We’ve just had the
National Association of Television Program Executives conference in Las
Vegas, and there were some interesting debates taking place, some of
which focussed on the future of traditional television.
Jeff Zucker, CEO of NBC Universal, did the opening keynote for
the conference and
talked
about how — surprise, surprise — the
industry is “under
pressure.”
I’ll
bet that got some big laughs. It’s probably also not that
surprising that he didn’t spend much time talking about the
writers’
strike and its effect on the industry, although he did drop in that old
line about “trading analog dollars for digital
pennies,” just for good
measure.
The part that I found really striking, though, was near the
end, where Zucker starts
talking about
how he thinks the system of making dozens of expensive — and
ultimately
futile — TV pilots is a dumb way to do things.
Half A Billion Dollars On Pilots!
When you listen to
the numbers involved, it’s hard not to agree: The big five
networks
spent $500-million last year on about 80 pilots, he says, of which only
eight were brought back for a second season. And even among those,
“none could be considered a big success.”
What kind of crazy business spends a half a billion dollars on
80
prototypes, and gets less than 10 per cent that actually work?
That
might make sense if you’re an experimental research lab
— preferably
government funded, so that your success rate doesn’t actually
matter —
but shouldn’t the mass-market TV business have a bit better
idea of
what it’s doing than that?
I assume that every one of those was
greenlighted by someone who hoped they would get a monster hit like CSI
or Law & Order, and then they could afford to write off all the
other losers.
Cheap Webisodes Could Be The Answer
If I were a TV executive, I would put down the crack pipe or
whatever they’re smoking over there and put some small
amounts of money
into a few Webisodes, or maybe look around at what’s catching
the eye
of my target market at FunnyorDie.com
or Break.com
or places like that.
Finance some things on the cheap and then turn
them into something when they take off — flushing billions of
dollars
down the drain on pilots in hope that you’ll magically hit
the CSI
jackpot is insane.
Written by Mathew Ingram, a technology journalist. Catch his views on the intersection between media and the web at MathewIngram.com. This post is licensed under the Creative Commons.
