Comcast’s Ziddio Reads Facebook

By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 2/7/2007 12:01:00 AM

Hoping to bottle the creative juices of millions of Internet users, Comcast inked a pact with social-networking site Facebook to let its members share videos through the cabler’s Ziddio user-generated video site.

With the deal, Facebook will for the first time offer video-sharing features to its 16 million members. Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Next month, the companies plan to launch a contest asking Facebook users to submit short videos “about their lives.” The winning entrants will be included in a television series, called Facebook Diaries, that will be available online and on Comcast’s video-on-demand service.

The 10 half-hour episodes of Facebook Diaries will be produced by R.J. Cutler, whose credits include American High and 30 Days.

“Ziddio has leveraged Comcast’s powerful reach in broadband and television to create a nationwide site that elevates the world of user-generated videos to a cross-platform experience,” Comcast Interactive Media president Amy Banse said in a prepared statement. “We are excited to connect this phenomenon with the Facebook community and bring it to their unique demographic.”

Comcast Interactive Media launched Ziddio in November with the purported strategy of harvesting the best bits of Internet content for its VOD services.

Privately held Facebook provides forums for members to share information, similar to MySpace, the social-networking site bought by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. in 2005.

Comcast hasn’t disclosed how much traffic Ziddio receives, but it said the site has served millions of views per month since launching.