TV 2.0

CALL NOW FOR THE AMAZING KARMA-FLEX MACHINE, PART II

(Posted from the fabulous Paris Hotel, Las Vegas)

(btw, read Part I first if you haven't already)
Two weeks ago I didn’t even know there was such a thing as the Electronic Retailing Association. Today I’m in Vegas, attending parties as a guest of its chairman.

Fate played its hand in the person of Jack Kirby, outgoing (in every sense of the word) head of the ERA. In our previous lives, Jack and I had worked together 22 years ago at a CBS overnight show called Nightwatch. Jack was, at the tender age of 22 or possibly less, a wunderkind senior producer in charge of booking guests on the show. I was, at the age of 24, a wannabe wunderkind, a writer charged with throwing together glib little introductions for the anchors to read about those guests.

To survive in a place whose median age was twice your own required preternatural doses of self-assuredness, which both Jack and I possessed in spades. His was cloaked in bespoke suits; mine in writerly sweater-vests; but under the hood the same aspirational engine was purring. Which might have been why, even though most people in the place might not have loved us nearly as much as we loved ourselves (he had to tame an unruly bunch of older, female talent bookers who all felt they should have his job; I spent too much time pestering the “hard news” writers in the bullpen with jokes and observations – verbal blogging – while they were frantically trying to squeeze down Associated Press wire copy into 20-second TV scripts. I’m sure that today I’d tell me to shut up, Pupkin, this is a place of work not your personal talk show) Jack and I always got along. They saw him as cocksure; I saw him as, simply, sure. He was five levels above me at the show, and could have thrown copy back in my face just because he was having a bad day, but he was always respectful, and for a Rat Pack throwback he sure knew a hell of a lot about the popular culture (such as it was in 1982). Though I did wish that I’d had a shot at meeting whoever had greased Jack’s way into the business – he wasn’t chained to his Smith-Corona bulletin-font typewriter as I was, leaving him free to glide through the newsroom on his way to fancy steak dinners with grownups who were his actual friends while I ordered Chinese.

Flash forward a year. “Nightwatch” is radically downsized, with only a skeleton crew transferred to the CBS News Washington bureau to work with a new anchor, Charlie Rose. I was the line producer, getting the show on and off the air on time; Jack was head booker. One day he blew me away by coming over and asking if he could shadow me as I did my job, as he wanted to learn how to produce a live TV show. In other words, remove the cufflinks, roll up the sleeves, and get a little ink on those manicured fingers. Forgo cocktail cruises around Georgetown in the company of Larry King for the pleasure of working 6pm to 6am in the ultra-glamorous death hole of CBS News Washington, with no desk to call your own, working your pencil and eraser to the nub repeatedly timing the show elements backwards from the hard off-time of 5:59:52am to make sure everything fit. I figured one night would kill him.

He wound up spending several weeks, and I learned something much more valuable than he did. I learned that no one had ever handed Jack Kirby anything – it was clear from his unpretentious attitude, his sense of humor about himself, and his earnest desire to learn that Jack had earned everything by working harder and being better at it than the others. What a strength: when he had a gap in his knowledge, he’d address it, not ignore it.

Two weeks ago I found myself staring at a gap in my knowledge, about the direct response business. Rusty Greiff, a Kirby-esque figure in his own right who we’ve hired to spearhead our entry into the Direct Response and Direct Marketing categories, handed me a list of top players in the field. And there was Jack Kirby, on top of the heap. He’s had a huge success with a pet vitamin product called Paaws that his company, Continuum Commerce Group, developed and sold via infomercials.

We got him on the phone. And because of our history and the kind of guy I know Jack to be, I didn’t pretend I knew a thing about his industry. I laid my cards on the table, said we had developed a platform that seems really good at using video to keep people on websites longer and more deeply involved – and to me it seems that if there was a commerce element attached, it could help move more product than a TV spot. But I wasn’t sure I was right.

Jack and his partner, Brad Galinson, listened attentively, offered many good insights, and concluded that I wasn’t crazy, maybe. That it’s worth looking into further. That it so happens the ERA is holding its convention this week and we ought to be there. Jack’s been incredibly generous in offering to pull us into parties and other gatherings at this event, which should help us to have the right kinds of conversations at the right level to get a few trials going.

On the phone, Jack filled in for me his own Chapters 9-29: he went from CBS to a job as a, get this, line producer for the 11 o’clock local news in Boston, then to a station in Santa Barbara. Where they leased out the studios to infomercial producers. Whom he learned from, exceedingly well.

I hope I learn as well from him.

CALL NOW FOR THE AMAZING KARMA-FLEX MACHINE (PART I)

(posted from DFW Airport, Gate 37C)

This is not what I had in mind when I founded The FeedRoom – like, by a mile. I’m headed to Vegas for an infomercial convention. It’s actually the annual gathering of the Electronic Retailing Association – the entire ecosystem of infomercial makers, their distributors from the cable systems, individual cable channels (I was amazed when I helped to launch CBS’s Eye On People cable channel in 1997 how much we – and most other networks – were dependent upon infomercials for ad revenue and programming), production companies, consultants, etc.

Now, remember – I was a journalist for the first 20 years of my career. And I started The FeedRoom as an online news video portal in 1999. So why is this happening to me? Why am I about to spend three days in the desert rubbing shoulders with Ron Popeil (actually, he’s made far too much money off the Pocket Fisherman to deign to show up at something like this)? Because one thing the Web does really well is to eliminate static on the invisible lines that connect different strands of society, thereby facilitating connections between them; between, say, supporters of President Bush’s re-election and document experts, for one example. Likewise the connection between television and money.

Those of us weaned on TV might have from time to time been lulled by the likes of Columbo, McCloud, and McMillan & Wife (really, the entire rotating, transfixing slate of NBC Mystery Movies) into forgetting that the only reason television exists is to make money for the advertisers and producers.

Infomercials cut to the chase. Infomercials delivered over the Internet would cut even more quickly, by eliminating the need to actually pick up a phone and dial a precise series of numbers in order to buy (Ellen DeGeneres has a great line about those new Listerine Pocket Packs, which you place on your tongue and let dissolve: “we’re too lazy now even to suck on a Life Saver!”). One click, while the infomercial is still playing, and it’s yours! Leaving infinitely more time to watch more infomercials and buy more stuff than ever before.

This is easy to see, of course, if all you ever do is think about broadband video applications (none of the easy, obvious stuff is being done yet, in any category – that’s the advantage of being an early mover: you don’t have to be too smart; just first. And right). But if you already make gobs of money making infomercials, you’re plenty satisfied with the current state of the art and pretty busy (and good at) refining it even further, so that it’s not readily apparent that there is a potentially game-changing approach waiting to be exploited.

Thus, Vegas.

Now, how I came to be at this particular gathering is an example of what Anthony Powell called “A Dance to the Music of Time.” A chance encounter with a long-lost pal I first met in Chapter 8 of my life, and is showing up again now in Chapter 30. But you’re busy, so I’ll tell you about it tomorrow…

LAPTOP CHATS

So the latest polls show that John Kerry is having a bit of trouble making his position clear to voters. And I’ve read that the Republican Party is hoping to make inroads among Hispanics who have historically voted predominantly Democratic.

If only each candidate could speak directly, one on one, with every single targeted voter. Even just a couple of minutes of private time would help, even if it were just once.

In a nation of 300 million people that would postpone the election until, say, 2032.

But wait – 63 million Americans have high-speed Internet connections! They are among the most likely voters – college educated, affluent, managerial class. Hispanics are among the heaviest broadband users. A candidate could record a two-minute discussion on any issue, have it encoded in virtually real time, hit “send,” and have it show up in voters’ email boxes immediately. Different messages in different mailboxes, even. And he could do this every day between now and November.

This would be by far the most cost-efficient media spend of the campaign – compare this targeted campaign with the millions spent on TV and radio spots that blanket the population at large, 97% of whom have already made up their minds.

Instead, it gets lumped into the Web budget – because campaigns have not come to understand that the Web now IS television. Part of me says go easy on ‘em – they only realized this year, a decade late, that the Web could actually help them get elected. So they’re just feeling their way through the traditional text Web of yore – give them another decade or so and they’ll be all over this broadband multimedia thing. Just you watch.

In TV, you create every show with the 18-49 year old demographic in mind. In politics, you craft every message around the undecided voters. Why waste a dime on anyone else?

WRONG AGAIN

The Hollywood Reporter recently ran a front-page lead story about the dazzling news just reported by Nielsen: that the MAJORITY of US Internet users now connect via broadband. This is a seismic development in the broadband industry – it’s the landing-on-the-moon moment that Chuck Johnson, our co-founder and head of bus dev, and I used to talk about five years ago. That is, if you’re going to land a rocket on the moon, you don’t aim for where the moon currently is, but for where it’s going to be by the time the rocket gets there. (I’d have used a skeet shooting analogy, but it wouldn’t have conveyed the audacity of our own FeedRoom undertaking nor the degree of difficulty, not to mention the distance we’d have to traverse). You look ridiculous aiming at an empty sky, which broadband sure was in 1999, but the expectation is that the sky fills with a nice big juicy moon just when you need it to.

Anyhow, the rocket’s landed on the moon – there is a broadband market, and it turns out to be the entire Internet. As we predicted five years ago, the introduction of video changes everything – Americans are addicted to moving images, and they’ll pay forty bucks a month just to be able to get them on their laptops. Multimedia is beginning to steer the Web.

But here’s where I may have been wrong: The Hollywood Reporter asked me if companies like DEN and Pseudo and Pop!, which were famously formed during the bubble to create original broadband content with the hopes of one day replacing the studios themselves (remember how grandiose the statements were in those days? Today we all just want to eke out a profit and hope to build from there) might now stage a comeback – would we see lots of independent broadband production companies sprouting up?
Check it out at http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000614740).
No, I confidently asserted, if there’s an opportunity to create original broadband content, it’s the media conglomerates who will seize it because they’ve got control over the brands and the marketing and unlike five years ago they are now well aware of the power of broadband, of the massive penetration numbers and the associated advertising opportunity.

But now I disagree with myself. Maybe I was thinking too much about the poor example set by DEN and Pseudo, which wildly overspent on the nonessentials like lavish launch parties and cool offices and created stupid, unwatchable programs. Maybe I was trying too hard to spin the big media companies – many of whom are our customers, and whom I fervently believe should devote much more attention to the opportunity in broadband than they currently allow themselves to. And maybe I was trying to dampen the competition – the Mark Burnett of broadband, whoever he or she is, who could come up with a blowaway hit that was best watched in two-minute bursts on a PC, when really, as a former documentary producer, that’s kinda what I’d like some part of The FeedRoom to do. And maybe I was just driving too fast through Silicon Valley with a faulty phone jack in my ear, trying to make my plane home and not really concentrating on what the hell I was saying. In fact I think it was all of the above – plus the three or four Diet Cokes I’ve usually had by that time of day (ah, product placement hits the blogosphere).

Because in fact, when you look at the runaway hit that the “This Land Is Your Land” spoof has been in broadband thanks entirely to viral marketing (50 million streams delivered, according to Atomshockwave CEO Mika Salmi), it can’t help but hit you that, really, ANYONE can mint a hit show in broadband, for not a hell of a lot of money.

These guys who just launched Mania TV (www.maniatv.com) – why couldn’t they stumble upon their version of TRL, and thanks to bloggers and emailers and v-mailers and AIM users suddenly find themselves with many more viewers in a day than the 200,000 or so tuning into MTV? Aren’t those viewers sick of the sameness of television? Isn’t that what sparked the reality TV craze – people just numbed by the same old stupid cop and doctor dramas? Isn’t the sameness of TV news responsible for the mass defections of news viewers to the Internet, blogs, and cable chat shows? Isn’t 200,000 out of 63 million broadband users a ridiculously low threshold to hit? Couldn’t a hit show in the broadband universe, just as in cable, grab a 1 rating, meaning 1% of viewers or 630,000? Why not, since this is a virtually frictionless environment – you can watch any time, anywhere, for free, and the producers can watch you watching and thereby deliver more of the stuff you like the most and less of the stuff that makes you tune out.

Especially when you look at what passes for “Online TV” at mainstream distributors like Yahoo – which pays a small fortune to launch “The Apprentice” in broadband, and does nothing more with it than throw up a few extra “exclusive” clips. (feast your eyes at http://apprentice.tv.yahoo.com) The law of the online entertainment jungle is not going to allow that to become a hit at the expense of a fresh approach that takes into account the voracious appetite of broadband users for more more more material, more ways to watch and use it, refreshed constantly, and not available in quite the same form anywhere else. Yahoo’s got too much invested in their current business model to take advantage of this reality – which is the same phenomenon we saw in the early 90’s when Yahoo ate the lunch of Big Media, which was too slow and out of it to grasp the power of the Web as a media platform.

The ones most likely to seize the initiative are people we’ve never heard of, who we’re going to be hearing a lot of in the next 5 years. I hope some of them are working with me at The FeedRoom right now, and that they still are then. The mission – create an environment that makes them want to stay.

Things That Make No Sense Although They Seem To When You Don't Think About Them

CARS ONLINE
A car dealer will sink his teeth into your leg to keep you in his showroom 30 seconds longer. But he doesn't do the one thing that would keep you in his online showroom longer - namely, use video to pull you in and hold you there. Automakers spend a fortune producing 15-second commercials of their cars zooming around the identical mountain hairpin or perched atop the same old terrifying butte. But they haven't figured out that for a fraction of the cost they could create their own broadband networks that would also, by the way, help them sell more cars.

Besides the obvious (like demonstrations of the cars in action and testimonials from the people who drive them) what if you could meet the people assembling them? What if you could choose which assembly line your car came from, based on the machinists you'd gotten to know this way? What if a really approachable person explained the difference between leasing and buying? What if a dealer explained, with no salesmanship, how he makes money? What about the designers of the concept cars showing us what's on the drawing board - and how that reflects what the brand is all about? How about some celebrities who drive those makes and models? Not only would the experience be more informative and involving - but you'd come away feeling a human connection to what has been up to now only a logo.

Who am I?

Reading as many blogs as I do, I'm often left impressed by the content, but wondering who on earth is posting it. So: my name is Jon Klein. I'm CEO of The FeedRoom, which has been helping to redefine television for the past five years. Before this, I spent 20 years as a television producer and executive, most of that time at CBS News, where I started as a writer on the overnight shift and ended up as executive vice president, overseeing "60 Minutes" and the other prime-time programming.

In between I launched the first reality show on CBS, ten years ago. It was a series of movies of the week that had no actors and no scripts - just real-life events (not artificially staged on a remote island, which I wasn't smart enough to think up) unfolding before the cameras. The series was called "Before Your Eyes," and it played into two passions of mine: storytelling and television.

I left CBS in order to find new and better ways to combine those two passions. At the time, online video was postage-stamp sized and herky-jerky; but I was just dumb enough about technology to have blind faith that the video quality would keep getting better. And once it did, the Web would be an overwhelmingly superior platform for delivering video, thanks to the interactivity and personal audience involvement it offers.

Many FeedRoom employees share a TV pedigree - and it's been essential to our success. We were born during The Bubble, and have survived its collapse thanks to a laser-like focus on using broadband to deliver better television - to the PC, PDA, V90, or any other collection of initials that may come along.

We operate broadband sites for media companies like ESPN, USA Today, NBC, Tribune and Reuters. And for non-media giants like General Motors, Cisco, Sun, Honda, and Herbalife.

Think of broadband as the equivalent of a massive cable system that has 63 million subscribers. That's more users than Comcast, Time-Warner, Charter and Cox put together! And it's a system in which everyone can have his or her own "network" - thanks to DV cameras, editing software, the plummeting cost of bandwidth and the explosion of consumer uptake (according to Nielsen, more than half of all Internet users in the U.S. now have a high-speed connection). For most of us a broadband channel would be a nice to have; for corporations, celebrities, TV shows, and consumer brands it's a MUST HAVE. Because broadband users are the most affluent, most influential, best educated audience out there - and they far outspend dial-up users online.

We're always on the lookout for cool new uses of video online, and that's what this blog is intended to highlight...along with misuses and missed opportunities. Your additions and opinions are more than welcome.