Audience Wrangling: What JibJab Could Teach TV
Published June 24, 2007
He sees promise in the way networks are making deals to get their content online: "Everybody's realizing you've got to put content everywhere." A recent New York Times article talks about networks making forays Second Life, and Bittorrent and YouTube, among many others, have struck deals to distribute television content, legally and everything.
But he also sees room for more creativity in how television engages with their audience. "I think people can be more innovative about how they use their television audience and get them online, or how they build their audience online and push them to television," Spiridellis says.
I suggest that television would kill to have the kind of hard data on their audience that JibJab does, without relying on small and questionably accurate samples from a research company (aka Nielsen). "Not only can we target ads against it, but we can also get smart about how well our programming is performing in different demographics with real data," he agrees. But it later occurs to me that the television networks could do the same at least for their online audience, only most don't track that data nearly as well as JibJab, or do anything nearly as useful with it.
At a television festival where everyone was trying to look into the future to see how TV can survive in the Internet age, it occurs to me that the networks don't even seem to be looking into the present for clues. For such an enthusiastic and optimistic guy, speaking a television festival, Spiridellis has an odd way of making me feel pessimistic about television. But JibJab? Those guys are going places.
Diane is a publications manager who's addicted to television, movies, and books and justifies her pop culture obsessions by writing about them for Blogcritics. She also runs the TV, Eh? website, a compilation of news and information about Canadian television series.
- Audience Wrangling: What JibJab Could Teach TV
- Published: June 24, 2007
- Type: Interview
- Section: Sci/Tech
- Filed Under: Video: Television, Video: Film and TV Business, Sci/Tech: Internet
- Part of a feature: Banff World Television Festival
- Writer: Diane Kristine
- Diane Kristine's BC Writer page
- Diane Kristine's personal site
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Yup, that's pretty much Spiridellis' point, that the current system is great for producing hour and half hour productions for broadcast, and that won't change - there'll always be a market for that, and a short video, which is what the web does best, doesn't compete with that.
However, he points out - and I've heard this over and over again from TV industry people - that the system is not set up to do cheaper, shorter, made-for-web content. It hurts JibJab and it hurts teh TV industry, who are desperate to use the Internet to engage and build audiences. The next round of union contracts will either help or hinder the process, but there's other work to be done too.
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The reason that "television" will survive, even as it translates to the Internet as a deliver medium, is that creating quality episodic drama is expensive and that can't change. There are only so many good writers, directors, actors and editors to go around and they command a premium for their services. And it doesn't work to have a good writer and a so so director working with adequate actors, they all have to be there to bolster each other.
Canadian television producers have bigger budgets than any online content producer and they still fail to deliver quality content because the good creators and talent have moved to the US where the money is.
The chances that you can get five good writer, a good director and a dozen good actors to work for next to nothing... it is so close to zero as to be indistinguishable.
And even if that 0.000000001% possibility panned out, you would be relegated to a very narrow selection of material that could be created with any semblance of production values.
Sanctuary is there with production values but that costs over half a million dollars per 15-18 minute episode... and as far as I can tell, they are paying the talent largely with participation in a financial venture that is almost certain to be a money losing proposition.
You need deep pockets to create quality episodic drama and that can't change.