Moving away from the net and into a more widely available global market comes News Corps MySpace with their latest venture into the TV market. In a deal with Rupert Murdoch’s daughter that will see MySpace distributing their web shows on television and DVD’s outside the United States, the move sees Myspace using the media platform to the full and showing itself to be head and shoulders above their rival, Facebook.
Exporting MyspaceTV to local TV networks is not something that has been done before and is broadening the potential horizons of US writers. After the writers recent strike, media companies have been forced into rethinking their strategy of paying for expensive pilots and then dropping them again. Going through internet companies makes the shows available to a wider audience and the writers less under the control of the big TV producers.
There is concern that Web-developed shows will not do so well on TV after NBC aired episodes of Quarterlife. This was originally shown through thirty short videos on MySpace with an audience of 5.5 million but once they were hour long TV episodes, the following only reached 3.1 million putting it last for popularity in its time slot.
Forrester Research analyst, James McQuivey, is not hopeful that the whole concept will take off. He said that this has been tried before, unsuccessfully, claiming that most Web shows are ‘mostly bad’. However, this is a work in progress and there is still hope that it will improve enough to be a feasible platform.
This particular deal will see companies sharing licensing revenue and is excellent news for budding producers, moving them into the light of a much wider audience.
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