The Arts and Entertainment Television Network is leveraging its historical properties to embrace the digital domain.
On 27 November, A&E will launch a revamped version of its History Channel site, repositioning it as "the Web's first history portal, the best search in history," says Todd Tarpley, the network's new-media director.
The new portal site will be a key element in A&E's push to hybridize broadcast programming and interactive media, with on-topic search engines taking precedence over the site's current promotional bent. Earlier this week, the network launched two new digital-TV channels, History Channel International and the Biography Channel.
Both new channels will have major online tie-ins, with the prototype History Channel International site evolving into a 24-hour-a-day content stream synchronized with the TV broadcasts.
A showing of The Year in Depth for 1939, for instance, would be complemented on the Web by deep background about the chronology of World War II, the text of the Neutrality Act, significant developments in China, and highlights from Lou Gehrig's career that year. Streaming audio and enhanced video files, as well as texts written or licensed for the site by notable historians, will be available.
Biography.com will feature a searchable 25,000-name database and will be coordinated with the Biography Channel program Born on This Day.
The idea is to move away from "spoon-feeding information," Tarpley says. "It will be more an information resource and less an entertainment site. Instead of us giving you information, we're giving you our databases."
Scholarly contributors to the portal site will include Stephen Ambrose, author of Citizen Soldiers and historical consultant for the film Saving Private Ryan, Civil War expert James McPherson, and Eric Foner, whose writings on the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment have been licensed for the site. New features on the site will include "This Day in Wall Street History," "This Day in Automotive History," and "This Day in Civil War History," as well as an audio archive of 365 speeches, from Teddy Roosevelt to Paul McCartney.
The portal currently pulls in 3 million pageviews a month and 20 percent of the visitors to historychannel.com say they don't watch the broadcast programming. Tarpley admits that the least-visited areas of the current site are those devoted to hyping the TV programs.
User-driven information retrieval and user-created content -- such as discussion areas on historical topics -- "are what the Web is all about," says Tarpley. The network is hoping that the site, which currently draws the majority of its users from the 25-to-54 age range, will be embraced by educators and students doing their homework.
Patrick Keane, senior analyst for Jupiter Communications, thinks that A&E's historical content could be a promising platform for TV-and-Web convergence efforts. In a survey that Jupiter conducted at the beginning of the year, 34 percent of a sample of 2,200 households said they logged on to the Net while watching sports programs on TV.
"Utility-driven" programming -- such as sports, news, and weather -- is a natural for added interactivity, Keane says. "The phenomenon of people interacting with both boxes simultaneously is on the rise."
Tarpley says that such events as the publication of the Starr Report on the Net indicate that the instant access to information afforded by the online world is changing the way that history is being made.
"Just as CNN changed the way people looked at broadcast news, the Web is now the first place that people go for breaking news," Tarpley says. "Now 'history' includes current events."
At least one of Wednesday's visitors to the History Channel site's bulletin boards, however, might have quarreled with that latter observation.
Faced with a discussion question du jour about Monica Lewinsky's agreement to do her first TV interview, the critic posted testily, "Will you please shut up about Monica.... Enough already. Let's talk about history. Jeez."
