HowStuffWorks and Discovery Communications: the Possibilities

Take a look at Discovery and the HowStuffWorks Web site. They're both powerful players in their respective domains. Discovery Communications has 100-plus worldwide networks and reaches some 1.5 billion viewers across the globe with programming focused on science, exploration, animals and wellness. HowStuffWorks has built a highly popular, easy-to-understand Web site that explains to millions of visitors a month exactly how the world works. Like Discovery, HSW has built a strong reputation on quality content that appeals to millions of people wanting to learn, and all of it is search-engine-friendly.

What happens when you put these two players together? For starters, you can leverage the strengths of each medium. For example, HowStuffWorks can start to embed short video clips from Discovery's networks into its articles. Clips like this one, on sonar technology:

Now imagine thousands of these clips across the entire site.

In the same way, Discovery's programming can display URLs that direct viewers to HowStuffWorks articles so that viewers can dive into HSW's world of information. The potential is also there to tie Web articles directly to a show. It's when you think of new types of programming like this -- programs that can seamlessly integrate TV and the Web -- that the potential opportunities for the future start to take shape.

Here's another possibility. Right now, millions of users are creating low-budget YouTube videos. Is there a way to learn from and improve on this model? What about building hundreds of new short-form shows on the Internet? Backed by the traffic and sales forces of a major media company and a major Web property, these shows could actually attract audiences and make money, with the most popular shows graduating to long-form at the network level with a core audience already in place. End result? It could hugely expand the number of shows available to all of us.

What we end up with from this marriage is high-quality, credible, family-friendly, entertaining multimedia content both on television and the Web. People discover the content by channel surfing on TV or by searching for information on the Web. Once they find the content, they are able to move seamlessly back and forth between TV and the Internet. It's the best of both worlds.

Our goal is to build the ultimate multimedia experience for people who want to learn about the world we live in. As we move forward, we want to hear your thoughts. What would you like to see?