Today marks the start of an exemplary relationship between old and new media that I expect we’ll see a lot more of in the future.

CBS and Dogster, Inc. have partnered to add a whole new level of participation and engagement in their TV programming.

Tonight at 8pm CBS will premiere their big prime time summer program, Greatest American Dog. However, this is a reality show you will not only watch. Thanks to the CBS / Dogster relationship, viewers will be able to meet the contestants, talk with each other, meet in the fan club and root for their favorites all on Dogster.com.

CBS smartly realized that though they could add some forums and community features to their show website, it would be an uphill battle for deep, passionate participation to occur there. Traditional media companies are great at releasing highly-produced programming that millions of people tune in to. They also have made strong gains in using the web to expand that presence by offering more viewing opportunities as well as using the web as another advertising channel. But the radical changes and benefits of “Web2.0″ functionality (i.e. web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and collaboration) are currently very difficult to harness for large corporate properties.

Conversely, online properties such as ours have learned how to provide entertainment to millions using web technologies, but have neither the resources nor abilities to produce great television programming.

That’s exactly why old and new media are the new hot couple. The “old” provides the great quality and massive distribution via traditional entertainment mediums and the “new” provides a deeper experience in terms of extra, supporting content, entertainment and human-to-human connections that has been so profoundly missing from from the living room experience.

The last ten years are littered with the failures of web properties trying to become TV broadcasters and TV broadcasters trying to make great web services. But together, these cross-media extravaganzas can be done very easily.

We term this type of relationship “In Stream/Out Stream.” In this case CBS provides the “in stream” of visitors to Dogster, and we provide an “out stream” of viewers to CBS. Of course the converse is true from CBS’ perspective and what happens is we create a cycle of audience augmentation.

We have been doing “In Stream/Out Stream” for years now. Many of our advertisers get huge ROIs from this. Disney (in, out), 3M (in, out), Febreze (1, 2, 9Lives have all found that directing customers to dedicated areas on Dogster and Catster leaves a far more profound impression on their customers then if they tried to provide the same service on their own websites. This is because we always ensure the customers get a deeper, more meaningful experience than they would anywhere else.

We’ve also got a similar “In Stream/Out Stream” relationship in the works with Lifetime TV. They found 70% of their viewers have a dog or cat and pet-related content on their websites was always a hit. Lifetime Media, as expected, is great at producing high-quality TV content, not online pet content. So they came to us and together we are producing a webisodie, “The Pet Report”. They provide the state of the art studio and high production quality and we provide the super-fun passionate pet content.

We’ll keep writing updates on this, but tune into Greatest American Dog at 8pm on CBS to see it in action.