More TV Shows Online

Canwest has announced that they’re going to be streaming some big name shows online this fall including House, Heroes, The Office, Deal or No Deal, Weeds, Knight Rider (the new series, not the old) and 90210 (also the new one). In addition, they’re going publishing additional webisodes and behind-the-scenes footage not available on TV.

Canwest already offers full episodes of certain shows on their specialty networks, but this marks a dramatic increase in high-profile shows the broadcaster is making available.

No doubt they are looking to compete with CTV’s broadband video library (which has streamed some popular shows in the past) as well as capture more ad revenue dollars in their pre-roll supported video player.

Speaking of their video player, Canwest currently uses the Maven platform for streaming video (which was bought by Yahoo! earlier this year), but they’ve recently undergone a competitive analysis of video players/CMS and last I heard consider Brightcove a possible replacement.

I haven’t reviewed Brightcove in a while, but I use Maven quite regularly and it’s a very problematic piece of software both from the publisher and end user perspective. So in addition to Canwest offering some great shows online this fall, it may be on an improved player. Great news for Canadians who love these shows but have online viewing habits.