It should be noted that Five relies very much on third party licensed content - mainly hit US TV shows - to drive its viewership, with the exception of some homegrown programming such as Fifth Gear. This naturally makes Five's ability to become a content reseller a more complex proposition, but fits very well into a syndicated video player strategy.

Syndicating the video player, rather than selling or reselling the content it has rights to to third party ad-supported platforms, is likely to generate more revenue for Five than licensing content to online affiliate partners individually. Five can typically command higher CPM rates than its affiliates by maintaining control of the content and the online ad inventory available in the UK around the specific shows it holds rights to. By centralizing ad sales, Five will be able to maintain its ad rates, which would not happen in the market if multiple partner sites were competing with one another for advertisers with the same licensed content.

Further, Five can retain almost 100% of its ad revenue in some cases even as it syndicates the player through third party sites, even though it will carry the cost for ad sales and video delivery. This approach is likely to be more lucrative on a per-view basis for the broadcaster than the typical 70% share of ad revenue from online episode views were it to license the programming to other platforms.

In addition to syndication, allowing users to embed the video player into any webpage will substantially increase the reach of Five's content beyond its own website. This viral distribution will help to grow consumption of the broadcaster's catch-up videos and correspondingly grow its online ad revenues. In the US, Hulu has demonstrated how a mixture of syndication and viral distribution can be used to maximise an online audience – around 75 per cent of users watching Hulu content do so 'off site' according to data from web metrix firm comScore.

By rolling out a syndicated player, Five is continuing to develop a catch-up service which, following its launch in June 2008, has provided more compelling features than those offered by many of its rivals. Five's move to distribute its videos to a wider audience comes less than two weeks after Channel 4 announced plans to make its video archive available on a free to view basis through 4oD. But, with catch-up driving online TV consumption, Screen Digest does not expect the expansion of Channel 4's catalogue will have much of a long term effect on video viewing through the broadcaster's site. Rather, it is Five's strategy of distributing its catch-up shows to a disaggregated online audience which is likely to result in a much higher growth of video consumption.