Two weeks ago NBC and Arby’s restaurant announced the launch of their new site www.lunchbreakshow.com. This site is one of the recently proliferating ventures seeking to bring together traditional TV and the Internet. NBC’s approach uniquely targets the nearly 60% of United States office workers who spend their lunch breaks at their desks, according to a study by Kelton Research. Office workers also make up a relatively affluent target group and are therefore potentially valuable customers to advertisers who take advantage of Web sites that entice workers on the job.

This past week’s Advertising Age article entitled: “NBC Wants ‘SNL’ to Be Part of Your Lunch Break” places thelunchbreakshow.com at the intersection of online video and prime time TV–a new media frontier. As the popularity of Web video grows, so too does the amount of high quality content available to users on the Internet. Networks such as NBC then undertake the task of reshaping their product just enough so that it retains its “prime time” quality while attracting consumers with the clever, pithy content they want to email to friends and coworkers. NBC Universal’s chief digital officer George Kliavkoff expects the site to have a relatively slow start and “grow through word-of-mouth,” which for Web video translates into the viral spread of video deemed worthy of a user’s extra seconds spent clicking the “email to a friend” button.

Some of the adjustments necessary for translating network TV-programming to Web video involve editing and shortening to create clips suitable for online consumption. Others, like the “boss button”–which fills a user’s computer screen with a spreadsheet at the panicked click of the mouse–acknowledge that enticing office workers to “play” while at work is somewhat risky business.

Yet NBC and other networks believe that for workers glued to computer screens 8 or more hours a day, the risk of their boss catching them enjoying some of that screen time as they finish their Arby’s sandwich is one they are willing to take.