The average visitor to the Kitten Cam on Animal Planet's website has a hard time leaving. The live internet stream of felines has been watched more than 25 million times since it started last September. The average person, seemingly transfixed by the cuteness, stays on the page for 18 minutes and 50 seconds.
"That's a longer length of time than many television shows," said the head of Animal Planet, Marjorie Kaplan. The channel, sensing that its visitors would like more of a good thing, will begin promoting 10 more web channels this week as "ambient entertainment" for viewers and advertisers.
At a new website, APL.TV, webcams of ants, beluga whales, chicks, penguins, wild birds, and even cockroaches, will be live all the time, day and night. The web channels - under the umbrella name Animal Planet Live - are designed for Internet-connected TV sets, so viewers can watch the kitties and penguins on their big screens.
Animal Planet already has a deal with Samsung so that the cams will appear on the manufacturer's smart TV interface, and it says it will have similar apps for Roku and Xbox Live in coming months. The arrangement portends a future when tiny, cheap web channels can compete for viewers with 30-year-old cable TV channels.
Importantly for Animal Planet's owner, Discovery Communications, which has withheld most of its television programming from the web, the new web channels are additive and do not use anything that already runs on the main Animal Planet channel. "This is a complementary channel that expands the brand, but isn't doing what we're doing on TV," said JB Perrette, the chief digital officer for Discovery.
Someday, the Cockroach Cam might show up right next to Animal Planet on a next-generation television guide. Discovery can sell ads on both, though executives at the company acknowledge that for now the cheap animal cams are only an incremental source of revenue.
Animal cams have existed online for as long as there have been webcams. Perhaps the most famous is the Shiba Inu Puppy Cam, which became something of a sensation when it was started by a couple in San Francisco in 2008. The New York Times has featured on its website a Hawk Cam, chronicling the red-tailed hawks of Washington Square Park, since 2011.
Generally speaking, the cams that have garnered a rabid following are managed by amateurs or nonprofit groups, not by companies looking to profit from them. So Animal Planet is treading lightly. In some cases it planned to redistribute existing cams, like the beluga and sea nettle cams already operated by Explore.org, a division of the Annenberg Foundation.
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