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Quarterlife- the jig is up?

Looks like NewTeeVee is also asking questions about Quarterlife’s performance.

It’s worth nothing the reported total of 2,000,000 views is still considerably more than you can track on the main video sites, at least for the episodes. Unless QL is counting total views for all the videos, including the little interstitial-like things and then dividing that by 8. Hopefully not, hopefully they really do have about 500,000 total views at the main QL website.

In any case, as I mentioned in my previous post, I don’t think the web audience was ever more than the cherry on top of the network pickup for this show.

2007 12 04 Rod Ramsey online video
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Quarterlife has a short half-life

So, Quarterlife.

Not doing as well as it was hyped to do, but hard to call it a failure since web success may never have been the true plan.

Looking over the history of how the got to where it is, it seems reasonable to assume that the net launch of the episodes was never intended as much more than a PR push for the TV version.

A while back, the producers put together a pilot for a show called 1/4life. That pilot was rejected by ABC, so the producers decided to put together a different pilot called Quarterlife, and promote it as a web series in partnership with MySpaceTV.

Quarterlife the web series was then picked up by NBC amid all sorts of commotion about the WGA strike.

The webseries continues to “air” on MySpaceTV and YouTube, but hasn’t been logging numbers in line with the hoopla surrounding the show. The hoopla has been huge indeed, with front page placement for epsiodes on MySpace.com along with banner ads throughout the site. In addition, the first episode was featured on the front page of YouTube for several days, and a director’s channel complete with banner ads etc was set up for the show itself.

Add to this the production costs, reported to be over $500,000 per hour (or over $80,000 per webisode), and you can see the standards for success have to be set fairly high.

As of this writing, 24 days after launch, the first webisode is sitting at a total of 822,798 views total between MySpace and YouTube. Interestingly, given the show’s partnership with MySpaceTV, about 3/4 of those views come from YouTube, which featured the webisode on its front page for a few days. Damningly, the first webisode has a grand total of 8 comments on MySpaceTV, orders of magnitude less than what a successful video with that many views should have.

After the first episode, the dropoff in views is quite steep. Episode 2 has 104,000 views, Ep. 3 has 164,000, and Ep 4 has 84,000, or less approximately 10% the total views of the first episode. Later episodes have not been on YouTube long enough for a meaningful comparison.

Altogether, the show has garnered 1.4 million views in the month since launch. That doesn’t sound too bad, and indeed would be amazing for a cheap show with no hype. But it can’t come close to paying back the money invested in the show, no matter what sort of CPM and revenue sharing plan the show has with the two sites.

So why isn’t the show doing better? Here are a few thoughts on what’s wrong and how a show of similar talent magnitude could be done right.

1. The concept isn’t that interesting or original. Real life vloggers are more captivating and less stilted and besides, the whole vlogger show thing has been done. If you’re going to move into this arena, find a new approach and more compelling characters.

2. The episodes are too long. The shortest is just under 7 minutes, but the longest pushes 15. Fifteen minutes is far too long for the current net audience. The optimal length at present seems to be around 6 minutes, but the average here is closer to 10. It makes a difference. People get bored easily on the net, so if you aren’t keeping things moving, you’ve got to keep things short.

3. Bringing us to the next point- things don’t move. The webisodes written and cut like a TV show. This ain’t TV, it’s a different medium, and requires different pacing. Quicker, more efficient, and denser, please.

4. The inter-epsiode pacing is non-existant. Where’s the compelling reason to come back to see the next one? Where’s the need for more? The mystery? The drive? The internet is not based on habit and appointment based viewing, it’s based on doing what comes to mind. Shows have to remain near the center of the viewers thoughts between episodes so they don’t forget to return.

5. It’s the same sort of story I’d see on TV. If I wanted to see this, why wouldn’t I watch it on TV? At present, a net show needs to serve audiences that are not being served on TV. Upwardly mobile young 20s white actors, filmmakers, and magazine writers are not that demo. There are countless shows about and for this audience on traditional TV

6. Where’s the money? I don’t see anything near $80,000 per websiode on the screen. Sure, it’s slick and professionals made it, but you could get professionals to make it just as slick for 1/10th that cost, and then it might have a shot at being profitable.

Basically, Quarterlife is a TV show sliced up and placed on the net. In a way, it’s good to have, because now there’s an example to point to in order to explain why that doesn’t work. Webisodes are their own medium, and demand new approaches.

Again, though, I can’t call the show a failure. It accomplished what was its likely goal of a network pickup, and when the show starts it will have a lot of PR surrounding it. It’s likely the creators were able to get a better deal than they would have otherwise. It just isn’t headed for success as a web-based show.

But there are lessons here for the next show, and all the shows to follow!

2007 12 02 Rod Ramsey online video
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BarCampLA 4, Day 1

Back from BarCampLA, and I have to say it was quite refreshing to spend a day talking with people who are at least attempting interesting things with technology. And every single presentation gave me at least one idea for a project, which was my real motivation for going.

Anyway, some random impressions from Day 1:

Small-scale social networks can be used for small-scale social pressure. Thought from the lifehacking presentation. We’ve always seen this, of course, the idea that telling your friends you’re going to do something makes you more likely to do it. But something about the idea of “publishing” that same statement, in however small a way…that seems even more motivating.

Is the mystery still essential for making an ARG compelling? Or can you do without puzzles? Of course, good storytelling always creates its own mysteries.

Marketing is all that matters now. I’ve said below this is true for the small filmmaker before. But it’s also true for the major studios (and record labels). They don’t really want to be in distribution any more than is absolutely necessary. They only want to be in production insofar as production transfers investor monies into studio pockets. But if they lost it, they would survive. But they can’t lose marketing. That’s the core competency, and in the end it’s the only one that matters. (Yes, quality of product matters, but that’s another topic).

Everyone wants a true metaverse, but no one wants to build it. Where’s the business model that works? So much of a metaverse has to be user generated if it’s going to be useful…

More on day 2 tomorrow.

2007 11 03 Rod Ramsey barcamp Comments (0) Permalink

Who's On First: The Movie

So here’s a funny video from my friends at SoCal Film Group- a comedy about the old days when you’d go in a store and rent “videos”. My memories of doing such are vague in this time of NetFlix and the coming age of digital distribution, but at least they aren’t driving those whacky old model-T cars!

2007 06 24 Rod Ramsey online video
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The Secret of Successful Internet Video

You can’t sell a feature film on the internet. It’s both too much and not enough. It costs too much to produce a feature in relation to what you’ll get back from internet-only sales. But a single feature isn’t not enough to build a regular audience- people will visit and watch once, and then what? Word of mouth is possible, but it’s a lot more difficult with a one-shot, however impressive that may be.

Your movie has to be relatively cheap, and it can’t exist in isolation.

One likely solution is to sell a serial on the internet, via an aggregator, such as an iTunes like store.

Make something like one of the old serials, with a plotline that moves forward via a series of cliffhangers. You start off free, hook people into your storyworld, then charge a small amount per episode following.

Probably not going to make millions, but probably enough to be self-sustaining under certain sets of business circumstances.

Assuming, of course, that your content is fantastic (more on this later).

That’s one model.

A model that’s more likely to be self-sustaining is the full-service model. Make the serial. Build a website around it. Sell swag. Sell (HD)DVDs. Sell a fanclub. Sell behind the scenes looks. Sell advertising on the website. Sell all the ancillary aspects of the show you can think of.

“That’s not filmmaking”, you might say, “I don’t want to do it”. No, maybe not, but it is part of the gig. This still all happens when you go the studio route, you’re just farming it all out to the various arms of the studio and losing most of the money along the way.

The goal is to be a self-sustaining filmmaker first. After that you worry about growth and the wider audience. If you have to sell all the geegaws to get there, so be it.

Can you compete with the studios? Not on their battlefield, certainly not. You aren’t going to make Pirates Of The Caribbean 5 and sell it on the internet. You don’t have the resources and you couldn’t fight the studios for audience if you did. But is that really the goal?

Or is the goal to be a filmmaker on a self-sustaining basis?

Which brings us to branding. Which brings us, indirectly, back to having fantastic content.

For any of this to work, you’ve got to have a stream of content. You can’t cut it with one or two pieces of content. A short, a feature, whatever, not enough (see above). But with regular content, you’re building a following, a brand, an audience. People start to know who you are and what you do. What you do isn’t defined by one or two works, it’s defined by a series of works. And in order for people to care about what you do, it’s got to be fantastic. All of it.

There’s a huge machine out there, the hype/media/news/entertainment machine, and it wants you to make fantastic stuff. It NEEDS you to make fantastic stuff. Tomorrow, as they say, is another day, and the media needs a new story tomorrow (and “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow”, as someone else once said). They need to make you a star, they just want you to give them a reason to do it. There’s always a Pretty Young Thing, in the broadest sense of the term, and a Pretty Young Thing producing fantastic content and distributing it in a sexy way (ie “outside the system”) is a story they love to tell, they’ve been doing that story over and over for at least 40 years now.

There’s a way to leverage their machine to your benefit. It can be done. Someone will.

Look, I’m the first to admit I’m not really talking about something the Average Joe can do. But I am talking about something the Smart, Hard-Working, Lucky Joe might pull off. Maybe. If it all falls into place, just right.

2007 05 12 Rod Ramsey online video
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Internet not a mass marketing tool, YouTube clip at 11

In a nice article on the digital film revolution, David Zelon of Mandalay Filmed Entertainment had one humdinger of a statement on microdistribution and the associated marketing-

“Without mass marketing, you won’t capture the attention of a mass audience, and the Internet is not a viable way to attract a mass audience.”

Talk about whistling past the graveyard…

Zelon’s views on more than 640k RAM in home PCs were not stated in the article.

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2006 07 28 Rod Ramsey online video
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You Are The Media

The revolution has come, and it seems it’s being televised after all. Well, sorta.

By now, nearly everyone has heard the Myspace and YouTube explosions. By combining the tools on these two sites, it’s possible to build a nice little social network around your video, or video series. You can lead people to your work, and keep them updated on new installments quite easily.

What’s not so widely explored yet are the possibilities in building your own stream of content, much like a TV channel in the old media world.

You’ve had this in the audio world for some time, with small-scale net-only radio stations broadcasting content of a specialized sort, such as the folks at SomaFM We’ve even seen much more hyper-specialized channels, such as Eve Radio, a 24/7 station for people who play the video game Eve Online.

One factor in favor of the hyper-niche stations is that their audience is built-in. They target an existing small group that has some commonality before they tune in to the station. Identifying these niche groups will be key to building channels of your own.

Sites are starting to arise to aggregate these niche channels, such as ChannelChooser. ChannelChooser merely collects free feeds from around the world and puts a basic interface around them. Some of the channels are widely known, if narrowly defined (CSpan, for instance). But others exist for niche audiences, such as European Affairs or The Sail Channel. Some of the channels are clearly small repackagers of other people’s content, like some of the “independent” channels, or a couple of the “adult” channels.

So what seems to be the obvious next step? A streaming independent channel of self-produced content. A new, cheap way to establish a global TV network showing content created and produced in backyards and basements. Undoubtedly, the first steps have been taken, and this revolution is well underway.

For the first time, you can take control of your own distribution.

You Are The Media.

Coming soon- identifying and playing to your niche.

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2006 05 24 Rod Ramsey online video
transmedia
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A handy list of web video outlets

Tim Clark over at SoCal Film Group’s blog has put together a handy list of web video outlets, mostly compiled from other blogs (hmm, I think this is a second derivative post).

Anyway, it’s still nice to have them all linked in one place.

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2006 05 15 Rod Ramsey online video Comments (0) Permalink

Weinstein Company experiments with YouTube

In an interesting marketing ploy, The Weinstein Company has placed the first 8 minutes on “Lucky Number Slevin” on YouTube.

Now, it happens that the first 8 minutes of this particular film are pretty self-contained, like a nice little prologue to the film itself. There’s a story, more or less complete in itself, but that implies a lot about the direction and style of the whole film.

It’s a unique situation, most films don’t have a prologue this self-contained. Honestly, most films don’t have a first 8 minutes that are this interesting. They’re often setups for for payoffs that come later, without any payoffs in themselves. Sequeneces from the middle of the movie are less desirable for a few reasons, not least because audiences will know it’s coming and will be expecting it until they see it, which might blemish their experience of the film.

So this technique might not work for most movies. It might not work for this one, coming as it does sort of late in the release window (though it wil likely help dvd sales).

But if your structure does support it, it’s a fantastic idea. If you have something, characters, plot, style, something that pulls people into the movie in the first section, this is a great way to let people get a solid taste of your film. And it’s a natural for digitally distributed films, why not? You’re reaching the audience that might pay to see the whole thing anyway.

Smart promotional technique, and will probably be widely linked and discussed. And emulated.

And we’ll eventually have studio execs asking filmmakers “Great, but what’s the youtube sequence?”

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2006 04 23 Rod Ramsey online video
transmedia
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Digital Distribution- How Soon Is Now?

A few weeks ago, during the Silver Lake Film Festival, I attended a panel on Digital Distribution of films. The panel was full of people who are hard at work to bring about a world where distributing your work digitally is a practical alternative.

Representatives from Movielink, Withoutabox, Moving Pictures Magazine, DirectTV, Goldpocket Interactive, and Cinema Screen Media. Several of those companies are no doubt familiar to indie filmmakers, and some are perhaps a little more behind the scenes, but all represented opportunities to get your work in front of more people.

Withoutabox, for example, said that they are planning to begin on-demand DVD fulfillment for indie filmmakers, allowing you to print and ship DVDs on an as-ordered basis. They also plan to allow filmmakers to integrate this process into websites as a “store”, much along the lines of cafepress. So obviously, this will allow filmmakers to more easily manage getting DVDs to viewers, especially in small numbers. While this will undoubtedly come at a higher cost per disc than managing the process yourself, it will allow you to focus on what you do best- making films.

Representatives of several other companies talked about the coming opportunities for theatrical distribution for small-scale indies. They pointed out the under-utilization of screen capacity in most theaters, and that digital distribution makes it more practical for a once-a-day or three-times-a-week screening for certain smaller films. Without print costs, shipping, storage, etc, it makes more sense for a theater to change its screenings once or twice a day, which allows more films than ever to be shown, and makes more economic sense for movies that cost less and earn less. There are people actively working to bring this to fruition, and they have financial incentive to do so, so it’s possible this won’t remain a dream for long.

Also worth noting, the company Cinema Screen is anticipating this as an opportunity, as they are responsible for many of the ads shown before theatrical screenings. Having the projectors and distribution system in place, they are poised to distribute and promote this sort of under-the-radar feature.

So what about direct-to-the-viewer distribution? Well, that’s well on its way as well. Movielink is already offering this for major motion pictures, and no doubt the system will expand to include a huge variety of indie films. With “shelf space” being nearly cost free, Movielink could afford to exploit the Long Tail and carry nearly everything. They could stand to improve a few things- supporting Firefox would be a good start, as would taking a good hard look at their DRM and Pricing models. But overall, it’s a promising start.

All of the panelists were very positive and excited about the new distribution channels opening up, and a number were also excited about the possibility of filmmakers going right to consumers themselves, with methods such as youtube and google video. The next 18 months promise to bring big changes, according to all concerned.

It’s a good time to be making movies, that’s for sure. More ways than ever to get your work to viewers, and more ways than ever to build your fanbase. The future is here now, time to get moving!

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2006 04 17 Rod Ramsey online video Comments (0) Permalink