Lost and Gossip Girl - A Case Study
Last week Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet published an interesting article on the future of television. Since most people don’t read Norwegian and the article touches on some interesting facts and figures I’ve borrowed heavily from it here. If you know Norwegian, it’s worth a read. If not I’ll try to sum it up for you and ad on a few points for good measure.
On November 11th The New York Times published a piece by Lost producer Damon Lindelof titled Mourning TV. In it Lindelof explains the background for the current Writers Guild strike and the ramifications this strike might have on our viewing habits in the foreseeable future (namely that unless the conflict is resolved there aren’t going to be any new shows for quite some time - like Spring 2009 quite some time!).
If you don’t want to read the article (you should by the way), here are the main points:
- Historically the writers are paid not only for the original show but for any residual income thereof (international syndication, DVD sales etc)
- The writers are currently not being paid for any web-related broadcasting because this type of broadcasting does not generate direct income, at least according to the networks themselves
- With more and more shows moving to the web (Gossip Girl being the perfect example - more on that later) there is a substantial amount of revenue that is not being shared with the content creators
That pretty much sums up the strike itself. But the strike is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg - a consequence of a larger shift in paradigms that is threatening to topple the broadcast giants and change the way we watch our entertainment forever.
In a strange way it is my background in analytical philosophy that helped me fully realize what was happening. Over the last few years I’ve been working with broadcasting both on television and the web. And knowing what to look for I’ve seen the telltale signs of a shift in paradigms, or what Thomas Kuhn would call a scientific revolution taking place right in front of me. A scientific revolution takes place when theories, techniques, technology or circumstances changes to such an extent that the “old ways” are completely replaced by new ones. In this process the gap between the two fronts widens as the “old” practitioners hold on to their ideals refusing to accept anything new while the “new” practitioners discard the old and create a set of new ideals. This divide only widens until the new paradigm takes over leaving the old one a distant memory.
In television this shift can be seen in the way the established broadcasters are dealing with the emergence of PVRs, TiVo and the internet. In his article Lindelof correctly states that when people record or download the shows and skip the commercial breaks they are removing the very element necessary for the show to be created in the first place. The main reason the networks can afford to make great shows is advertising sales but if people have the ability to easily ignore the advertising who is going to buy the spots? This isn’t a new problem - the issue first surfaced with the emergence of VCRs, but it is far more complicated today because unlike a VCR a PVR or even a computer can record countless hours of shows and also gives the viewer the ability to share commercial free shows with their friends for free.
But this is the “old” way of thinking. On the other side of this argument you have the explosively popular teen show Gossip Girl from The O.C. creator Josh Schwartz. Entertainment Weekly reports that while the show ranks a dismal 105th on the Nielsen ratings with only 2.6 million viewers, it has become unbelievably popular both on the web and as a “TiVoed” show. With the introduction of new ways of presenting and watching content the people behind Gossip Girl have realized that judging the popularity of the show solely on the number of viewers that catch it during it’s scheduled air time is no longer accurate. Turns out that if you include people who PVR or TiVo the show in your calculations viewership increases by 14% among teenage girls and 18% in the age group 18 - 34. Ad to that the fact that Gossip Girl is the most downloaded show on iTunes and you have a hit on your hands - just not in the old way.
The real challenge facing the broadcast industry is that the consumer / viewer no longer needs to conform to the standards they run by. To put it simply people want to watch their shows when they feel like it, not when they happen to air. I can say this from experience: We bought a PVR 3 years ago and it changed our viewing habits for ever. Whereas before we had to schedule our evenings around our favourite shows or deal with old VHS tapes we can now catch up on our favourite shows in the middle of the night or watch both Heroes, House, Law & Order: SVU and Grey’s Anatomy on Sunday afternoon if we like, commercial free. And that’s nothing. With BitTorrent and other file sharing systems online many shows are hitting computer screens before they even make it to television. An acquaintance told me he ran into one of the leads on Battlestar Galactica while in a coffee shop in downtown Vancouver. When he told her he really liked her performance in a recent episode she responded in bafflement that not only had the episode not aired yet but she hadn’t seen it herself.
The way things are going the only shows that will be able to generate any revenue from advertising sales on TV will be live shows and events such as the Superbowl and headline news. That is if we stick to the old paradigm and refuse to embrace these new technologies and come up with new ways of generating revenue. And there are many ways of doing this. But that’s for a different article.
