Part of their future plans may or may not be a leap into television. We somehow get onto the subject of the strange fall and rise and fall again of Nobody's Watching, the failed WB television pilot that found success online, only to be reportedly picked up again by NBC, then quietly dropped again. "It's funny, everyone's desperate for a cross-platform success story," Spiridellis says. Does JibJab hope to be that, I ask? "No, we're totally focused on digital. I don't care about TV."
I point out the irony of that statement, considering we're at a television festival, so he qualifies: "The problem is I would never get to do TV the way I want to do it."
Some of the advantages he sees to Internet programming include spontaneity and creative freedom. "We can think of something, create it, produce it, and get it out to an audience within six weeks right now. We can be more irreverent with our humor."
"The odds of having any kind of real success on TV are so small that to be focused on that wouldn't make sense for us now, because we have millions of people coming to our website every month," he continues. "We can program for them. And if we do our job there well, there may be opportunities in television."
So it seems television isn't completely off their radar, though not in their immediate future. "If I can build an audience for a show online and get consistently millions of viewers every week to my website, then all of a sudden it becomes a very different proposition when we go to television networks and say hey, we've got this big audience and we want to do this show," he comments at one point. "The web gives some leverage to the creators that you don't typically have in the television development or production cycle, but also takes the risk out of the equation for television production and networks."
The future of television
Whatever JibJab's plans, they seem to be well-positioned to continue creating content for a constantly shifting distribution system. At the Festival and elsewhere, some sky-is-falling scenarios have been predicted, with audiences fleeing television for the web, and new but unknown business models facing the television industry in the years to come. Spiridellis isn't so pessimistic about the future of television, though he's got a cautionary word about the future of networks and studios. "I think it's a really exciting time for creators. I also think the whole production model has got to change."
Article comments
1 - Clint Johnson
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.
2 - Diane Kristine
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.