Network Quality Entertainment — Online?
It is hard not to intrinsically believe our entertainment will come across the web before too long — everyone is moving there from the BBC to ABC to Al Gore with Current TV.
The question everyone asks is will it be any good? As much as people have always loved their reality tv including the Gong Show, Candid Camera, Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, and Big Brother, we can’t be expected to live on YouTube alone.
We recognise it takes real talent to create “24″ or “Spooks” — the question is will that talent work for online distribution? Or if you are real techno optimist, can digital tools make their work even better?
I’d of course say the answer is yes. And it is probably going to happen faster then we think. As the writers and studios are breaking down about who gets what online and Grey’s Anatomy goes into another week of re-runs, directors and producers are skipping both the union writers and the studios and using a social network to create a network quality series.
Check out Quarterlife. It is from the producers and directors of thirtysomething and My So-Called Life. It plays full screen. It is presented in 8 minute episodes. They have online distribution deals with MTV, MySpace Video and YouTube. And they are defining additional advertising deals directly for QuarterLife.com. If they decide they don’t want to take their studio outsourcing quite that far, I’m sure VideoEgg would love to manage that for them.
So go home and plug a £200 computer into your TV and start revelling in the choices!
Here is an article from the Salt Lake Tribue on the same subject:
From the article:
This spreading of home entertainment options may mean the advertising and the profits will be spread thinner. Maybe that’s good. More people cash in. But it’ll also mean there will be fewer big-money studios to fund blockbuster films like ”The Lord of the Rings” and the coming ”Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” or high-end TV shows like ”Lost” and ”24.” Production values cost money.
We’re already seeing a start to all this on sites like YouTube, Break.com, Revision3 and the rest. And a big step was taken forward last week with ”Quarterlife,” a social Web site built around a near-network-quality series of eight-minute episodes from respected producer/directors Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick.
”Quarterlife,” the Web series, started last week and tells the story of some mid-20s folks focusing their lives. It feels like a blend of ”My So-Called Life” and ”thirtysomething,” which makes some sense because Herskovitz and Zwick created both of those.
”Quarterlife” was headed for the Web long before the writers strike, just as the digital video has been exploding on its own for a couple years. And the technological changes driving all that exploding have been coming and increasing at a seemingly insane pace. A digital world is our future, for entertainment and everything.
As for the strike, you can see why writers care so much about money from digital delivery – that’s where everything will eventually go. That’s also the reason the studios care so much – that’s where their money will come from.
Yep, I agree … with most of it.
Digital tools will definitely make traditional content better, and platforms like Joost (if it sorts itself out) or VideoEgg (if they get enough traction in the market) and many others will follow YouTube’s path of creating truly innovative ways of delivering and making a few bucks from content online.
Online content can certainly rival traditional TV. Why? Because apart from a few exceptions like Lost (which owes much of its success to being digitally enabled) and Studio 60 (which the idiots canceled after one season) and The John Stewart Show (which the dinosaurs loath to have online in the first place) the vast majority of traditional TV sucks!
It isn’t that hard to compete when the bar is so low.
That’s to say nothing of the fact that you can create inherently more engaging content online than in a one-directional medium like television. McLuhan was right about that one …
So JB, given this latest wave of love for professionally produced online content, does this mean that the sun set on Terry Semel’s old-school content reign at Yahoo a bit too soon? See: Say goodbye to Hollywood
Personally, I’m not so sure that folks like Rupert, Sumner, Barry and co. can pull it off. If other media dinosaurs like newspapers (print in general, actually) and music have proven one thing, they’re incredibly slow to react to changes created by the internet. And make no mistake, they react. They do not innovate. I can’t think of one real innovation that MSM has successfully brought to the internet. Sure, they’ve bought a lot, but what have they brought?
And then there’s Google – always ready to get in the game, whatever game it is. See the Guardian:
Google turns to X Factor’s Fuller for push into TV.
Who knows where that’s going? I sure don’t …
Even given all that opportunity, there’s still the need to convince people like Mary Turner (CEO of Tiscali UK) that the internet can support video in the first place:
“The internet was not set up with a view to distributing video. We have been improving our capacity, but the bandwidth we have is not infinite,” she says. “If the (BBC) iPlayer really takes off, consumers accessing the internet will get very slow service and will call their ISPs to complain.”
In Japan, they’ve got 100MB connections over fiber, and Mary wants us to think that the internet wasn’t set up for video … Next, she’ll be convincing us that the internet is just a series of tubes.
Classic, isn’t it?
More on that gem is here.
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