Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz are creating a new show
for MySpace and
the Web.
I spoke to MySpaceTV general manager Jeff Berman
yesterday, and here are the full details of the show and what impact it
could make when it debuts in November.
Facebook
may be getting all
the headlines lately, but MySpace still has a few cards up its sleeve
—
including the connections it has to some of the top names in
traditional media, thanks to its parent company, media and
entertainment giant News Corp.
The social-networking
site
announced today that it has signed an exclusive deal with Ed Zwick and
Marshall Herskovitz, the Hollywood duo that produced such hit TV shows
as Thirtysomething and My So-Called Life,
for the rights to a new Internet drama the pair are working on, called Quarterlife.
On MySpaceTV First
Episodes — or webisodes — of the show,
which follows a group of
twentysomethings through the eyes of one young girl with a video-blog,
will appear first on MySpaceTV, and then on the Quarterlife.com
website.
Jeff Berman, the general manager of MySpaceTV, said in an
interview
that the show was a “landmark moment” for MySpace,
and that it would be
“the highest-quality serialized content ever to appear on the
Internet.
We’re talking about the same production values as 24
or Prison Break.”
There have been a number of episodic TV-style shows created
for the
Internet, including the popular Lonelygirl15 show, which was developed
by a trio of unknowns and also appears on MySpaceTV.
More recently,
former Walt Disney CEO Michael Eisner’s company created a
show called Prom Queen, which aired on MySpaceTV
and drew a large following.
Entertainment websites have been speculating for several
months
about a possible Internet offering from Mr. Zwick and Mr. Herskovitz,
after a number of reports leaked out about TV writers and production
staff working on something called Quarterlife.
The Hollywood duo had a traditional TV show of the same name
that ran briefly in 2005.
Debuts On November 11th
“We’ve been talking to [Zwick and
Herskovitz] for the past several
weeks, and we’re delighted to be able to announce
this,” Mr. Berman
said. The first “webisode” will be posted on
MySpaceTV on November 11.
Under the terms of the deal, the social-networking site has a
24-hour window during which the webisode will only be available on
MySpaceTV. After that, it will appear on Quarterlife.com.
Both sites
will have interactive features, Mr. Berman said, but on MySpace viewers
will be able to interact with the cast through their MySpace pages.
MySpace users and bloggers on other sites will also be able to
“embed” the webisodes in their pages by pasting in
a small chunk of
code, as they can with video clips on other sites such as YouTube,
Blip.tv and DailyMotion.
When asked whether the new show would have a mobile component
involving cellphones, Mr. Berman said “stay
tuned.”
More To Come?
He also said that
MySpaceTV was working on several other projects with content creators
in the entertainment community.
According to Mr. Berman, more than 50 million users stream
video
each month from their MySpace webpages, and the social-networking site
as a whole produces 500 million individual video streams every month.
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.
