Tag: Digital

11/6/2014   Business Insider   by Lara O’Reilly

The death knell for the primacy of TV advertising has been ringing for some time, but we now know when to arrange the funeral: 2016.

That is the year researchers at Forrester predict US advertisers will spend more on digital advertising than TV ads. Email marketing, social media, display advertising and search marketing combined will be growing at a combine annual growth rate of 30% by then (up from 24% in 2014.)

And by 2019 “interactive spend,” as Forrester calls it, will top $100 billion, while TV advertising will be at just over $90 billion.

That crossover is coming a lot earlier than was previously thought.

Researchers at eMarketer think the switch will happen two years later, in 2018.

Magna Global, meanwhile, said in August that digital would overtake TV in 2017. BI Intelligence has also previously predicted digital will surpass TV in 2017.

The signs of the demise of the traditional TV spot have long been visible. But there has recently been an acceleration in the amount of evidence pointing toward the shift to digital advertising. It’s worth pointing out that this evidence doesn’t point toward the death of TV networks and broadcasters (they sell a lot of digital ads too), but that marketers are increasingly pivoting their spend to focus far less around the 30-second digital spot. So it’s the end of TV’s dominance, rather than the end of TV.

That’s a bracing thought: The internet is about to do to TV what it has already done to newspapers and radio. TV will become a second-rate medium, the afterthought behind digital.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week of a “structural slowdown” in the TV ad market, with marketers pulling back amid economic uncertainty (TV is — aside from sponsorship or huge stunts — the most expensive form of advertising around) and the shift towards digital media.

The WSJ backed up its claim with three key recent financials:

• Last month Comcast reported a 4.6% decline in ad revenue across its cable networks segment.
• Time Warner Inc reported flat domestic Q3 ad revenue on Wednesday.
• On Tuesday Discovery Communications said its domestic cable network ad revenue grew at 1%, less than analysts had expected.

Overall, US advertisers are committing hundreds of millions of dollars less to cable TV networks for the first time since the 2009/10 seasons, according to a report released last month from the Cabletelevision Advertising Bureau. The report found that advertisers spent 6% (or $577 million) less on securing “upfront” deals with cable TV networks this year. The upfront represents the time of year when TV networks sell the bulk of their advertising for their most attractive Fall programming ahead of time.

Forrester thinks there are a number of reasons behind the move to digital advertising: that there are an increasing amount of measurement partners that can help marketers prove their digital advertising works, media proliferation means there’s more ads to buy and that a recovering economy boosts confidence in technology (with Forrester citing the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013 report.)

Also, marketers are slowly coming around to the realization that consumers are spending more time on their desktops, mobiles and tablets than they are watching live TV. Ad spend on digital is starting to level up with time spent.

BI Intelligence

Digital formats are also getting a lot more attractive than the humble 20-year-old banner ad. Advertisers are starting to see the branding benefit of digital video in particular. Brands can run beautiful campaigns like on TV, but they don’t have the shackles of scheduling, they can use more sophisticated targeting techniques and — currently — online video ads are still cheaper than buying primetime 30-second spots.

Marketers’ budgets aren’t infinitesimal, that digital ad spend has to come at the expense of something else. For the most part it’s display advertising. And after that it’s coming from TV.

BI Intelligence

On the other hand, we could just be in a period of experimentation. There is evidence that TV remains the most effective ad medium. A UK econometric study from Ebiquity, commisioned by UK TV marketing body Thinkbox, found that every £1 spent on TV advertising generates £1.79 in profit, far ahead of the next most effective medium, radio.

Thinkbox

Once marketers dip their toes in the digital water and find it’s not as good for raising awareness as TV, they may well perform a u-turn and do some serious grovelling with their broadcaster account managers to get their brands back in the commercial breaks. But for the next two years at least, the rise and rise of digital advertising looks to be finally coming at the expense of TV.

3/23/2014   The New York Magazine   By Nitsuh Abebe

Rebecca Eisenberg, an editor for the viral website Upworthy, works from the back of her Jersey City apartment, surrounded by Star Trek posters, felt ­Muppet versions of herself and her boyfriend (he’s a schoolteacher), and a cat named Bones with an unerring instinct to hop on the desk during work-related video­conferences, nuzzling his head at Eisenberg and, by extension, pointing his anus directly at the camera lens. This happens often, because working for Upworthy involves a lot of videoconferencing. One of Eisenberg’s computer monitors has a rotating background of comedy heroines (Tina Fey, Lisa Simpson, the cast of Pitch Perfect); the other has her colleagues popping up from other apartments around the country (some next to unmade beds, some with toddlers trying to open the doors of the rooms they’re in, others from immaculate, Apartment Therapy–­looking pads) to discuss some bit of information they’ve found—a video about bigotry or sexism, an infographic about beauty standards, an inspiring quote, a startling statistic, an interesting ad campaign, an illuminating clip from a TED talk—and the best strategies for getting millions upon millions of people to look at it. This is what Upworthy does: It finds stuff on the internet, identifies it as somehow meaningful or socially redeeming, adds a killer headline and a trace of description, and then gets lots and lots and lots of people to look at it.

It’s the sort of thing that’s hard to hate without feeling like a churl, villain, or snob. The site’s mission is to “draw massive amounts of attention to the topics that really matter,” which is almost tautologically hard to argue with. The things they collect can get fluffy, smarmy, or manipulative, but there’s no denying the amount of it that becomes Gangnam-style viral-smash material, leading millions of Americans to spend a few extra moments pondering meaningful societal issues; I mean, are you against millions of Americans pondering meaningful societal issues? One of the site’s founders says the most exciting thing about its success is that “people would laugh if you said, ‘This 13-minute video from the point of view of a black kid getting stopped and frisked is going viral.’ ” Hear this, and you do worry there would have to be something seriously gangrenous happening in your heart to account for any suspicions you harbored.

This hasn’t stopped anyone from resenting Upworthy. It’s one of the fastest-­growing media sites in internet history; in its two years of existence, it’s bent the fabric of the web to make itself chillingly ubiquitous, a level of success that presents as a cultural sore spot. The site is jealously, relentlessly obsessed over by everyone else fighting for online traffic, and it’s disdained or distrusted by a solid percentage of the human beings who are constantly offered links to its content. It publishes both some of the web’s most successful material and some of its most widely mocked and reviled. Some are allergic to the site’s tone (cloying?), its substance (pandering?), or the machine-tooled headlines it uses to lure visitors, many of which read like the taglines for terrible movies that nevertheless make you cry (“The Things This 4-Year-Old Is Doing Are Cute. The Reason He’s Doing Them Is Heartbreaking”). Some associate Upworthy with the same terminal uncoolness that descended on Facebook when grandparents signed up; some insist that “the topics that really matter” can only be tackled with hard noses and daunting complexity, not (as Awl co-founder Choire Sicha once put it) “feel-good weepers”; some just enjoy the way any given tweet can be turned into a solid Upworthy dis by adding “You’ll Never Believe What Happened Next.” And some simply note how quickly the site’s amassed web-breaking amounts of traffic—up to a high of 88 million unique visitors in a single month last fall—and assume, based on all prior experience with viral content that drives staggering amounts of traffic, that the people behind the stuff must be the most craven, cynical content-mongers in a field already plenty crowded with them.

The site’s founders, Eli Pariser and Peter Koechley, are, in fact, mellow, affable guys with half-beards and pleasant demeanors; they’re both married, in their 30s, and possibly the only people I’ve ever interviewed who seemed worried I might think I was cooler than they are. They have well-worn and convincing responses to all but one of the complaints above. Upworthy’s tone, they say, is what gets the job done, and if it grates, you’re probably too old. (Younger audiences are “more sincere.”) The content’s designed to “reach people where they’re at,” building from points of agreement rather than points of contention. (“You don’t want to be that guy in your Facebook feed going, ‘These ReTHUGlicans out there …’ ”) Emotional narratives are the most effective way for human beings to process information, even in a culture that denigrates feelings as “feminine” and irrational. Coolness is about standing apart, whereas Upworthy’s mission is to reach a broad mass of Americans. (Pariser, last year: “I’m not going to pay too much attention to some snarky New Yorkers who see [our headlines] too many times.”) But that last assumption—that they’re mere cynics—irks them, especially if you happen to bring it up after having spent time with Upworthy staffers. When I mention it, in the shared Manhattan workspace that constitutes Upworthy’s only real “office,” Pariser looks sort of thoughtfully wounded; Koechley looks indignant and asks: “Have you met anyone cynical here?”

I have not. There was one meeting where somebody was trying to figure out how to promote a video of orcas being hunted, and Adam Mordecai, one of the site’s star curators, asked if there was any chance they were feminist orcas—but that was pretty funny, in context. I’ve watched the staff hold long debates about what kind of content is truly “upworthy,” a word they use far more often as an adjective than a noun; I’ve met a woman who told me, “I don’t own a TV,” without even a trace of whatever knowingness normally halos that statement; and I’ve seen people collectively lip-sync “Bohemian Rhapsody” over video chat. No cynicism, though. It’s been a lot closer to Koechley’s description of the company as “the most earnest, do-gooder, touchy-feely group of 40 people that you’ve ever met in the world.”

Still, it doesn’t matter either way. Upworthy takes that old binary—earnest versus cynical, fair versus manipulative, righteous versus self-interested—and twists it into meaninglessness, from the mission statement on down. It turns out that if your noble goal is to “draw massive amounts of attention to the topics that really matter,” then the success of that mission (i.e., driving eyes toward meaningful content) and the short-term success of your company (i.e., attracting visitors to your for-profit, investment-backed website) are precisely identical. It’s the ultimate in “social entrepreneurship”—the good of the company and the good of mankind are, allegedly, the exact same thing. And not that the founders will say this explicitly, but there’s even some ambient implication that if this situation nags at you, you might on some level be more critical of getting the masses to think seriously about important issues than you are of a web-media status quo that on certain days seems to be 90 percent rage-bait essays and side-boob slideshows. Which would make you the cynic, nitpicker, hypocrite, or elitist.

Whereas the founders, says Pariser, are “ultimately kind of Sorkin-esque idealists in the role of the media in society.”

“But early Sorkin,” says Koechley. “West Wing Sorkin, not Newsroom Sorkin.”

“We see Upworthy as confirmation that the potential to have a broadly well-informed public still exists,” says Pariser. “And underestimating that, or writing people off because hey, reality TV gets great ratings—when you haven’t actually tried the experiment of making important stuff as compelling as reality TV—is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”

Much of Upworthy’s content does feel like reality TV. A lot of it also feels like advertising. This isn’t an accident; the site’s built, tactically and deliberately, to appeal to what skeptics once called the lowest common denominator. Its choices are the ones you’d normally associate with a race to the bottom—the manipulative techniques of ads, tabloids, direct-mail fund-raising, local TV news (“Think This Common Household Object Won’t Kill Your Children? You’d Be Wrong”). It’s just that Upworthy assumes the existence of a “lowest common denominator” that consists of a human craving for righteousness, or at least the satisfaction that comes from watching someone we disagree with get their rhetorical comeuppance. They’ve harnessed craven techniques in the service of unobjectionable goals—“evergreen standards like ‘Human rights are a good thing’ and ‘Children should be taken care of’ ”—on the logic that “good” things deserve ads as potent as the “bad” ones have. “I think marketing in a traditional sense, for commercialism—marketing to get you to buy ­McDonald’s or something—is crass,” says Sara Critchfield, the site’s editorial director. “But marketing to get people’s attention onto really important topics is a noble pursuit. So you take something that in one context is very crass and you put it in another. People will say, ‘That’s very crass,’ but in the service of doing something good for humanity, I think it’s pretty great.” This happens often when you ask questions about Upworthy: It turns out that whatever you were curious about is actually wonderful, because it’s ultimately in the service of the good of humankind. Would you need to be a black-hearted monster to feel that there must be a catch? Or that one will arrive next month, when Upworthy is slated to announce its long-awaited monetization strategy? (Over the past year, the site has run content sponsored by Skype and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on an experimental basis.)

“There are tons of media outlets,” says Koechley, “that end the process when they think they’ve done something good. They think it’s beneath them to try and get people to see it.”

“I worked on a literary magazine in college,” says Pariser, “that was read literally only by the people who did the college literary magazine. Ever since then, that’s what I’ve wanted to avoid. And I think there’s a lot of that happening in the media world.”

There are two main factoids that illuminate Upworthy’s place in the online universe, and both have to do with Facebook. (One of the social network’s co-founders, Chris Hughes, was actually an early Upworthy investor.) Factoid one: At some point in the site’s still-brief ­existence, someone found a statistic indicating that 52 percent of Americans on Facebook “liked” or had a friend who “liked” Up­worthy’s page; now, according to the company, it’s more like 78 percent. Factoid two: Those people share Upworthy posts at a rate that positively dwarfs the competition; according to a chart that made the rounds in December, it’s nearly eight times the rate of the next comparable site. The core audience may not be the biggest, but it can be relied on to echo links to everybody it knows. As Eisenberg tells me, “You’re not preaching to the choir. You’re preaching to the choir’s friends.”

We could here descend a deep analytical rabbit hole concerning a bunch of questions media people and analysts are forever debating—why do people share things? Does it mean they care more? Do the people they share with care?—but I will give you, based on my reading, the layperson’s upshot. The first answer is that nobody really knows—although Tony Haile, CEO of the analytics company Chartbeat, did recently say that available data shows no link between how much a piece of content is shared and how much time the average person spends with it before closing her browser tab. The second answer is that, even if nobody really knows, some people nevertheless worry that Pariser and ­Koechley know better than they do.

Read about Upworthy, and amid all the wonky discussion of traffic metrics, Facebook algorithms, and testing tools, you detect a collar-tugging fear that these guys have, like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, seen into the drizzle of numbers that hides behind virality and are now able to bend it to their will. Toward the start of the year, there was much happy crowing when a change in Facebook’s news feed appeared to have decimated Upworthy’s traffic—palpable glee at the thought of Upworthy as a naked dethroned emperor—but the apparent drop was just the comedown from a huge spike in November; zoom out a bit, and you still see steady growth. (The company line is that Facebook’s news-feed algorithm is like the weather: It’s always changing, so you dress appropriately and go about your business. Besides, they’re now dropping traffic as a main metric and focusing on “attention minutes,” the amount of time people spend actually watching stuff.) The unsettling thing about all this stats-talk is the way it assumes all “content” is equivalent, an interchangeable widget Pariser and Koechley are better at distributing than the competition; you see precious little talk about what makes Upworthy’s relationship with the web different from, say, BuzzFeed’s. Nevertheless, it’s not an entirely unreasonable thing to think about. Upworthy really is constructed from the ground up to make sure its content spreads far and wide. Even phrasing it like that feels backward: On some level the site was built from the start to figure out why things spread far and wide, then operate accordingly.

The founders first met through the world of viral videos “back before YouTube, when that meant QuickTime and AVIs.” Pariser’s background was in ­nonprofits and organizing; Koechley’s was partly in comedy, including time as managing editor of The Onion. Both, interestingly, grew up with educators—Koechley’s parents started a Waldorf school in rural Wisconsin, and Pariser’s ran an alternative high school in Maine. They wound up working together at MoveOn.org, where, during the 2008 presidential campaign, they made a video that got 23 million views. “There’s something about sharing and how ideas spread that we’re both really interested in,” says Koechley. “And then Eli got all big-thinky about the structure of algorithms on the internet”—Pariser wrote a book, The ­Filter Bubble, about how personalizing algorithms shield people from outside points of view—“so we argued about that for a while. And then we were like, let’s pick something to do.” Critchfield, the editorial director—tall, sharp, confident, and friendly, a firm handshake of a person—answered an ad they placed for interns. When I meet with her at the massive Clinton Hill loft the company booked on Airbnb to house employees during a New York conference, she tells me that before Upworthy she’d studied graphic design, co-founded an intellectual-property research firm, and worked on international development. “When you’re in D.C.,” she says, “you’re talking to legislators, and they’re like, ‘It would be great to feed hungry children in Africa, but we don’t hear about that from our constituents.’ And I wondered how we get from not hearing about it to hearing about it.”

Upworthy isn’t really these people’s vision; it’s merely the best answer they’ve found to that question. Even core aspects of what the site does—like the way it curates and aggregates content produced by other people—turn out to be answers to that question: Koechley tells me they chose curation because it “increases the learning curve.” (You can post and analyze dozens of videos in the time it’d take to create one.) When he and Pariser describe their original idea for the site, you get the sense it was something snappier, funnier, edgier, maybe more overtly political. But this wasn’t the answer: Any kind of edge or stridency is a no-no for shareability.

Critchfield lived in Cleveland when she started with Upworthy and says she worked “from the perspective of a Clevelander. I was completely unexposed to New York media, so I wasn’t thinking anything like that. I would just go to the 7-Eleven and be like, Hey, what’s in the news, what are you thinking about? And whatever that person said to me, I would go home and write about.” The media reference is a running theme: She and Pariser and Koechley all talk about the world of “New York media” with a kind of arm’s-length amusement, casting it as an insular elite that struggles to connect with most Americans. “Being in New York,” says Koechley, “and living about where you’d expect us to live in Brooklyn, there’s a mind-set and a clubbiness that we try to aim wider than.” They find it strange that journalists obsess over Twitter when “it’s not where people are.” (Facebook is.) At one point I suggest to them that Upworthy works because it is, for lack of a better word, “uncool,” something I assume they’ll take as a compliment. Both founders make slightly pained faces in response. “For a long time,” Critchfield tells me, “we were describing our site persona as ‘the cool kid at the party.’ And eventually we started calling ourselves out on that. Are we really? I think we wanted to be a little more Daily Show when we started, and wound up being more … Upworthy. Mothers think we’re cool. People who do charity work think we’re cool. People in D.C. tend to think we’re a lot cooler than people in New York.”

Something funny happens, though, when you track the decisions Upworthy’s made in order to differentiate itself from the rest of what they call “medialand.” They emphasize quality, not quantity, taking their time to cull content down to the most potent material. (“Nobody was desperate for a media site that offers a faster stream of content.”) They stress videos, visuals, narratives, and emotional experiences. They aim to drive the topics the internet’s discussing on a given day, not latch onto them. They care about fostering deep engagement with their brand as a one-stop provider of substantive experiences. Their target audience is the whole broad mass of Americans. Sure, they may be wary of online media’s usual suspects, but what they’re creating is not some bold next step beyond the Huffington Posts of the world; it’s a step back to the broadcast values of older media. What they’ve come up with is a lot like old-school general-interest programming, a sort of web-based cross between 60 Minutes and Reader’s Digest and a very socially responsible TV morning show.

And they’ve developed an entire data-driven system to get this done—a system, and a far-flung network of contributors to operate it. (The founders are tickled to have one curator in a town called Brooklyn, Michigan, “on a farm that got Wi-Fi,” and in one meeting someone jokes that when climate change leaves New York underwater, Upworthy will be uniquely situated to take over the media world.) Curators like Eisenberg trawl the web for “seeds”—content to feature on the site—and develop them into “nuggets.” A nugget is, for the most part, a list of 25 potential headlines, developed in a kind of high-octane one-person brainstorming session. Then comes “click testing.” Curators load potential headlines and thumbnail images into a testing system, which shows each option to a small sample of the site’s visitors, tracking their actions—did they click it, did they share it? The system used to return detailed numerical feedback on each option, but it was decided that hard numbers over­influenced the curators; now it tags options with things like “bestish” and “very likely worse.” There’s fact-checking and copyediting and internal discussion involved—nuggets take days to actually wind up on the site—but the process itself, as played out in bedrooms and kitchens and back offices across the country, is surprisingly simple: Find something. Ask yourself, “If a million people see this, will it make the world a better place?” (“If we can’t say yes to that,” says Koechley, “then we’re not going to post it”; many things on the site suggest a loose interpretation of this rule, but he says they’re working to keep raising the bar.) Keep writing headlines, and keep testing them until the results are maximally explosive.

Watching a curator crank out headlines is a bizarre experience, insofar as it’s almost indistinguishable from watching people toss out parodies of Upworthy headline styles—either way, the mind runs immediately to stock phrases like “you’ll never believe,” “you’d be wrong,” or “everything wrong with [topic] in one [piece of content].” This does not bother Critchfield at all. “I’m not making a fashion statement here,” she says. “I’m trying to get shit done. We could hit the next big thing in testing tomorrow, and then completely reorient and change.”

The advent of click testing seems to have been a pivotal development for touchy-feely Upworthy, with each staffer developing his or her own balance of hard data and intuition. (Critchfield likes to dismantle this binary by talking about “emotional data,” arguing that a gut feeling is every bit as meaningful as hard numbers.) The foremost data-lover might be Mordecai, a former actor and Howard Dean organizer—he likes to credit his audience-riling for enabling that memorable Dean “scream”—who beams into video meetings from Denver, and seems equally loved and head-shakingly tolerated by his colleagues, like a grumpy uncle whose tics everyone’s learned to enjoy. Eisenberg tells me with some happiness that Mordecai didn’t have a single “hit” until click testing came along; now he’s the staff’s biggest advocate of using data to optimize content, testing dozens upon dozens of headline variations until one succeeds. “The guy’s brilliant,” says Critchfield. “But because he’s so brilliant, his ideas are, like”—she mimes a scatter with her hands. “And the data channeled his energy in a really powerful way. He was like: I could do this, or this, or this. And the data was like: Do that one.”

He and other Upworthy staffers keep cycling through Eisenberg’s screen. They convene for “lunchtime karaoke,” dominated by a highly put-together redhead named Melissa Gilkey, who’s previously auditioned for American Idol (the experience was disappointing) and plans on trying The Voice next. (One guy explains his lack of participation by introducing the Russian idiom for tone deafness: “A bear stepped on one’s ear.”) Then comes the “nugget race,” in which a set of curators all try to create as many complete nuggets as they can within an hour. Eisenberg works on an infographic that recommends some of the great books of the current century—the greater-good logic allegedly being that school curricula are stuck on the classics and not responsive to new literature. She starts firing off headline options: “If you liked Reading Rainbow as a kid, you’ll love this flowchart as an adult.” “Do you think the only good books are old books? You’d be wrong.” “The best books of the 21st century—take that, Dickens!” One of the first things she told me when I arrived at her apartment was “I have ADD,” which was meant to explain why she doesn’t drink coffee but could just as easily go under “special skills” on her résumé: At one point she’s writing in two separate documents, checking email, video-chatting with other nugget-racers, text-chatting with someone else, and ordering a pizza on GrubHub, more or less simultaneously, and is still the person to notice and call five minutes left in the race.

As the curators work, they discuss thumb­nail pictures in great detail—when to split between two different images, when it helps to tilt one way or another, whether there’s any real difference between pictures of different whales. Headlines are discussed more in theory than in detail. One curator shares the tip of trying to express the core point of the content in four words. Mordecai gives it a shot: “Racism bad. Eat kale.” Then he lets everyone in on his newest data discovery, which is that descriptive headlines—ones that tell you exactly what the content is—are starting to win out over Upworthy’s signature “curiosity gap” headlines, which tease you by withholding details. (“She Has a Horrifying Story to Tell. Except It Isn’t Actually True. Except It Actually Is True.”) How then, someone asks, have they been getting away with teasing headlines for so long? “Because people weren’t used to it,” says Mordecai. “Now everybody does it, and they do cartoon versions of ours.” (CNN, for instance, recently ended a tweet about a child-murder story with a ghoulish “the reason why will shock you.”) There’s general delight about Upworthy leading the curve. “It’s like everyone’s watching whales on a boat,” says one curator. “And we’re the ones going, they’re all on this side!”

Photographs by Amy Lombard

*This article appeared in the March 24, 2014 issue of New York Magazine.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/03/upworthy-team-explains-its-success.html?mid=emailshare_dailyintel

10/25/2014   Deadline

by Dominic Patten

The creator of Amazon Studios’ acclaimed Transparent has an endgame timetable planned out for the streaming series, she said today. “In my mind, it’s 5 years It’s 5-years because Six Feet Under went for 5-years, “ Jill Soloway told me after delivering the filmmaker keynote Saturday morning at the Film Independent Forum, held at the DGA HQ (UPDATE – 10:15 PM: See video of the speech below). “Five years because for some reason 5-years equals syndication money, even though this is a whole different ballgame. I don’t even know if syndication is part of the model,” the former Six Feet Under producer added.

Transparent was renewed for a second season just two weeks after its September 26 debut of all 10 episodes of Season 1 went up simultaneously on Amazon Prime. At the time of renewal, Amazon said that Jeffrey Tambor-led ensemble of a family dealing with its patriarch becoming a matriarch has proved to be the most binge-watched TV series on Prime Instant Video ever. Nearly 80% of all viewers binging on two or more episodes in the same day, claims the Jeff Bezos formed company.

That access and business model is clearly a big part of the industry’s future as Hollywood concentrates on big budget action movies, says Soloway. As is the lack of network notes, she adds.

“Silicon Valley is up in San Francisco and they’ve got nothing but ideas and money,” Soloway said of the new players in town. “Amazon, Netflix, Hulu and even places like YouTube, these are people who are trying to reinvent content and they are absolutely going to spend money on it. And they don’t do the kind of micromanaging that the TV networks do.” the director/writer noted. “The only person I deal with on a day-to-day basis and it isn’t even day-to-day but once a week, is Joe Lewis,” Soloway said of the Head of Comedy at Amazon Studios. “He comes in a speaks about big ideas not small ones, he doesn’t micromanage, he doesn’t give me line notes.”

Transparent is the first of four new series to emerge from Amazon’s second development season. The Gary Trudeau created Alpha House was the breakout show of the first development season and had its Season 2 10-episodes debut on Friday.

“At the networks there are people who believe they can make things better by changing the rhythm of a sentence, about a joke not being funny,’ Soloway recalls of previous gigs. “They have 20 people involved in every page of the content. Now I just have Joe.” Soloway noted that the whole philosophy of AS was summed up for her by a note in Lewis’ office that reads “More creative freedom equals better quality equals more audiences equals more money equals more creative freedom.”

Traveling the road to creative freedom was the theme of Soloway’s keynote at the 10^th annual FI event. In a sharp one-liner heavy 45-minute address, Soloway told the packed main DGA auditorium that her remarks were going to “be very motivatey and inspirey.” She added to the first of many laughs, “I ain’t going to sugar coat, I have some horrible truths to share.” And Soloway did share.

The ex-United States Of Tara showrunner told the crowd that 3-years ago after HBO passed on a pilot of hers, she was seriously thinking of leaving Hollywood for a life in northern California. “Lot of balls in the air, no money balls. I had to get a job.” Even with her established credits that was a lot harder than Soloway expected. “The word out there is you’re difficult,” Soloway revealed to the audience her agent told her.

Without naming almost any names, except actress Jane Lynch and a meeting on the set of “Blamerican Blurry Blory” that never happened, Soloway spent the first part of her speech detailing the all too brief highs and that very hard scramble of getting work in Hollywood before deciding to make her own film. That film eventually became 2013’s Afternoon Delight, which won Soloway the U.S. Dramatic Directing Award at Sundance that year. It was supposed to happen so I could write Transparent,” she said of the whole experience from being so despondent and broke to success with her feature debut.

“Getting the green light to make the Transparent pilot and then season divided my life to before and after,” Soloway admitted. “When people ask me if I like TV or movies better, I say there is no difference – except I couldn’t finance a series or a 5-hour film on my own,” she added, praising the relationship with Amazon and the way they have marketed the series.

Soloway noted that she tried to do things differently on Transparent than she had experienced on past shows. “Filmmaking is really like throwing a great party,” she said of the tone and organizational skills she brought to the series’ set. ” I set up an environment that reversed the polarity of filmmaking and TVmaking,” she added, rejecting the industry standard of time and money constraints determining so much of the process. “It’s artmaking, it’s play. We have plenty of time, we have plenty of money and there is light everywhere, we’re not running out of anything.”

“I went through my whole life felt like I was trying to get somewhere, say something and there is a feeling with Transparent that I’ve done enough for minute and feel that feeling that people like it.”

http://deadline.com/2014/10/transparent-creator-jill-soloway-envisions-five-seasons-for-amazon-series-859822/

10/24/2014   Deadline   by David Lieberman

That could start to happen soon based on some of the trends that RBC Capital Markets’ David Bank identifies in a new report exploring the traditional and digital syndication markets — the latest in his must-read “Deep Dive Series.”  He notes that Netflix likely will spend around $3.3B next year on content, while Amazon ponies up $1.7B, and Hulu follows with $1.5B. And they’re hungry for original productions; they’ll probably account for 10% of Netflix’s outlay.

Yet except for Lionsgate, “the dominant players on the network TV first window side (CBS, Warner Brothers, Fox, etc.) are playing a virtually immaterial role in the production of content for the emerging original content SVOD [subscription video-on-demand] ecosystem, even as its growth accelerates,” the analyst says. Smaller firms including Legendary TV and Electus, he finds, “are taking the lead on …originals, increasingly through co-production roles with the SVOD platforms themselves.”

No wonder. The Hollywood powers are doing just fine as they focus on the $23B a year off-network domestic syndication market, producing sitcoms and hour-long procedurals that they can sell to TV stations and cable networks, and arc-based dramas that can be re-run on SVOD. Their business could grow as channels including WGN America and FXX buy additional off-network fare.

And Bank acknowledges that there isn’t a clear financial model yet for shows that debut on digital platforms, such as Netflix’s Orange Is The New Black or Amazon’s Alpha House. We haven’t seen one of these shows jump to another platform “that would demonstrate that SVOD originals have true syndication value outside of window one.” What’s more, Netflix, Amazon, and others “are seeking long-term exclusivity in both time and geography, which would essentially prevent real exploitation of content in syndication even if demand developed.”

He already sees interesting experiments – particularly as big studios cut deals for individual shows, as opposed to libraries. CBS paved the way last year with Under The Dome, which also appeared on Amazon. It seems that these days studios “can make more from one show than they would have from a library sale only a few years ago,” Bank says. For example CBS probably made more from its sale of CSI: Miami to Netflix in 2012 than it did from its first library deal with the streaming service.

But the big guys may have to explore new opportunities. “Fewer linear syndication-friendly format shows are ‘breaking,’ and they are breaking later,” the analyst observes. And investors may fail to see the value from the new array of complicated, one-off, and often opaque deals. Unlike a few years ago, “today we have limited visibility into 2015 and none into 2016,” Bank says. Yet he takes a stab at it: he predicts that next year SVOD syndication deals will provide CBS Studios with $179M, Warner Bros. with $106M, Lionsgate with $61M, Sony with $43M, Fox and ABC Studios with $40M apiece, and UTV with $22M.

http://deadline.com/2014/10/studios-wary-produce-original-shows-digital-859489/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

10/24/2014   by The Associated Press

She co-developed six products, including a bouncer that plays music, alphabet blocks and a musical soccer ball — an ode to her soccer-playing boyfriend Gerard Pique

Shakira is partnering with Fisher-Price to launch a line of baby toys as well as a Web series for moms.

The Mattel, Inc.-owned company announced Friday that the First Steps collection of toys and baby gear would be available in November. Shakira co-developed six products, including a bouncer that plays music, alphabet blocks and a musical soccer ball, an ode to her soccer-playing boyfriend Gerard Pique, who plays for FC Barcelona.

All of the proceeds will benefit her Barefoot Foundation, which provides education and nutrition to children in impoverished areas of her native Colombia. Pre-order on Amazon for the products begins Monday.

Geoff Walker, executive vice president of the Fisher-Price Global Brands Team, said in an interview Thursday that Shakira contacted the company about collaborating. The Grammy-winning singer, who is pregnant and is the mother of 21-month-old Milan, is the first celebrity Fisher-Price has partnered with.

“She brings in both authenticity and emotion, and I think that’s why this is such an exciting moment,” Walker said.

With her foundation, one of Shakira’s main initiatives has been early childhood development, which attracted Fisher-Price to the global star, Walker said.

“I saw how important developmental milestones are and how toys can help babies reach them — including with my own son,” Shakira said in a statement. “I wanted to design a line of toys that stimulated development in the crucial early stages of life, the stages in which learning can be achieved through supervised play, fostering the development of psychological, social and motor skills.”

The 12-part Web series debuts Monday and targets millennials. Some of the episodes, three to five minutes long, will feature her son.

Shakira is one of the most popular celebrities on social media. She is the first person to reach 100 million likes on Facebook.

Walker said as a result of the collaboration, Fisher-Price would be open to more celebrity partnerships.

“It’s about finding an authentic mom that is relevant to the millennial crowd,” he said.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/shakira-partners-fisher-price-web-743641

10/22/2014   The Wrap   By Jethro Nededog

Phase 2 Media CEO Sandy Grushow took a crowdfunded Australian web series in need of $73,000 and got it a script order at Fox.

Grushow discovered the web series on crowdfunding site Mobcaster.

“The CEO of Mobcaster got in touch with me, described his company as Kickstarter for TV series,” Grushow told TheWrap. “He asked if I would look at this pilot that these two Australian kids had posted on Mobcaster in an effort to raise $73,000 so they could shoot six more episodes.”

He continued, “I said to the CEO, ‘You realize that $73,000 is craft services money.’ So, I went back to my hotel room, watched it and thought it was hilarious. I was blown away.”

The former chairman of the Fox Television Entertainment Group went to the show’s creators, Timothy Nash and Lucas Crandles, and asked what they really wanted. They told him, “We want to leave this provincial country of ours and come to Hollywood to make sitcoms.”

So, Grushow sent co-chairman and CEO of Fox Television Group, Dana Walden, an email “on a lark” and asked if she would watch “Weatherman.”

“Frankly I didn’t imagine I’d hear back from her,” Grushow said. “To her credit, within an hour I got an email saying, ‘This is really funny. I’m sending it to [creative affairs president Jonathan Davis].’”

On Wednesday, the broadcast network told TheWrap it had given a script order plus penalty to the single camera comedy described as an office place comedy based on the Australian web series. At the center of the show is weatherman Tony Turpinson, the most insecure man on television.

Wellesley Wild (“Family Guy,” “Ted 2”) is set to executive produce and write the project with 20th Century Fox Television under Wild’s overall deal with the studio.

Watch the original pilot for the web series, “Weatherman,” below:

VIDEO

http://www.thewrap.com/fox-buys-weatherman-remake-from-sandy-grushow-ted-writer-wellesley-wild/

10/16/2014   The Hollywood Reporter   by Rhonda Richford, Scott Roxborough

“There are no game-changers” as reality retreats from the market and online platforms grow

10/19/2014   The New York Times   by David Carr

The last time I wrote about the traditional cable bundle — which has been so lucrative to networks like CBS and HBO — I warned that change comes very slowly, but then happens all at once.

This is the all-at-once part. Last week was pretty big for television, one in which not just a cable channel, but a broadcast one as well, jumped onto the streaming bandwagon with both feet. We all knew it was coming, but not this fast. The future, as it always does, sets its own schedule.

And Netflix is the necessary figure in what will come to be seen as the year that television staged a jailbreak. Yes, Netflix, which was supposed to lay waste to traditional media companies, may have saved them instead.

True, Netflix’s earnings took a beating last week, partly because it missed estimates and partly because, well, it now has company. But its bet on streaming has never looked smarter.

Netflix pointed a way forward by not only establishing that programming could be reliably delivered over the web, but showing that consumers were more than ready to make the leap. The reaction of the incumbents has been fascinating to behold.

As a reporter, I watched as newspapers, books and music all got hammered after refusing to acknowledge new competition and new consumption habits. They fortified their defenses, doubled down on legacy approaches and covered their eyes, hoping the barbarians would recede. That didn’t end up being a good idea.

Television, partly because its files are so much larger and tougher to download, was insulated for a time, and had the benefit of having seen what happens when you sit still — you get run over.

Instead, traditional television is morphing in nontraditional ways. Last week, Richard Plepler of HBO and Leslie Moonves of CBS both announced streaming services that would bypass established distribution systems. Suddenly, two fairly traditional media executives, sitting on top of lucrative companies, were adopting the tools of the insurgency and augmenting their current business models with ones that leave the bundle behind.

For any legacy business under threat of disruption, the challenge is to get from one room — the one with the tried and true profitable approach — to another, where consumers are headed and innovators are setting up shop. To get there, you have to enter a long, dark hallway, a scary place.

I had always thought that HBO would hold hands in the hallway with existing cable providers and offer an over-the-web product that they would jointly sell on broadband. There will be some of that, but HBO’s programming will also show up on Xboxes and as a part of stand-alone offerings. HBO’s move is motivated partly by global considerations. Right now, HBO has licensing deals all over the world and a complicated set of arrangements with an array of cable systems. An Internet product will be lower priced while also letting HBO develop a direct relationship with consumers. And in sidestepping cable in some instances, HBO — likewise CBS — will have its hands on precious viewer data, an asset Netflix has used to lucrative ends.

The strategy has its risks. In 2012, HBO announced that it would offer a streaming-only service in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, partly to complicate Netflix’s entry into the market. But the product was delayed, then disappointed customers when it started. And here in the United States, those of us who piled online to watch the finale of “True Detective” on HBO Go received a “fatal error” message instead. Delivering high-definition video online is complicated — a different skill set than making must-see programming.

VIDEO:

http://nyti.ms/1qz5gra

But those early kinks seemed to have been ironed out, and Mr. Plepler of HBO surprised many, including me, when he announced Wednesday morning during an investor meeting for its parent company, Time Warner, that sometime in 2015, the network would christen a stand-alone Internet-based service.

“It is time to remove all barriers to those who want HBO,” he said.

Just in case people didn’t get the message, he later added, “This is the most exciting inflection point in the history of HBO.”

Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, who in the past has delighted in tweaking the network, responded in unexpectedly respectful fashion, another sign that the dividing line between insurgent and incumbents is increasingly becoming meaningless.

“The competition will drive us both to be better,” he wrote in a letter to investors. “It was inevitable and sensible that they would eventually offer their service as a stand-alone application.”

Consider the advantages. In addition to meeting a cohort of young consumers in the place and manner in which they watch, programmers will gain leverage in negotiations with distributors. With more than one route to the ocean (of consumers), HBO and CBS will be less exposed should Comcast manage to consolidate much of the video ecosystem. And the next time CBS fights with a cable system, it can do more than take out full-page ads to complain — it can tell consumers to use its cheap, $6-a-month service to get its must-see shows.

If another service like Aereo comes along offering recorded broadcast programming over the web, CBS can say, by the way, we are already in that business. (It’s worth pointing out that HBO announced its streaming service with few specifics — the details, of which there are many, remained to be worked out — while CBS has a product you can buy right now.)

Mr. Plepler was plain-spoken about how going beyond cable strengthened his company’s hand: Just the threat “gives us added leverage,” he told investors. He was mostly addressing the broader international market, but HBO’s increased independence will also prove valuable in negotiations over revenue splits or efforts to wrangle better bundling arrangements. As Peter Kafka of Recode pointed out, ESPN is seeking a similar advantage by making its programing available with a low-cost online service from Dish Network. (Of course, most cable channels lack the profile to live outside the bundle, and the moves by HBO and ESPN might hurt them in the long run.)

Comcast, always a step ahead, has been working for years to decrease its reliance on a strictly cable model and forge a big footprint in the broadband services that will carry the new unbundled initiatives. That’s part of the theory of scale and ubiquity: Everywhere you turn, there we are.

Given Comcast’s ambitions, no media company will completely outrun it, but it’s now apparent that there are other ways to reach audiences.

If, in a few years, cable and broadcast programmers — many will follow the examples of CBS and HBO — are still thriving in a vastly changed entertainment landscape, they may have to send Netflix a thank-you note.

In addition to funneling cash to legacy media providers by paying close to $3 billion for their programming, Netflix has schooled them on the way forward by challenging their business model without tipping it over.

It makes sense; after all, Netflix famously disrupted itself by moving away from DVD rentals and tackling streaming with a vengeance. There’s an upside for Netflix as well. As older media companies invest in streaming, they may begin to see net neutrality and better Internet infrastructure as more than just something Netflix should worry about.

It will be a while before the smoke clears from the current upheaval, with mergers, new players and the diversification of platforms. But with each passing day, it is becoming clear that content is not just a commodity — it is precious and valuable — and distribution is up for grabs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/20/business/media/the-stream-finally-cracks-the-dam-of-cable-tv-.html?emc=eta1&_r=0