CBS has cut a deal with Yahoo! to syndicate local news from 16 of its owned and operated stations on the Internet portal. Under the deal, the first between a network-owned station group and an Internet news provider, the two will share revenue from ads sold against the local content.
Yahoo! News, Yahoo!'s news area, will offer 10-20 CBS local news clips daily from markets including New York; Los Angeles; Chicago; Philadelphia; San Francisco; Boston; Dallas; Minneapolis; Miami; Denver; Sacramento, Calif.; Pittsburgh; Baltimore; Salt Lake City; Austin, Texas; and Green Bay, Wis. Yahoo! News will be the exclusive internet aggregator for CBS TV Stations' content, and CBS will be the exclusive local news provider from their markets to Yahoo! News.
The video will be highlighted to users who pick a city or zip code within one of the markets. The clips will be station-branded and distributed throughout Yahoo! News and on the Yahoo! home page. On Yahoo!'s local news pages, video will be accompanied by links to the stations' home pages.
CBS' approach to distributing its content on Internet platforms has so far been liberal; in addition to streaming full episodes on its own site, like ABC and NBC, the company has done deals with a variety of external players, including Google Video and most recently YouTube.
Last month, NBC announced plans to partner with the network's 230 affiliates in the National Broadband Company, or "nbbc," a business for aggregating and distributing video from NBC, its affiliates and third-party Websites.
