulu, forces a click back to the source site.
iWidgets, in turn, gets paid when people click on the videos and see an ad that shows either before the video starts (preroll) or during video (midroll).
However, the deal is not exclusive to iWidgets, so CBS can distribute content through other widgets on Facebook. But iWidgets, in turn, is allowed to work with other broadcasters. I just talked with founder Peter Yared, and he says five other media companies contacted him after the CBS deal was announced at the DEMO conference in San Diego Tuesday.
Still, the problem here is I don't see any major barriers keeping out other entrants from offering something similar -- and so I'm not sure how robust the business model is here for iWidgets. I'm not sure how much users at social networks actually want to watch video and TV viewing from within their social network.
Presumably, this deal will lead to other forms of interactivity on the clips, such as quizzes, polls and contests -- all of which have proven more effective ways to monetize in social networks so far.
Update: An earlier version of this piece suggested iWidgets is paid when people click on the ads. That's not true. As clarified above, payment happens when a video is clicked on and an ad is viewed.