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YouTube Revives Failed Sitcom Pilot
Vary Krishna writes ""Nobody's Watching", a pilot made for last year's upfronts that was never picked up, is being put back into development by NBC after gaining attention on YouTube. From the ZapTV article:
"I love the spirit of the experimentation," NBC Entertainment president Kevin Reilly says. "And I think if we can actually have something find an audience on the web, gravitate over to the network, continue with a web presence and have them feed each other, that could end up being a really cool thing."
Where was this guy last year?"
your post has a lot of insight. i'm on a working vacation in Seattle right now, and i'm amazed that even though i have probably 10x as much free time to watch television, without a DVR here i'm watching basically none, because nothing I enjoy is available at the right time.
it will be interesting to see if this show does well on NBC (certainly the PR from the situation under which it was purchased by NBC will help its ratings), but I would imagine your assesment is at least partly correct. Certainly a chunk of its audience will be youtube viewers, who are probably very likely to have DVRs, so they may be able to watch it in much the same fashion as on youtube (i.e. on-demand).. but I wouldn't imagine this chunk would amount to more than a minority of the show's viewers.
what's really interesting are the business models that Mark Cuban and others are developing.. in the case of the linked press release above, basically Steven Soderbergh shooting a number of films for simultaneous theatrical / dvd / hdtv / download release, so that all marketing dollars are used effectively, and the audience ultimately decides which form of content delivery works best for them. I don't know that the model initially includes download release (i.e. itunes style), but I can imagine that's something Cuban is working on now (probably the DRM issues are a bit of a snag).
So even if NBC blows their opportunity at transferring to primetime tv the collective attention of viewers from the internet, there are other (potentially better) business models in the works that will better appeal to viewers who want to watch on their own terms.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
I'd like to think I'm "too smart for ads", but in truth, I'm not.
Ads, despite what advertisers themselves may believe, aren't about tricking you into things. They're about increasing brand or product recognition. You've seen Brand X on TV, you've never heard of Brand Y, you're going to buy Brand X. It's not about smart or stupid, it's about risk and comfort levels. You don't want to buy something shady, so you'll buy the thing you know. Without commercials, we'd have to rely on which box had the prettiest pictures, or, heaven forbid, product research. So commercials aren't that bad in themselves, they're just often done really badly.