Apr 18th, 2008 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
It’s hard to imagine an example that sums up the conflicting ambitions and tensions within the TV business better than the latest announcement about Gossip Girl, the show that appears on the CW network (co-owned by CBS and Warner Brothers). The news from the network is that fans will no longer be able to watch episodes online, as they have been since it started airing last fall. Instead, CW would like viewers of the show — which is all about a girl and her blog, and was effectively created in part to piggyback on the online habits of its target audience — to watch it only on television.
That’s ironic enough, of course – a show that’s all about how young people are turning to the Web and social media, but you can’t watch it online. The reasoning behind the decision is even more illuminating, however: in effect, the network is saying that the show has become too popular with fans online, and they would like to shift some of those eyeballs to the tube instead. Why? Because that’s where the advertisers are. Advertising on TV still brings in far more revenue per viewer than online, and CW needs to build up the former at the expense of the latter.
In reality, of course, the network may end up irritating the core group of viewers — many of whom enjoy the freedom of watching a stream online whenever they want — and the show could go down the drain regardless.
May 10th, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
Guess I missed this somehow, but Richard Rosenblatt — one of the co-founders of MySpace — has formed a new company called Demand Media with Carson Daly, one of the early MTV video jockeys, and they are offering people who want to create their own video channel a video website-in-a-box, with a .tv domain name — they have a deal with Verisign to resell .tv domains — and some social-networking tools to grab, create and share video (the .tv domain, incidentally, ultimately belongs to the tiny island nation of Tuvalu — only 10 square kilometres in size, the least-populated country next to Vatican City, according to Wikipedia). An interesting idea.
Feb 12th, 2007 | Citizen Media | 4 Comments
It would be nice if the proprietors of KFTY-TV in Santa Rosa, California — a tiny pimple on the giant media corpus that is Clear Channel Communications — had decided that “citizen journalism” or “crowdsourcing” or “open source journalism” or whatever we’re calling it these days was a truly valuable thing to have, a worthy goal in and of itself for a media entity.
Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. What happened is that Clear Channel wanted to cut costs, so it fired all the news reporters at what appears to be a marginal TV station. And now the management are trying citizen journalism as a fallback position. And the guy in charge of the station, whose name is Steve Spendlove (I am not making this up), says that he prefers to think of what he’s doing as “local content harvesting.” Seriously.
This, of course, is very close to what Seth Finkelstein likes to call it, which is “digital sharecropping.” Although the San Francisco Chronicle article says that Spendlove is considering paying contributors, it’s not clear how — or how much. Presumably they will operate on the popular “if you don’t ask, you don’t get” model. And Mr. Spendlove admits that, in order to maintain a certain level of quality control, the station may have to hire more editors.
The Poynter Institute’s site has more, and Dan Kennedy at MediaNation points out that citizen journalism is often a euphemism for getting content for nothing, to boost a content producer’s bottom line. But Dan makes a good point: since the technology is cheap and plentiful, what exactly does a citizen journalist gain by giving their content to a TV station for free, when they can just upload it to YouTube? In the long run, TV stations like KFTY may be sowing the seeds of their own irrelevance.
Not surprisingly, many people think this is a dumb idea squared, including the TV critic from the Miami Herald (not surprising perhaps), as well as this guy and this guy. I think citizen journalism is an interesting idea — but this is not citizen journalism, it’s just financial desperation. Not a great motivator.
Nov 14th, 2006 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
The Lost Remote guys (Steve Safran and Stephen Warley) have posted a fascinating repurposed presentation they did at the Streaming Media conference, in which they talk about some of the TV shows and networks that are really thinking outside the box (sorry). Hat tip for the link goes to Will Sullivan of Journerdism, who is interactive projects editor at the Palm Beach Post.
That includes the producers of Lost — who make extensive use of forums, blogs, websites that are extensions of the show, podcasts and so on — and shows such as 5 Takes, which drops five travel journalists in a city without any resources and then has them interact with the audience to decide what to do, where to go and so on. They also look at how some of the networks are encouraging their audience to upload their own videos.
The two Steves also do a pretty good rundown of some of the things they heard at the Streaming Media conference that are wrong, including a) “Our core business is television”; b) “We need to drive people to our site” and c) “If we control the information, people will come to us.” A refreshing take on the future of TV (my apologies for the poor quality of the screen grab image included in this post).
