MSLO To Test Online Video Subscription Offering

At a New York City panel discussion held by investment-banking firm DeSilva & Phillips, Martha Stewart shared that the namesake company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia will test a paid download service for access to a portion of its enormous online video library next month.

Next month’s test will make Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia the latest media company to try charging audiences for content online, where most media is currently free.

Details about pricing for the video subscription offering are yet to be worked out, but it’s an experiment for MSLO to find new ways to generate additional revenue from video content not currently available on the website marthastewart.com. The website will for the most part remain a free, ad-supported venture.
The company will launch the test using a platform from iAmplify.

On a different topic, Martha also said that Twitter, the leader in “microblogging technology” will become a powerful marketing tool for Corporate America. Martha said it was a service she would pay to use. She commented that in 11 weeks of using Twitter, and making only about 250 tweets, she gained a following of more than 600,000 people.

“It took me two years to get to 600,000 subscribers with Martha Stewart Living,” she said. “It took a fraction of that time to get there with Twitter.”

I like the idea of a subscription video service. My hope would be that MSLO would make several different types of offerings for the online video subscription. I’d like to see topic specific subscriptions (cooking, holidays, decorating, etc) and perhaps another subscription to the various SEASONS of the old Martha Stewart Living television show. I would also hope that subscribers would have the option of downloading the video content (much like iTunes) to their computers to watch it whenever they wished, as often as they wished. We’ll see what type of subscriptions MSLO comes up with.

The question for the day: would YOU subscribe to a Martha Stewart video library service? What would you like to see? (single content, seasons of television shows, vintage, new?) Share your thoughts in the comment section.