All of the major television networks are now putting most of their television series online, streaming new episodes starting the day after they first air. ABC was one of the first to do this, and their streaming technology remains one of the better out there–they recently started full-screen streaming, which runs with surprisingly few hiccups. NBC, Fox, and The CW followed suit (though NBC and Fox annoyingly refuse to stream some of their most popular shows, such as The Office, House, and American Idol). CBS’s equivalent streaming service has not been doing as well as most of the others–I honestly haven’t used theirs either, because I watch very few CBS shows; speculation is that CBS’s lineup typically appeals to an older demographic than the other networks, which is true, and thus to people who are less likely to watch TV online. So what has CBS decided to do? Something drastic and very cool.

Read/Write Web reports that CBS is expanding their audience network through partnerships with many, many web companies, from stalwart media giants like AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, and CNET to Web 2.0 startups like Joost, Bebo, Brightcove, Veoh, Goowy Media, MeeVee, Meebo, Ning, and many others. The idea is that instead of making viewers seek out content on the CBS site, the way the other networks do, they’ll distribute it out on all sorts of media platforms, allow embedding in blogs and webpages, and focus on getting their media seen by as many people as possible rather than trying to control where and how viewers see it. This is a radical shift in media company mentality, and I’m sure the other networks will be watching closely to see how it works out. I hope they will be.

“We now want to empower our audience to be creative and deepen their experience with our content by allowing them to share and embed CBS-provided clips to their blogs, wikis, widgets, community sites and whatever else gets thrown our way,” said CBS Interactive president Quincy Smith. “We can’t expect consumers to come to us [...] It’s arrogant for any media company to assume that.”

Fox is working on a YouTube beater for their media and …Viacom’s? I think? I need to look that up. NBC’s. But in any case, that’s supposed to have embeddable media, too, but it’s still a centralized location for finding the media, as opposed to CBS’s decentralized vision. Relooking at the Fox/NBC deal, I see they’re going decentralized too, but focusing on the big media outlets. CBS’s big move is to include the smaller Web 2.0 startups, i.e., the places web-savvy people actually go to watch videos. The media landscape is interesting right now…frustrating, but interesting. I’m fascinated to see what’s going to come out of all this.