Tag: Digital

Vox Is the Conde Nast for Next Generation: CEO

Ellen

7/1/2014   Bloomberg

VIDEO: http://www.bloomberg.com/video/vox-finds-its-voice-in-the-future-of-digital-media-A5gPfZdWTHSy18NWOysDVg.html

July 1 (Bloomberg) — James Bankoff, Chief Executive Officer and chairman at Vox, talks with Erik Schatzker about new branding opportunities created by digital media, their focus on transforming news presentation for an online audience and the importance of social media platforms in growing their brands. He speaks from the Aspen Ideas Festival on “In the Loop.”

Video text:

Digital content is anybody i can think of.

I think i know what buzzfeed is, what clock — gawker is, but what is vox?

We create media brands, high-quality, large media brands like the ones you mentioned, for new generation of consumers prefer to consume their content digitally.

If you think about it in a simple way, great magazine companies like “timing” and great cable companies like usa networks or disney, now we are creating new media titles in the same way.

And we’re doing it within this medium as opposed to cable or magazines, obviously.

It’s funny you mention condon asked because they operated a portfolio of magazines.

The people know them better for vanity fair or “folk.” do you see yourself more as digital publishing as opposed to say the kind of company that “feiss” is becoming?

We think spnation, you can command more authority.

We don’t want to be another portal where everything is just general.

We believe individual variance — rinse convey and their subject matters.

More Munchies: High Maintenance, Everyone’s Favorite Marijuana Procedural, Returns

Ellen

9/24/2014   New York Magazine   By

Blichfeld and Sinclair filming in Prospect Heights last month.

A New Yorker’s apartment is his kingdom, but for many of us, it’s a solitary domain. Inviting someone into your home forces you to gaze upon it with fresh eyes, and it inevitably looks squalid: too small, too dark, shabbily decorated, oddly shaped, and weird-smelling. The default solution is to socialize externally and keep the front door closed. I can count on two hands the number of friends who’ve stepped inside my fifth-floor walk-up, and I’d sooner cry in public than ask a neighbor in for coffee.

The magic of High Maintenance, a web series on the cusp of its second—or first proper—season, is that it penetrates these fortresses, both door-shaped and ­human-shaped. The creation of married couple Katja Blichfeld (an Emmy-­winning casting director for 30 Rock) and Ben Sinclair (an actor and editor), the series debuted in late 2012 and released new installments over the following months. Its morsel-size ­episodes—each between five and 15 minutes long—and quick-twists-of-the-knife storytelling attracted a small but strong viewership, which attracted critics, who took up the kind of urgent championing that indie creators pray for. From the first season’s 13 snippets, all available for free on Vimeo, came a development deal with FX, attention from networks, and, finally, a chunk of cash from Vimeo to fund season two.

High Maintenance may also be the first indie web series that could plausibly launch its own genre. The premise of the show is simple: A weed dealer bikes around the city delivering to customers. As with emergency-room medicine and organized crime, the world of weed delivery lends itself beautifully to dramatization—there’s voyeurism, jargon, journeys across the spectrum of human need. Sinclair plays the nameless pot-dealing angel of mercy. Among the tokers introduced in season one are a cult member, a Helen Hunt–obsessed recluse, a cross-dressing dad (played by Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens), and a traumatized stand-up comic (played by Hannibal Buress). Episodes can be nibbled à la carte or swallowed whole in one sitting. Together they add up to less than two hours.

When the Vimeo deal was announced in May, it represented the company’s first foray into original programming. Vimeo had already established a service where filmmakers could set a viewing price and take 90 percent of the proceeds; Kerry Trainor, the company’s CEO, says it was just a natural step toward advancing some money to High Maintenance, a show he thinks “shows off everything we think Vimeo is in the world to do.” For Blichfeld and Sinclair, who glued together season one of High Maintenance with their own funds and through favors from friends, it represented an ideal way to keep a good thing going. Vimeo has been an extremely hands-off partner: “That’s the coolest thing about being here,” Sinclair says. “They haven’t even read a single script. They haven’t asked.”

Blichfeld: “No one’s looking over our shoulder.”

Sinclair: “No one can tell on us.”

On an afternoon in August, the crew was staked out near a conference room at Vimeo’s Chelsea headquarters to film an office segment involving a martial-arts instructor. The nameless weed guy was performing a suite of ass-kicking moves on the instructor. Sinclair, who is wary-eyed and bearded, has a vocal slur that makes him sound three beers deep at all times and an intensity that he can flick on and off like a light switch. Blichfeld directed two takes of the scene (yelling, body-slamming) while 50 or so Vimeo employees typed quietly behind her, paying no mind. The atmosphere on-set was one of giddy and furtive productivity, as though the crew were trespassing and had to move quickly before the cops rolled in. (They also took heavy advantage of the tech-office snack bounty: Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, a machine that dispenses every kind of soda.) Greg Clayman, Vimeo’s general manager of audience networks, occasionally wandered from his office to watch the action.

Blichfeld and Sinclair insist the cash injection hasn’t changed the couple’s process. They’re still working with actors whom they meet through mutual friends, like Orange Is the New Black’s Yael Stone, whom they met recently at a play. They’re still writing about topics that bubble up over dinner. (Upcoming episodes will have a heavier emphasis on career.) Sinclair had some mild concerns about editing episodes in an office, rather than at home in Ditmas Park, because he prefers to edit when “fucking stoned,” but he concluded that edibles would do the trick while at Vimeo.

What distinguished season one from the anarchy of indie web TV was its visual sheen and lean, reversal-laced plotlines. The episodes could have served as a launchpad for a conventional network show, sort of like how a short video Christmas card morphed into South Park on Comedy Central. ­Blichfeld and Sinclair went on a tour of studio meetings in L.A. last year, which led to a nine-month deal with FX to develop a 30-minute version of the show. Before writing any scripts, they pitched characters (Sinclair: “A shitload”), but the network consistently gravitated toward the more recognizable stock characters. It didn’t pan out. There were other potential homes, too, like Comedy Central, but as Blichfeld puts it, “We were like, ‘Oh, shit, they’re gonna want an episode full of jokes every week when sometimes we want to do an episode about a sad shut-in that isn’t actually laugh-out-loud-funny.’ ” In the end, Vimeo’s offer won them over. Even though the deal only fronts the production costs of six episodes, they hope that charging viewers an as-yet-undetermined price for each episode will create a healthy revenue stream.

And staying indie, at any rate, will allow the show to keep doing what it does well: showcasing undervalued actors, lollygagging in corners of Brooklyn, and chronicling the everyday indignities that city dwellers—not just New Yorkers—endure. Like the houseguest who leaves a pair of filthy Q-tips on the bathroom counter, or those freaks who walk among us clipping their fingernails on the subway. “Katja’s model public citizen is Danish,” Sinclair explains. “Quiet, respectful. Hygienic. Almost anything in New York violates one of those rules.”

Also technically verboten in New York: weed. But there’s nothing shady about Sinclair’s dealer, who has all the emotional intelligence of a gifted therapist and, like any good salesman, remembers flattering details about his clients (“Where’s your lady friend, man? That redhead?”). When the new season debuts in early November, ­Blichfeld and Sinclair will find out whether their own customers mind paying for something they used to get for free—whether those first beloved episodes, maybe, were exactly the right gateway drug.

*This article appears in the September 22, 2014 issue of New York Magazine.

 

http://www.vulture.com/2014/09/more-munchies-the-return-of-high-maintenance.html

 

WTF is an MCN?

Ellen

9/26/2014   Digitday by E 

The land grabs started roughly four years ago, when YouTubers began pulling in real money. Almost overnight, organizations sprung up around the booming Web video economy, with major tech and entertainment executives peeling off to start or join a digital video network. Their pitch to creators: Turn your video-making hobby into a lucrative career.

Today, they’re called multi-channel networks, or MCNs. Similar to how United Artists led Hollywood talent to wrest control of their livelihood from a rigid studio system, MCNs help deft, young creators navigate and profit in a complicated digital landscape. Here’s what that entails:

WTF is an MCN?
MCNs collect and represent talent — folks with popular YouTube channels — and package them for advertisers in exchange for a slice of their income. Offerings differ across each MCN, but they tend to help creators build and share audiences, provide access to production resources and seek sponsors for branded content opportunities.

Who can join an MCN?
Anyone with a sizable YouTube following, basically. Some MCNs are focused on specific content areas. Machinima is centered on gaming culture, DanceOn around the dance community. Other MCNs have a more general array of content. There’s a lot of variation in size and exclusivity, too: A network like Fullscreen serves up 4 billion video views each month across its 50,000 video makers, while Collective Digital Studio draws 1.5 billion monthly views with just 700 creators, which implies the average Collective DS creator has a significantly larger following.

That’s a big gap. What does that entail for folks who sign up?
It means smaller MCNs like Collective DS can pay more individual attention to their creators. Larger MCNs rely more on their creator platforms, where members can access a suite of audience generation and monetization tools. Fullscreen is hands-on with its top members, like comedy duo The Fine Brothers, which have over 10 million YouTube subscribers. At that level, artist management and sponsorship sales become a much more substantial part of the relationship.

What do brands get from working with MCNs?
While YouTube doesn’t own or endorse MCNs, they tend to be trustworthy sources of high-quality YouTube content. Working with an MCN takes a lot of the legwork out of finding relevant channels on which to advertise. MCNs also facilitate branded-content opportunities with top YouTubers.

So MCNs are completely dependent on YouTube?
YouTube is a huge piece of the MCNs’ audience generation and monetization strategy and will be for the foreseeable future. But the top MCNs are becoming broader media entities less dependent on a single platform. Defy Media, for example, represents YouTube comedy group Smosh, which inexplicably has close to 19 million subscribers on the platform. But the majority of the Smosh-related revenue Defy rakes in comes from videos viewed and merchandise sold on Smosh.com, which the MCN operates. The recent Smosh movie deal with Defy investor Lionsgate surely didn’t hurt either.

Wait, Lionsgate? What do big entertainment companies have to do with goofy YouTube videos?
Just as MCNs seek out popular YouTubers, media giants have begun to invest in or even acquire top MCNs. Otter Media, a joint venture between AT&T and The Chernin Group, just acquired Fullscreen. Disney paid $500 million for Maker Studios in April and could shell out as much as $450 million more if the company performs well. Dreamworks spent $33 million for AwesomenessTV last year, with performance incentives that could push the total to $117 million by 2015.

What’s the catch?
Well, in the best case scenario, everyone wins: YouTubers build their brand and make more money, advertisers benefit from the consistent exposure, and MCNs (and their owners or investors) take home a fair but sizable cut. But it doesn’t always turn out that way. MCNs like Maker Studios and Machinima have been criticized for their onerous contracts.

Such as?
Machinima came under fire in 2012 after contributor Ben Vacas discovered he had signed away the rights to anything he posted on YouTube, for life, “in perpetuity, throughout the universe, in all forms of media now known or hereafter devised.”

What’s the solution to these contract disputes?
Who knows. But one thing is certain: always read the fine print.

 

http://digiday.com/publishers/wtf-mcn/

The secret to BuzzFeed’s video success: Data

Ellen

9/24/2014   Digiday

BuzzFeed Motion Pictures wants to be your best friend.

And by all accounts, it’s well on its way: Like the rest of BuzzFeed, the 40-person video department has centered the majority of its content around a cheerful, upbeat tone, an ethos that has helped BuzzFeed become one of the fastest-growing digital video publishers, having just started a video division in 2012. Unlike many text publishers that have pushed into video, BuzzFeed’s videos aren’t boom and bust. They regularly rack up hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube. For example, the last 10 videos BuzzFeed created have view counts between 221,000 and 1 million on BuzzFeed’s primary YouTube channel, BuzzFeedVideo.

Andrew Gauthier, newly promoted to executive producer of BuzzFeed Video, is one of the main forces behind BuzzFeed’s impressive foray into video content. Gauthier, BuzzFeed’s first full-time video employee, now oversees all of the company’s non-sponsored video content. In a recent conversation, he talked with Digiday about BuzzFeed’s video operations and ambitions. Excerpts:

What’s the new role?
I’ve been at BuzzFeed for a little over two years. We’ve obviously grown a lot since 2012: Now we have 40 talented video producers that are making over 30 videos a week. In my new role, I’m focused on establishing short-form video as the engine that runs BuzzFeed Motion Pictures. As we experiment with doing longer-form, serialized content, short-form BuzzFeed video will be the place where we test out new characters, topics, storylines and styles, with the opportunity to bring those things into longer videos and serialized videos.

Following the $50 million Andreessen Horowitz investment, BuzzFeed renamed its video division BuzzFeed Motion Pictures. Does that mean long-form content is a major new focus for the company?
The scope is going to grow in a very organic way, where we’re going to test certain lengths of videos, characters, and topics. In terms of stuff we’re experimenting with, we’ve started an unscripted development team that’s being headed by Henry Goldman. That documentary-style content may run for five to seven minutes or longer.

How are you using data to inform video production?
Data influences every stage of production. In the pre-production stage, we’re very conscious of existing conversations on the Internet, about topics or identities or certain styles that appear to be resonating with people. Everybody that works here lives on the Internet, so it’s this very natural thing to say, “Oh, I’ve noticed that a lot of my friends are posting this type of thing on Facebook.” We’ll talk about why certain things went viral, then we’ll incorporate that into a larger conversation.

And after a video is released?
We pay close attention to how viewers are interacting with our videos. We look at share stats on Facebook, comments on YouTube and BuzzFeed.com, and through those metrics, we will learn about what types of things in the video resonated with viewers, and also how viewers use the video interact with their friends whether they share on Facebook or Twitter or elsewhere.

Do you have an example of data-driven content creation?
We made a video called Weird Things All Couples Do. It got a ton of shares, and we noticed by looking at the comments and shares that a lot of couples were sharing it with each other. Now we’ve done a number of follow-ups. We did Weird Things All Couples Fight About, which has well over 1 million shares and 30 million views on Facebook — and that’s just the Facebook player. Then we did Weird Things Couples Do On Date Night. We have a number of follow-ups in the works about being best friends, siblings, cousins.

Looking at the analytics dashboard, what surprises you, and how do you use that data?
We are continually surprised by the reach of our videos internationally. Our video team is based almost exclusively in Los Angeles. Because a lot of us that are making stuff are American and are based in the U.S., we naturally create stuff for an American audience. But I am continually surprised by our reach beyond the U.S. and beyond English-speaking countries. Specifically, we continually get a lot of viewers from the Philippines, and that’s not something we have consciously targeted. It’s just perhaps certain elements to our viewers that have resonated with people in the Philippines. Videos about friendship and family have done particularly well with our Filipino viewers. We have done a couple of videos that were specifically about being Filipino, about growing up as part of a Filipino family, and we have a couple people on staff here who are Filipino-American, so they were able to build off their personal background to make videos that resonated with millions of people. We are continually surprised by our reach beyond the U.S. and are always looking to expand that to create content that not only American viewers want to share but also international viewers want to share.

Which social platforms have been the best distribution channels for BuzzFeed video?
A significant percentage of our views come from YouTube, but we’ve seen an incredible amount of growth and viewership through the Facebook player. Facebook is a lot more about personal identity and interacting with friends, while YouTube is a lot more about consuming video, so they have pretty different audiences.

Different how?
On YouTube, we recently had a video pass 10 million views: If Disney Princes Were Real. And on Facebook, we’ve had a number of videos that have more than 10 million views, and also some videos have a million shares. That’s really exciting for us. Shares are obviously a big part of what we consider when we’re attacking new platforms and looking at what resonates and what doesn’t.

There isn’t a perfect formula for virality, of course, but BuzzFeed has been remarkably consistent in making videos that are highly shared. What’s the secret?
Our video is a unit of conversation. After we make a video like 13 Things Only Siblings Understand, as an older brother, I’ll share that with my sister, and I don’t really have to add words to it, because in a small way, it sums our relationship. We strive to make videos that include pieces of truth. Hopefully, people feel they need to share it with their friends or family because it adds a certain amount of truth to their lives.

Is that tone something the video department learned from BuzzFeed editorial?
We’ve applied the BuzzFeed voice that our editorial team has established over the years to video. It’s not just positive; we approach the reader or the viewer from the standpoint of being their ally or their proxy. As we develop storylines, we want viewers to say, “That’s so me” and really see themselves in the characters.

How is the video department organized? How do you decide what content to make?
We don’t have a conventional division of labor here, in that we don’t have writers and directors and camera people and editors. We have a bunch of people that do everything. We call them producers, but effectively, they will create a video from beginning to end: write it, shoot it, direct it, edit it. If you have one person making a video from beginning to end, it gets infused with their personal passion.

 

How do you prevent the whole operation from sliding into chaos?
To some extent, chaos is great. We learn a lot by working in an environment where anything is possible, where we walk into work with the desire to take on new challenges.

Any hints about what’s coming up next?
We’re always pushing forward, testing new formats, new characters, new styles. We launched a channel, BuzzFeed Violet, a little over a month ago. The goal there was to establish a handful of characters and to really test characters and establish a community around the characters, similar to what you’ve seen with other personality-driven YouTube channels — the types of people you don’t commonly see on TV and movies but that exist in the world — and use them to tell many, many stories.

 

 

http://digiday.com/publishers/inside-buzzfeed-video/

The Age of the Streaming TV Auteur | Which Streaming Service Should You Sell Your Show To? A Guide for Producers

Ellen

The Age of the Streaming TV Auteur

9/21/2014   New York Magazine   By

There’s a memorable story in Peter Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures, a great history of the 1990s indie-film boom, in which an upstart production company, eager to establish its bona fides, promises an absurd amount of money and unheard-of creative control to an in-demand filmmaker with a suddenly hot property to sell. The year is 1989, the company is Miramax, the filmmaker is a then-26-year-old Steven Soderbergh, the property is sex, lies & videotape, and the result was a renaissance. In the ’90s, startling, innovative, and ­personal films—by directors like Quentin Tarantino, Hal Hartley, Allison Anders, and Whit Stillman—flourished, buoyed by a new marketplace, and a hungry audience, that happily rewarded daring and creativity.

Twenty-five years after sex, lies & videotape, it’s hard not to think of a similar scenario that played out much more recently but on a very different screen: Netflix buying the rights to the show House of Cards. Netflix won that series essentially by offering two seasons, up front, guaranteed—a bid that was both fundamentally insane yet absolutely necessary for the company to establish itself as a legitimate competitor to HBO, Showtime, AMC, and so on. Four Emmy wins and one Golden Globe later, Netflix is no longer looking like the late entrant to the cable-drama sweepstakes but the early adopter among internet content companies, many of which are now angling to become producers of original programming. Earlier this year, Yahoo commissioned two TV-style original comedies; Vimeo has acquired the critically acclaimed web series High Maintenance; and Amazon, having already unleashed the exceptional comedy Transparent, launched an additional five new pilots—including, tellingly, The Cosmopolitans, from ’90s indie auteur Whit Stillman.

All of which is to say: The same swashbuckling energy that gave rise to the ­indie-film movement has migrated to TV programming online. By this analogy, Netflix is Miramax, Amazon is Fox Searchlight, and your laptop is the Sundance Festival—a clearinghouse for potential breakouts waiting to be discovered. No, Netflix, Amazon, and (Lord knows) Yahoo don’t know exactly what they’re doing yet—but that’s kind of the point. They have money, and they’re throwing it around basically to see what will stick, which is exactly the kind of environment that leads to a whole lot of misfires and a few genuine revelations.

Companies like Netflix and Amazon have one crucial advantage: They have a well-built technical infrastructure but little programming experience, while companies like HBO have excellent programming expertise but are playing catch-up on the technical end. One executive described the current climate to me as a horse race in which everyone’s competing but no one knows exactly where the finish line is. So every once in a while, someone just whips the horses to get the pack moving. Netflix’s decision to get into original programming, or HBO’s ongoing flirtation with a stand-alone HBO Go, is just that—whipping the horses. The result of all this horse-­whipping is a series like Orange Is the New Black on Netflix—with its fresh, off-kilter voice and the most radically diverse cast on TV, a show that would be tough to picture on Showtime, let alone ABC.

It’s hard to say whether Amazon’s notion to finance original TV shows in order to promote Amazon Prime—effectively to nudge you to subscribe to free two-day shipping—is a good long-term business plan. But then, many of the most exciting new shows are web series that have no business plan at all. And it’s a great short-term opportunity for some weird, and ­occasionally awesome, new TV. The pilot episode of Transparent on Amazon, which stars Jeffrey Tambor as a transgender dad, was written and directed by Jill Soloway, and watching it, you think this is exactly the kind of personal vision that Miramax used to finance, before Miramax got bought up by Disney.

Since the ’90s heyday, nearly all of the indie shingles at major studios have been shuttered or reabsorbed into their parent companies. Even the Golden Age of TV, as personified by auteur-showrunners like Matthew Weiner and David Chase, has become stultified in its programming choices: “Prestige” cable series now ­honor the rules of their format as faithfully as the most formulaic prime-time procedurals. Halt and Catch Fire is Mad Men set in the 1980s computer industry; The Knick plays like Downton Abbey, M.D. For all its success, Game of Thrones is hardly the TV equivalent of Pulp ­Fiction; it’s more like the TV equivalent of Ben Hur or Lord of the Rings.

Which leaves room, ideally, for a TV equivalent of Pulp Fiction—something so audacious and daring that it will tilt the whole TV industry off its axis. And the new reality is, if there’s going to be a Pulp ­Fiction for TV, you probably aren’t going to see it first on TV. But definitely keep your laptop handy.

*This article appears in the September 22, 2014 issue of New York Magazine.

http://www.vulture.com/2014/09/age-of-the-auteur-on-streaming-tv.html?mid=facebook_nymag

 

Which Streaming Service Should You Sell Your Show To? A Guide for Producers

9/23/2014   New York Magazine   By

House of Cards and Netflix are synonymous with each other: The Kevin Spacey series made the streaming service a serious player as a non-linear TV network, and being on Netflix initially helped the show stand out amid the glut of quality dramas that now populate TV. And yet, House of Cards could’ve easily been an HBO or FX series. Before Netflix agreed to buy two seasons of the show, sight unseen, its producers pitched it all over Hollywood, entertaining offers from multiple outlets before ending up on the nascent streaming network. It was a breakthrough deal, and the fact that it’s succeeded wildly — critical love, Emmy nominations, a prominent place in pop culture — has created a new dynamic: Showrunners and agents now routinely include non-linear services such as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon on their list of stops when setting up pitch meetings for new projects. “They’re all competing in the same sandbox,” one studio executive says of the world order post–House of Cards. “We’re in the most robust, aggressive market [for creators] it could be.”

Recent evidence of the streaming surge has been abundant. As Vulture first reported in June, Judd Apatow’s new comedy series Love was in play at multiple networks, including Hulu, before ultimately landing at Netflix with a two-year pickup. And today, Hulu announced a big deal to air an hourlong drama adaptation of Stephen King’s 11/23/63, to be produced by J.J. Abrams. Traditional broadcast and cable networks still land most projects, of course, if only because there are far more of them and because they can still offer a clearer path to big money in success. But the new Big Three of streaming — Netflix, Amazon and Hulu — are all in the game, and they’ve all got a pile of cash to spend. If you’re a producer looking to take the plunge into the non-linear world, how do you decide where to pitch your project? Let’s take a look at what each of the three networks is looking for and how they’re choosing:

Netflix

Who should sell here: Anyone looking for the biggest (potential) audience — and a big payday. Two executives who’ve had dealings with Netflix both say that when there’s a hot project in the marketplace, Netflix is usually, as one put it, “by far the most aggressive” bidder, assuming they’re interested in the idea. Adds the other exec: “The perception is that Netflix is spending more money on bigger projects with the most prominent stars. They feel more advanced. The rest of [the streaming players] are trying to get their sea legs.” Indeed, while Netflix isn’t any older than its rivals — it began streaming content in 2007, same as Hulu — it dominates the streaming space on multiple levels. It has two buzzy, Emmy-nominated shows (Orange Is the New Black, House of Cards); its base of roughly 36 million U.S. subscribers puts it on par with HBO in terms of reach; and it’s got a huge international reach (with subscribers in over 40 countries and counting). Netflix also most closely replicates the HBO model in terms of original programming, offering much more than just comedies and dramas: stand-up specials, documentaries, and soon, a talk show with Chelsea Handler. While the Netflix imprimatur doesn’t automatically convey success or acclaim (see Hemlock Grove), getting a show green-lit by Netflix all but guarantees it will get noticed.

How it chooses: In the early days of Netflix originals, all the way back in 2013, much was made of the service’s reliance on its storied algorithm — that super-advanced computer program that is always recommending what subscribers should watch next based on past viewing habits. Initially designed to help guide users through Netflix’s vast feature-film library, execs publicly stated the algorithm was also used when it came time to decide how to proceed in the development of Netflix’s own original series. “It gave us some confidence that we could find an audience for a show like House of Cards,” a company rep told the New York Times’ David Carr in February 2013. Perhaps, but the Kevin Spacey series didn’t come to life because a computer told Netflix to build it: House of Cards was pitched to multiple networks by producers, with Netflix snagging the show after it agreed to go straight to production on two seasons of the show — no pilot, no let’s-see-how-season-one-does. More than anything, that sort of boldness is what really has guided the Netflix development process: Unlike Amazon and its “pilot season,” Netflix decides it wants to do a show before a single frame is filmed. Even HBO usually does pilots. Last year, Sarandos told Vulture that willingness to go big is what will ensure he gets the best shows for his service. “By going straight to series, the people [who] have a great story to tell will bring it to us first,” he said. Of course, now that Netflix has established a track record for success, getting those projects first is likely even easier.

The downside: The success of Netflix’s first few originals means expectations for all of the service’s new shows are high, perhaps unreasonably so. Producers bringing shows to Netflix now have to worry about jumping over the high bar Netflix has already set. Pressure to be really good isn’t a bad thing, of course, and any producer pitching to a service such as Netflix or AMC or Showtime almost certainly does so because she thinks she’s got something special. (If you’re just looking for a big payday, network TV is still a much better option.) But Netflix doesn’t have unlimited promotional resources, and reporters who cover entertainment can sometimes be wary of giving too much coverage to one service. As Netflix keeps expanding, newer shows might get lost in the shadow of its monster hits. It’s also quite possible that as Netflix matures — or if subscriber growth starts to level off — it could cut back on how many new shows it adds each year, making it tougher to land a series order there.

Amazon

Who should sell here: Producers who want to make independent movies, but in TV series form. Projects such as Transparent and the just-released Whit Stillman pilot The Cosmopolitans have shown Amazon is willing to nurture ideas that don’t instantly scream “mass appeal” and work with creators who might not have past experience building blockbusters. “If you want to create SST Records, or some awesome label, you have to focus on having a high bar,” says Amazon Studios chief Roy Price. “There are a number of adjectives that are bad. ‘Good-ish’ is bad. ‘Solid’ is bad. You want a show that is doing something interesting and groundbreaking, and you want to be working with the best, most interesting, most passionate creators … We’re really looking to empower creators with a vision.” Price also points to the loose infrastructure at Amazon as another selling point for would-be producers. The development process at the company “is pretty nimble, in terms of decision making and a lack of bureaucracy,” Price says. “Things get done. There aren’t a lot of priorities other than making a good show. We’re 100 percent aligned with producers on that goal.”

How it chooses: Before you get a series order, Amazon will put your show under a very public microscope, putting the pilot episode online for customers to rate. While this means your efforts will at least get some audience — unlike the dozens of TV pilots churned out each year which never get beyond network screening rooms — it also ups the embarrassment level if Amazon ultimately passes. Some producers might also not like the idea of their work being trotted out for the masses like a contestant on America’s Got Talent, particularly since many TV shows take several episodes to come together. But while Amazon’s version of the Netflix algorithm may seem a bit gimmicky, Price has always been careful to note that user reviews are just one factor in deciding what gets made. And even when he’s looking at said data, he’s not particularly interested in how many people gave a show a thumbs up. “You’re not just looking for the show that the largest number of people liked,” he explains. “You’re really looking for a show that can become a group of people’s favorite show, that they think it’s a great show. The goal is to get shows people really, really like. That’s when [data] becomes useful.”

Possible downside: Unlike Netflix and Hulu, Amazon Prime Instant Video (the formal name for the service) is not a stand-alone product. Its subscribers include millions of Amazon users who signed up for free two-day shipping and might not even know they have access to shows such as Alpha House. “It’s hard to say what the Amazon demo is because it has a dual role,” says one TV-industry insider. By itself, this distinction doesn’t matter much: There’s no evidence Amazon users are any less (or more) passionate or engaged in content than those who subscribe to a video-only streaming network. But long-term, the fact that Prime Instant Video isn’t its own entity could make it a whole lot easier to shut down should Jeff Bezos decide the cost of making expensive TV shows isn’t responsible for either attracting or retaining Prime subscribers. To be sure, there’s been absolutely no indication any such plug-pulling is in the offing, and if more projects such as Transparent break out, the service’s long-term future should grow even more secure.

Hulu

Who should sell there: Any producer who wants to be the next Matt Weiner or Chuck Lorre. Assuming Transparent breaks through with audiences the way it has with critics, both Amazon and Netflix will have found one or more signature series, shows which define them in the eyes of viewers. So far, Hulu — despite getting a modicum of buzz with half-hours such as The Awesomes and this summer’s The Hotwives of Orlando — simply doesn’t have that singular success. “There’s a unique opportunity for the right group of creators to come in and help creatively define the service,” says one TV-industry insider familiar with the streaming space. “AMC was John Wayne movies before Matt Weiner got there, and now he’s the guy who kind of built AMC. For the person who can get a show on Hulu that connects with the Zeitgeist, they can be part of the team that builds this thing. And that’s attractive to a lot of talent.” Another selling point for producers pondering where to park their pet projects: Hulu’s new content chief, Craig Erwich. Unlike the techies at the top of Netflix and Amazon, the veteran Warner Bros. and Fox Broadcasting exec is a Hollywood development veteran whose modest manner has won him many friends around Tinseltown. He’ll likely lean heavily on those relationships as he hunts for his big hit.

How it chooses: Like any streaming service, Hulu has the ability to mine reams of data to help guide its development process. It knows who is watching its shows and how they’re being consumed. But while there’s a basic overlay of information that’s factored into decisions, Hulu picks its shows in a pretty old-school way, Erwich says: “It comes down to passion, guts, inspiration — on our side and on the side of people doing the show.” It’s also worth noting that whatever process Hulu has had in place for developing shows is in flux: Both Erwich and his boss, Hulu CEO Mike Hopkins, have both been on the job less than a year.

Possible downside: Your show will be interrupted by commercials. Unlike its main rivals, Hulu Plus features advertising, despite charging its 6 million subscribers $7.99 per month. (The ad breaks are targeted and more limited than on the free version of Hulu, but they’re still there.) This fact may turn off a few producers (and some potential subscribers) — but as basic cable networks such as AMC and FX have proven, there’s no reason great TV and advertising can’t coexist. Advertising can also be an upside: Hulu will often promote its own originals during commercial breaks, giving newer Hulu shows a type of marketing support Amazon and Netflix can’t match. What’s more, while Netflix and Amazon only let paid subscribers regularly watch its shows, Hulu Plus series frequently will appear on free Hulu as well (albeit with more ads, and sometimes without the ability to watch a whole season at once). That means a producer setting up a series at Hulu could potentially reach a bigger audience. “Beyond our 6 million subs, there’s a huge amount of traffic driven to our platform from Hulu,” Erwich says, noting the site’s 30 million monthly unique users and the presence of next-day episodes of broadcast network hits. “So there’s massive circulation. There’s a huge chance to get sampled.”

The Other Players

Crackle: Sony’s ad-supported network has one legit hit — Jerry Seinfeld’s twist on the talk show Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee — and a slew of other action-oriented, dude-friendly fare featuring slightly recognizable stars such as David Arquette, Gina Gershon, and Patrick Warburton.

Yahoo: The internet giant’s free, ad-supported VOD service has been slowly building up the quality of its content: A deal last year brought SNL’s classic sketch catalogue to the site, while a partnership with LiveNation this year has resulted in a regular series of live concert events from acts such as Justin Timberlake and KISS. The possible game-changer comes early next year, when the sixth season of Community will air exclusively on Yahoo.

Vimeo: Originally known for music videos and user-generated content, the site has just started investing in original content, setting aside $10 million to help develop indie movies and funding six episodes of the pot comedy High Maintenance. For now, it’s offering titles on a pay-per-view basis, iTunes-like, rather than as part of a monthly or annual subscription fee.

Playstation Plus: The subscription-based component of Sony’s gaming platform gets its first big injection of TV-like content in December with the superhero drama Powers (based on the graphic novels by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming). Sony is expected to add more TV and movie content as well as it looks to get more of the millions of PS users to upgrade to the subscription service.

*This is an extended version of an article that appears in the September 22, 2014 issue of New York Magazine.

‘WIGS’ Creators Launch Indigenous Media With WPP, ITV Backing

Ellen

9/16/2014   Deadline   by

Indigenous Media, a digital-video company led by film and TV vets Jon Avnet, Rodrigo Garcia and Jake Avnet, has launched with investments by ITV and WPP. Jon Miller, former head of AOL and News Corp.‘s digital media unit, is non-executive chairman.

Producer/director/writers Avnet (Fried Green Tomatoes, Justified, Righteous Kill) and Garcia (In Treatment, Carnivale, Six Feet Under) and Avnet’s tech-savvy son, Jake Avnet, are the creators behind WIGS, the female-centric online site whose TV-quality shows run on YouTube, Hulu and FOXNOW.

Jon Avnet said the success of WIGS, financially and otherwise, over the past few years made Indigenous, and its big-time backing, possible.

“It was the fact that WIGS attracted such a high level of talent and got so much support from the journalistic community,” Avnet said. “Also, the fact that our production model worked. It was serious validation of the work.”

That production model involved careful writing and project development, focusing on story lines that could be compelling but not expensive to produce.

“The key was the production and the writing and conceptualization was very, very thrifty,” Avnet said. “That’s not easy.”

Given the many relationships the older Avnet and Garcia have built in their years in Hollywood, they were able to attract traditional-media notables on both sides of the camera, including Julia Stiles, Jennifer Beals, America Ferrera, Jennifer Garner, Anna Paquin, Alfred Molina, Betty Thomas and Neil LaBute.

Episodes are typically 7- to 8-minutes long, but also are written so they can be recombined into longer programs. The second season of Blue, which stars Stiles, was shot as a series of shorts, for instance, but what runs on Hulu is 11 one-hour episodes created from those shorts.

Now, with Indigenous, the company plans to expand its scope and ambition in many ways. First is with genre, moving beyond the core female audience that WIGS attracted. Garcia said they will do more half-hour- and hour-long episodes, and create them not just for a YouTube world, but also target many other distribution platforms, digital and otherwise.

“We want to be able to do more content,” Garcia said. “Not just half hours and hours, but just more of it.”

They also plan to leverage ITV’s international oomph to take show concepts and formats they develop and adapt those to international markets such as Brazil and Turkey that have very large and active online audiences.

“We believe high-quality, digital narrative content will have a tremendously long, monetizable tail,” said Avnet. The deals with ITV and WPP “give us reach. Some of our stuff will work in other markets. When you look at the Rubik’s cube of how do you monetize,” it will be vital to develop international markets, and possible new distribution opportunities in the fast-evolving digital-video world.

Avnet and Garcia were vague about the investment capital they’ve received: “A significant amount is all we’re allowed to say,” Avnet said. “We wanted the opportunity to be able to stick around (long enough to make the venture succeed.) We want to do stuff that’s sustainable, that lasts. That’s what we’re aiming for.”

They also plan to tap the brand relationships of WPP’s Group M, which owns the direct corporate connection with Indigenous and specializes in brand relationships. Indigenous will continue its programming relationships with Fox on multiple platforms.

Beyond WPP and ITV, other investors include Steven Tisch, Advancit Capital (the National Amusements-connected investment fund whose principals include Miller, Shari Redstone and Jason Ostheimer), Michael Price and Dr. Aaron Stern. CAA advised on the transactions.

 

http://deadline.com/2014/09/wigs-indigenous-media-wpp-itv-fox-jon-avnet-rodrigo-garcia-835173/

 

It’s No Blip, Online Video Is Taking Ad Dollars From Traditional TV: Analyst

Ellen

9/2/2014   Deadline

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The debate is over, or should be, MoffettNathanson Research’s Michael Nathanson says this morning: Advertisers are shifting spending to online video at the expense of traditional TV programming that isn’t “essential” — meaning live sports and events, hit scripted shows, and cable shows that appeal to hard-to-reach audiences. Even with a flood of political ads coming over the next few months, Nathanson just lowered his 2014 ad forecast for national broadcast TV to +2% from +5%, and for national cable to +5% from +6%.

Many media CEOs dismissed the weak ad trends in the first half of this year, blaming the Winter Olympics in Q1 or the World Cup, which peaked in July during Q3. CBS chief Les Moonves, for one, said that he’s “now seeing pacing improve significantly here in Q3, both nationally and locally, and Q4 will be even better than Q3.” The industry view is that traditional TV ad sales will pick up again as Nielsen improves its ability to measure online viewers. In June RBC Capital Markets’ David Bank also downplayed the digital threat, noting that only about 16% of the online video ad inventory accompanies content that would be suitable for a network TV advertiser.

But Nathanson says that he was “shocked” to see that online accounted for 98% of the growth in total ad spending in Q2 vs the period last year. “This is the largest contribution to growth since 2008 when online was growing in the face of a declining traditional ad market.” Ad spending for broadcast TV fell 4.7% in Q2 which reveals “the weak underlying non-sport advertising trends,” he says. While cable networks were up 3.6%, “only Disney ended up beating our estimates thanks in part to the strength of the World Cup on ESPN.”

Some of the recent weakness was due to Hollywood itself: Faced with anemic summer box office sales “film studios have kept a tighter leash on marketing spend,” the analyst says. The number of movie-related spots was down 10% in June and 24% in July, according to TiVo data.

Still, Nathanson says that execs should expect “a continued shift in TV [ad] budgets towards online video and display.” For 2015 — which won’t have an Olympics or major elections — he expects total TV ad sales to fall 0.3% with local stations -5.0%, the Big 4 broadcast networks -3.0%, national cable nets +5.0%, local cable -1.0%, and syndication (which includes WB, CW, and MyNetwork TV) flat.

 

http://deadline.com/2014/09/tv-advertising-online-taking-dollars-827634/

 

Has Crackle Cracked the Code For Over-The-Top Content Companies?

Ellen

9/14/2014   Deadline

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Crackle, once an odd bird among the flock of startups in the emerging world of online video, finally seems to be flying in the right direction. Crackle’s timing couldn’t be better, as consumer frustration grows over cable and other pay-TV providers. Suddenly, more people are getting their TV-like entertainment experiences in new ways, and are expecting increasingly high-quality material when they go there.

Crackle started early in the last decade as a stand-alone company called Grouper. Sony bought Grouper for $65 million in 2006, and a year later, renamed and refocused it into something like what it what it is now, a free, ad-supported channel of what looks like traditional TV, though technically, it isn’t.

The original approach – featuring lots of not-very-distinguished action films and TV shows culled from the deep recesses of Sony’s library – has evolved in the years since. Now the company is, as CEO Eric Berger says, “both a studio and a network,” mixing library TV shows and films with original content and editorial material about that content from Sony’s huge TV production operations and other providers such as Lionsgate, Fox, MGM, Universal, Snag Films and Toei.

“Think of it as a network that’s not that dissimilar to an FX,” Berger said. “We layer original programming over library content.”

The programming, per its roots, has “a male sensibility, international in flavor,” said Berger. The site does do a couple of things differently from a traditional TV network, however. For one, it’s only available “over the top,” the buzzword du tech for video sources that are distributed through platforms such as the Web, mobile apps, and TV-side streaming devices such as videogame consoles, Roku and Apple TV.

And the shows themselves can be released in a variety of ways, in clumps for the binge watchers out there, or on a weekly schedule. They may be a standard 22 or44 minutes long, or just a 2-minute video snack, like their award-winning series from Jerry Seinfeld, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.

Berger is discreet, to the point of vague, about the company’s financial picture, and it’s not broken out separately in Sony’s financial reporting. But he does say, “We’re very happy with the financials for us. We’re a meaningful part of Sony Pictures TV‘s business. TV is not going away, but OTT is a meaningful new part of that business.”

It may soon become even more meaningful. Months and months of executives’ hints at investor conferences and media reports say Sony is close to launching an Internet-based pay-TV service as an alternative to traditional cable TV.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Sony has finalized a deal to carry more than 20 of Viacom’s channels, including MTV and Nickelodeon, as one bulwark of the new service. Fox and Disney reportedly are also considering offering their channels. Such an online pay-TV service could provide yet another high-profile distribution option for Crackle, which already is available in 21 countries, including Australia and South America, on the web, through apps and with hundreds of devices.

Executives have said viewership these days is spread relatively evenly across users on PCs, smartphones or tablets and streaming-video devices such as Roku and Apple TV.

Its best-known program remains Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. When it launched in 2012, Comedians seemed to be just an entertaining little goof to pass the time after Seinfeld had cashed in big with his iconic 1990s sitcom. The premise is simple, and as literal as the show’s name: Seinfeld and another comedian take a ride in a classic car to get some java and jaw with each other.

But a funny thing happened on the way to pick up some joe: the show has become something of a critical darling. This weekend, it won a Streamy Award as best non-fiction show after nabbing a 2013 Primetime Emmy nomination for best short-form non-fiction programming. Other notable performers are making content for Crackle now too, and say they’re happy about the decision.

“When I first got offered to do this, I asked myself, ‘Do I want to be on the Internet?” said Jesse Bradford (Flags of Our Fathers, Bring It On), a star of Sequestered. “But I’m glad I did. It’s the interesting space right now.”

The show, a courtroom drama about a sequestered jury, also stars Summer Glau (Firefly, Terminator: The Chronicles of Sarah Connor) and Mr. All Media, Patrick Warburton (Rules of Engagement, Family Guy). The show also has some online roots: one of the show’s directors is Kevin Tancharoen, whose Mortal Kombat: Legacy 2 online series also won a Streamy Award this past weekend among a raft of nominations.

“I had to get over my own preconceived notion of what is going on in the world,” Bradford said. “TV is becoming movies, the Internet is becoming TV and film is becoming museum pieces that are hard to access.”

The show debuted half its episodes Aug. 5, with the other half coming in October. Because it’s the Internet, Bradford said, “the parameters are really loose. It’s not quite so paint-by-numbers.”

And he had another realization: Crackle’s production crew, “though they were a little young and a little green, had worked together a lot.” The result was the kind of near-telepathic cooperation and efficiency between crew members that Bradford said you might see on the set of a veteran director such as Clint Eastwood or Steven Spielberg, who have worked with many of the same behind-the-camera principals for years. That makes for great efficiency, though budgets still don’t leave a lot of room for dallying.

“What you get are these groups of people who know how to work together,” Bradford said. “How are we (shooting) 20 pages (of script) a day? That’s how.”

Crackle has other known quantities featured on its original shows: action series Cleaners, for instance, stars Missi Pyle, David Arquette and Gina Gershon. Crackle produced a first-ever “digital feature” last year, the actioner Extraction,  that stars Danny Glover, Sean Astin, Vinnie Jones and Falk Hentschel.

After debuting Sequestered and the second season of Cleaners this summer, the company has more original series coming out this fall. One big venture is the game show spinoff Sports Jeopardy, hosted by the urbane sports broadcaster and syndicated radio host Dan Patrick. It debuts Sept. 24 with new episodes each Wednesday. Other plans include longer-form projects, including a Joe Dirt sequel, said Berger.

Here’s a teaser trailer featuring Patrick:

http://youtu.be/n8trYUCN4Mw

 

http://deadline.com/2014/09/crackle-jesse-bradford-jerry-seinfeld-eric-berger-sony-pictures-tv-832998/

 

A Video Series Turns a Spotlight on Local Artists

Ellen

9/10/2014   The New York Times

AN online documentary about Porridge Papers, a company in Lincoln, Neb., that makes the type of deckle-edged recycled paper found in art supply and stationary stores, includes a field-trip visit by schoolchildren to the small mill and print shop.

“We love showing it to the kids because this is obviously nothing that they’ve ever heard of before,” says Christopher James, the owner of the company, as the students happily stir pulp with their hands and sift it onto screens, where it is pressed before being dried. “They’re very dialed in to the electronics, so to get them to come in here and think about that piece of paper” and how it was made fascinates children, he said.

One video features Claire Painter, who has a small leatherworking brand, Clever with Leather, in Lexington, Ky.

The video about such low-tech craftsmanship turns out to be a marketing campaign for a decidedly high-tech telecommunications company, Windstream Communications of Little Rock, Ark., which provides services like broadband Internet and telephone landlines in smaller cities and rural areas. A video series and Tumblr page, Locally Crafted, highlights people with creative pursuits in the areas that Windstream serves.

One video shows Dave Hall, also of Lincoln, whose auto shop, Restore a Muscle Car, specializes in making run-down cars from the 1970s like Firebirds or Camaros look — and sound — as if they just rolled out of the showroom. Another features Claire Painter, who has a small leatherworking brand, Clever with Leather, in Versailles, Ky. And the newest video, which is being introduced online on Thursday, features Ed Puterbaugh of Lexington, Ky., who owns a brand of locally sourced and made cheeses, Boone Creek Creamery.

The campaign is by Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal & Partners, New York, part of MDC Partners, and direction and production was handled within the agency by other MDC Partners divisions including the Media Kitchen. Windstream, which declined to reveal the production expense for the four videos, and four more that will appear through the end of the year, spent $4.3 million on advertising in 2013, according to the Kantar Media unit of WPP.

The web series is what marketers call branded content or branded entertainment, meaning that it aims primarily to entertain rather than to overtly sell products. Each episode opens with text that indicates that it is presented by Windstream, but contrary to what is often the case with branded content, the company is never mentioned or even obliquely evoked otherwise.

Sam Chotiner, a strategy director at Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal & Partners, which is the agency of record for Windstream, said that the company specified its selling points in traditional advertising, but that the video series was intended to promote uncelebrated people in the areas where the company does business.

“We thought that trying to sneak in a shot of a computer or phone line would get in the way of the stories,” he said. “Windstream completely understood and pushed for this strategy, which is about telling stories that matter in our footprint, and finding people who will really appreciate the exposure and platform.”

Barbara Lippert, an editor at large at MediaPost, said she was awed by the quality of the videos.

“They’re just beautiful little films,” she said. “I wouldn’t classify them as ads because there’s no selling, but the execution was fantastic.”

She added that the approach could appeal to consumers who have grown frustrated with some of the bigger telecommunications companies, which Windstream competes against in some of the larger markets it serves.

“Everybody hates Comcast and Time Warner because their service is terrible and because their constant nonstop blaring commercials are so in-your-face,” Ms. Lippert said. “And this is the opposite of that, so people who are fed up with the other ones might really appreciate this approach.”

In a Harris Poll in May on the reputation of the 60 most visible companies, Time Warner Cable ranked 45th, with a 65.8 score out of a possible 100, or “fair” reputation. Comcast, which is seeking to acquire Time Warner, ranked 50th, with a 62.6 rating, or “poor” reputation.

Michele Shaw, the director of consumer marketing communications at Windstream, made no direct comparison to larger telecom companies, but said that the new Locally Crafted series highlighted her company’s presence in smaller markets.

“Our brand is committed to providing services that connect rural communities and we believe that this Locally Crafted platform is the perfect extension of our brand position,” she said.

Mr. James of Porridge Papers said the video of his company, which was released online on June 25, prompted articles in newspapers in Lincoln and Omaha.

“It’s an odd pairing to have a telecommunications company work with someone that makes paper by hand,” he said. “But what it does, though, is bring two businesses together that are in the community and in the long run that definitely helps both of them out.”

Mr. James said he was pleasantly surprised that Windstream was happy to feature him even after learning that his company was halfway through a two-year contract with Time Warner. In a year, when he can do so without incurring a financial penalty, he said planned to switch to Windstream.