One aspect of television that has been impacted by the Internet, and even video games and VCRs, is the traditional broadcast clock - general programming in timed dayparts. Running home to catch the news at 6:00pm or tuning into That 70s Show at 8:00pm Mondays is about to be a thing of the past, the paradigm is over.
Why does a sitcom have to be 30 minutes in length (actually, 22 minutes without credits, commercials, promos, etc.), or a drama an hour? The TV networks in the U.K. have never followed this primarily American broadcast trait, opting instead for 20 minutes, 45 minutes, 50 minutes and staggered start times.
On this side of the Atlantic we see a similar approach on public television stations such as PBS and Knowledge Network. Although still reliant on top- and bottom-of-the-clock start times there is far greater use of interstitial programming - short, entertaining or informational non-commercial inserts used to s-t-r-e-t-c-h the programming to time.
In the Golden Days of television commercials running two, even three minutes in length were not unheard of. Today, 30 seconds is the norm even though the odd 15-second spot continues to appear.
Worldwide, actual program lengths are being tweaked. UPN, for instance, is developing 15-minute TV shows. This is due entirely to the perceived reduced attention span of viewers. Perhaps we should call it ADD: Audience Deficit Disorder! Seriously though, networks are going to start throwing all sorts of newfangled packages at us, all aimed at reclaiming audience viewing patterns that have been exposed to a severe attitude adjustment. If nothing else broadcast experiments can be entertaining in and of themselves and can lead to actual progress in TV programming and packaging. It’s happened before.
In the early seventies ABC experimented with 45 minute TV shows. In an effort to keep an audience in place — an audience they had spent a great deal of money luring in the first place — the Big Three experimented with a number of novel ideas.
ABC chose to program two 45-minute shows back to back to complete a 90-minute block. Had the content been there — the shows were both dogs — this experiment might have worked. What came out of this experiment, though, was the birth of the 90-minute TV program. ABC invented the Movie Of The Week (MOW) — in fact it was called the ABC Movie Of The Week — and it allowed a number of young TV episodic directors their first shot at so-called feature-style directing. Steven Spielberg is probably the most famous content creator to come out of that lab with his seminal, almost dialogue-less film Duel starring Dennis Weaver.
NBC created their own 90-minute block called The Name of The Game. This was a forerunner of the serialized (as opposed to episodic) form of primetime TV we see today in the form of NYPD Blue, ER, The Practice, et al. It begat a Sunday night staple in the TV diets of viewers at the time called The NBC Sunday Night Mystery Movie. Not really a movie at all, this effort was really a means of producing quality 90-minute (sometimes two-hour) projects that cost more money than traditional fare, but allowed for bigger stars and longer story arcs. Programs that came out of this period were The Bold Ones, Columbo, Banacek, MacMillan and Wife and McCloud.
CBS was really the only network that didn’t participate in this experiment, although they did adopt the MOW formula to great success later.
Proving that you can teach an old dog new tricks, Pearson Television of the UK was very smart in the highly competitive worldwide program content marketplace when they acquired broadcast AND format rights from CBS (for the world, not including North America) to old TV shows such as I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners. However, they had absolutely no intention of ever broadcasting the old versions. They are now producing or co-producing localized versions of these programs from scratch with regionally known talent. They are doing this across Europe. A localized version of I Love Lucy in Spain and The Honeymooners in both Italy and Germany (two different versions don’t forget) are constantly in their respective country’s primetime Top Ten!
As if we needed another example of content convergence, there’s the story of Toronto-based producer Jonathan Block-Verk. He was the inaugural winner in the Microsoft Interactive Pitch contest held at NATPE. His winning pitch, Space Challenger: A Home Improvement Game Show, got him US$50,000 in development funds, and a first-look deal with Columbia-TriStar distribution. The fact that he will manage to leverage his US$50,000 into almost CDN$75,000 because of the favourable exchange rate, and that he had only 60 seconds in which to make his case, also make this noteworthy. Who says lifestyle television has no place on the Net…?!
Most people on the content side of this business see AtomFilms of Seattle as the epitome of what is possible on the Net. Yet Mika Salmi (Founder and CEO) understands that traditional media plays a very important role in what they’re trying to accomplish. At NATPE AtomFilms most resembled a traditional television syndicator. Salmi’s company is barely 18 months old, but already it has deals with more than 35 television stations and networks as well as about 15 websites. Network customers include HBO which licenses Salmi’s content for interstitials. Deals are modeled like typical syndication deals, and run in the thousands to tens of thousands of dollars. Like Macromedia (their Shockwave website has output deals with Matt Stone, Trey Parker and Tim Burton), AtomFilms has exclusive content output deals with Bill Plympton (Plymptoons) and Oscar-winning Aardman Animation (Wallace and Gromit, Creature Comforts).
Here’s their mission statement:
to every conceivable audience, leveraging both traditional
and emerging distribution channels.