Sanctuary Leaps From Net To Network

Sanctuary won't be the first series to make the leap from web to television, but executive producer and director Martin Wood hopes it's learned enough from its broadband run to make the most of its cable run.

"When you're that far in front of the wave, you're sitting on the foaming edge of it. Everybody looks at you and says 'ok, how are you doing this?' And you have to turn to them and say 'not very well, but we have an idea,'" he laughed in a recent interview at the Banff World Television Festival.

Airing in early October on the Sci Fi channel in the United States, The Movie Network/Movie Central in Canada, and ITV in the UK, Sanctuary is a 13-episode, half-hour drama from the creative minds behind the Stargate series, including writer Damian Kindler, lead actor Amanda Tapping, and Wood himself.

He was at the Banff Festival to head a session called The Craft in front of a crowd of industry professionals. "The reason the Directors Guild asked me to do this is they wanted me to let people know how we made the move from net to network. For me, what's more important is talking about a shifting paradigm in the way that we make television."

The shifting paradigm he referred to initially is not, surprisingly, that of net to network, but of Canada moving from being a service industry for the American television industry to fighting for a strong industry of our own. He sees Sanctuary as further proof we have the "ability to do what we've been doing for so long without having to be part of the American machine."

Starting a series with such high production values on the Internet is another shift, though Wood and his colleagues had planned to move closer to a solution to the problem of monetizing content on the web. "Going into this, we had very high hopes of what we could do, because we thought this is the time. And it is the time," Wood explained. "Everybody knows this is where it's going. Everybody knows this is what's going to happen. Nobody's got the silver bullet yet."

"Part of the problem with finding the silver bullet is you're fighting conventions of people who believe everything that's on the net should be free. You're fighting against the ability to rip and bittorrent whatever's up there, whether you have DRM in it or not. You're fighting the inability to harness it to your site, which is where you want everybody to be able to pay for it. Unless you go back to a convention of advertising, how do you actually make money on your site, how do you make money on the show, especially to the tune of a couple million dollars an episode?"

Article Author: Diane Kristine Wild

Diane writes about boring things during the day, pop culture things by night. She also runs the TV, Eh? website, a compilation of news and information about Canadian television. Follow her on Twitter @deekayw for more random thoughts.

Visit Diane Kristine Wild's author page — Diane Kristine Wild's Blog