Turner Broadcasting gets its turn in the WSJ spotlight, more specifically the hard-working New Products group headed by David Rudolph. (Rudolph thought up Turner’s clever grits-niche network, Turner South.) Successful web sites are nothing new to Turner, with internet offerings that include CNN.com; CNNMoney.com (Turner-Time Inc. effort); CartoonNetwork.com; sports sites NASCAR.com, PGA.com and PGATour.com; and others.  But the article highlights a corporate emphasis on innovation and experimentation with both brand extensions and new brands or concepts—and a mix of contributions from the New Products group and the nets. Whatever the form, the focus, as Mark Lazurus, president of Turner Entertainment Group, told the WSJ, is on “building businesses outside our core that allow us to compete for other pools of money.” The list of Turner efforts from the last 18 months or so is impressive: CNNPipeline, GameTap.com, VeryFunnyAds.com, broadband players LaughLab (TBS) and DramaVision (TNT), ACCSelect, the upcoming SuperDeluxe.com for comedy shorts. Business models are mixed between PPV, subscription and ad-supported; some are partnerships or joint ventures. Most important, perhaps, Turner’s leadership understands that large-scale isn’t the only way to make money online. According to the Journal, Turner expects total Web revenue to grow about 30 percent annually on average through 2010.
—ACCSelect may be the best example of an experiment, at least the most public one. The broadband video service for the ACC conference is provided by Turner’s PlayON; games are available live and on-demand by the event ($3.99) or through an all-you-can-eat monthly pass ($9.99 regularly, $5.99 trial). According to the Journal. it costs about $1,200 a game and they produce about 100 events a month. No sunscription numbers but the company says the audience averages 200 or so an event with some baseketball games drawing 2,000 or so. David Levy, president of Turner Sports, said last year that PlayON is a two-year test.
Related: You can follow Turner’s new media evolution through our dedicated archive.
—Turner’s VeryFunnyAds.com Posts Very Serious Numbers; 7 Million-plus Plays So far
— @ Sports Media & Tech: Future Of Sports Media; One Example: MLBAM Bets On Figure Skating
— Turner’s TNT Launching Broadband Player, Genre “Channels”; Will Stream Ad-Free Spielberg Mini-Series