ABC.com's Enhanced Full Episode Player to Be Released This Fall

Disney-ABC Television Group's Emmy And Webby Award-Winning Abc.Com Full Episode Player To Add New Customization And Enhanced Viewing Features This Fall

Thursday, May 2008 -- Dedicated to expanding its network and channel brands across multiple platforms and connecting viewers with their favorite shows anytime and anywhere, Disney-ABC Television Group announced today that this fall it will unveil a new version of the award-winning ABC.com full episode player. The new player will feature a completely redesigned user interface and will incorporate several enhancements to allow for user customization, interactivity and improved viewing capabilities.

"Over the past two years, we've been squarely focused on creating a high quality consumer experience that combines ABC's most popular shows within a network-branded environment, effectively monetizing it through an interactive advertising model, and distributing it openly throughout the Internet from wherever consumers search for our content," said Albert Cheng, executive vice president, Digital Media, Disney-ABC Television Group. "Our leadership position in the online video space is the result of the tireless efforts of our digital media team. Our desire to continually push the envelope to create 'what's next' delivers a widely accessible, world class viewing experience to consumers and unparalleled returns to advertisers."

Building upon its success, the player's new features will include:

* True full-screen viewing
* Enhanced navigation and powerful video search capabilities that will allow users to search for series graphically, alphabetically, by genre or popularity
* Content sharing tools providing users the ability to send and share video links from full episodes with others through email or by embedding links on other websites, blogs and social networks
* Content recommendation functions
* Closed captioning
* Parental ratings information for all full episode content

Combining sleek, modern design with superior user-friendly functionality, the player will continue to offer users episodes of ABC's most popular series, many of them available in HD and in a variety of viewing sizes to provide the best online video viewing experience currently available. Users will also have the continued ability to launch the player off of ABC.com, affiliate sites, portals and video aggregator sites, as well as social network sites via the ABC.com full episode widget.

"Since we launched ABC.com full episode player in 2006, we've been continually looking at ways to make a great product even better," said Alexis Rapo, vice president, Digital Media, ABC Entertainment. "The clean, new user interface, powerful search tools and other enhanced functionality features, like true full screen and closed captioning, are examples of how we're again raising the bar when it comes to online video."

Featuring a unique interactive advertising model designed for high ad retention, ABC.com's full episode player continues to deliver a premium to advertisers, attracting a young, highly educated and loyal user base. Since launching in 2006, over 300 million episodes have been initiated through the ABC.com full episode player and over one billion ads have been served. Based on research conducted earlier this year, users of the full episodes player are highly satisfied with the viewing experience, with 88% rating it positively and over 90% reporting that they were likely to recommend watching full-length episodes on ABC.com to others.

The Disney-ABC Television Group is home to all of The Walt Disney Company's (NYSE: DIS) worldwide entertainment and news television properties. The Group includes the ABC Television Network (including ABC Daytime, ABC Entertainment and ABC News divisions); the Disney Channels Worldwide global kids' TV business, ABC Family and SOAPnet; as well as television production and syndication divisions ABC Studios, Disney-ABC Domestic Television and Disney-ABC International Television. The Disney-ABC Television Group also manages the Radio Disney Network, general interest and non-fiction book imprint Hyperion, as well the Company's equity interest in Lifetime Entertainment Services and A&E Television Networks.

Source: ABC

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