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Amazon Nears Debut of Original TV Shows
First time accepted submitter bakerharis writes with an article about Amazon's attempt to break into creating conventional television style episodic shows, but with a different model from the manistream media companies. "Amazon's foray into TV production is unique in the way it saves money. Every spring, traditional TV networks like ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox order dozens of pilots and show them to focus groups. Executives pick just a handful to make into series. Then, they commission 13 episodes of each promising show, with each one potentially costing a few million dollars. Many episodes won't ever air if the first few don't attract big audiences." Amazon, instead, has created 14 pilot shows, and is letting a cross section of customers in the U.S., UK, and Germany react to them to see which shows might be worth making more of.
Firefly?
How is this "but with a different model from the manistream media companies"?
How is this:
Amazon, instead, has created 14 pilot shows, and is letting a cross section of customers in the U.S., UK, and Germany react to them to see which shows might be worth making more of.
different then this:
Every spring, traditional TV networks like ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox order dozens of pilots and show them to focus groups. Executives pick just a handful to make into series.
They both make pilots and show them to groups of people who provide feed back, and based on that feedback the people producing the TV shows decide which ones continue.
So again, how is Amazon doing it differently? Looks exactly the same to me.
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"... a different model from the manistream media companies."
They won't play half the episodes out of order on a shifting schedule then refuse to show the rest? That sounds positive.
Sure, a non-TV-network producing original television shows for broadcast over the internet is going to have a different model than NBC or ABC do. But it's not like Amazon is the first company to do that. Netflix already produces original TV. I was hoping this article would compare to that, but it doesn't mention it at all. Is Amazon jumping in as a competitor of Netflix with roughly the same model? Or is their approach significantly different?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
so how's it different, other than 14 series and a different way of measuring viewer responses?
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
I've heard the phrase "wall of text", but this is like Great Wall of China of Text to the Power of Ten...
The networks have people overloaded on comedies. Kids content isn't exactly lacking either. They need to put out something different if they want any interest.
So I was bored and decided to watch a few of the pilots. As someone who loved Netflix's House of Cards, I was excited to see what Amazon had in store for us of similar caliber. Well, suffice to say that spreading their dollars across numerous pilots instead of one single show gets you what you expect: utter trash.
Those Who Can't, a story about three teachers (gym, history, and Spanish) was utterly terrible. They hated a jock in the school who was constantly annoying them and being the stereotypical douchebag. The script was jerky, the acting was bad, and the entire premise was overdone. Not impressive in the least, in fact in many instances it was downright painful.
Alpha House starts out great with Bill Murray getting arrested and John Goodman watching as he freaks out but it goes downhill from there mostly because Murray is not on the show after that first 45 second cameo. The vulgarity (something I don't mind in the least and use regularly myself) is there for vulgarity's sake, not because it makes sense in the dialogue. The show itself is slow, boring, and pointless. It's like Amazon was trying to make fun of House of Cards on SNL but failing as SNL tends to do so well.
While I haven't watched all the pilots yet, I really don't think I have much desire to do so. I am still waiting for more House of Cards and certainly more Arrested Development on Netflix but this Amazon shit is just bad. They need to get their shit together and up their game if they think they're going to compete with Netflix's first-run flagship.
Why would i go to the trouble of seeking out the pilots? Pilots are often kind of badly made, and hard to see how you might care about the main characters or subjects going forward.
I really like the approach Netflix is taking here, in that they are taking a bigger risk but producing a real series. That means more time to think out the characters carefully, to have a story that doesn't evolve on the fly but can be tweaked in an overall package that makes the whole season work before release. It also allows you to get much more into a show rather than viewing a bunch of pilots, that even if enough other people like you will not see more of for months or years. That's the part I like least about episodic viewing, and Amazon wants to potentially wrench my heart 14 times over?
Amazon's approach is also scraping the bottom of the barrel for content that even the networks would not touch, yet was crafted specifically to target the many limitations of network TV. It seems unlikely to find many winners out of the leftovers.
Netflix in the meanwhile is thinking more in terms of "Fantasy TV" - like "wouldn't it be awesome if we could see any show made by Director X that also has stars Y & Z"? Then they don't even care exactly what show gets made, they just throw the delicious self-aware ingredients together and let it all work.
I come off as sounding quite a lot like a Netflix infomercial here but I think it's just because I am amazed at the quality of what Netflix has produced out the gate in comparison to how much I detest most network TV shows. Netflix's approach also means that even if a show is canceled after a season, at least you get one strong season so it's worth the attempt to start watching. Although I thought Terra Nova was kind of ridiculous in a lot of ways and I wouldn't say I enjoyed it much, after watching a few episodes I at least wanted to see how it ended and it really left people hanging.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Aha, I missed somehow that it was net network leftovers they were watching but that they were specifically created as pilots for Amazon.
Still, it seems like it's the exact same approach that traditional networks have used and yielded so little of value. All my other points stand.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I wonder when he'll realize that others posting as "Anonymous Coward" aren't actually impersonating him.....
Personally, I'm not sure which I prefer; these rants, or the hosts ones. At least the hosts ones were mildly informative for anyone new to slashdot....
Oh for the days of a Natalie Portman and Hot Grits of beowulf clusters in Soviet Russia....
Featuring the Brazilian jungle. Or maybe a strong-woman competition. Just a couple of thoughts.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
I'm guessing Onion News Empire is one of them, just started watching the pilot a few minutes ago. A few recognizable actors (not just a bunch of unknowns), funny so far.
Hopefully others work out this well too.
Gave it a try and already lost interest again before any video even had a chance to start.
The German page didn't have any content, the US page wanted me to install Microsoft's Silverlight (was kinda surprised to see that this stuff is even still in use) and then ran into a region block.
Germany will most likely only get some dubbed versions with the usual delay (even their streaming services over here usually don't include access to the original audio for US-made content) and after that Silverlight crap I've already lost the interest necessary to get me to activate the proxy options.
After the pilot for 'Zombieland' (which was godawful, BTW), comes a video promotion message from Amazon's PR people. The message literally has imaged quotes from viewers saying things like "fantastic show", "best program ever" and "why can't all TV be this good", and then suggests the problem with ordinary TV networks is that don't get to hear all the positive thoughts we have on their various output. Then, we are told this great Amazon initiative gives us a chance to lavish praise on all the pilots, with the promise that now the program makers will notice the praise, and greenlight the shows.
There is no suggestion at all of any possible negative or ambiguous viewer response to the show. No, the geniuses at Amazon instructed their PR team to ONLY include imagined glowing responses from the imagined viewer. Can you imagine anything more condescending? And yet surely WE thought the idea was to vote the winners up, and the losers down, so only the good shows moved forward. Such a process surely needs to hear the 'boos' as well as the 'cheers'?
Better again would be a mechanism for constructive criticism- allowing the viewer to 'repair' promising shows that had clear issues in their pilots. 'The Munsters', 'Star Trek' and 'Lost in Space' (to name but three) experienced massive retooling after their pilot episodes. Indeed, the pilots to these shows were actually clear flops (at least in the eyes of the people financing the shows).
Shouldn't Amazon, therefore, be crowd-sourcing the viewers to improve the premise of shows described by their pilots. Changing some of the actors, perhaps. Or the tone of the show. Or the pace? Take 'Zombieland'. On paper, the idea has potential (although the successful film was also a stinker). On screen, a post-apocalyptic zombie infested world with no emotional 'weight', or budget for post-apocalyptic sets, is just dreadful beyond words. Add the cheapest, nastiest cast almost no money can buy, and the recipe for disaster is complete.
Methinks Amazon is going to strike out with every one of their pilots (and I say 'theirs' although various studios normally responsible for programs on other channels made the pilots- who knows how the funding responsibility was split).
Is Amazon jumping in as a competitor of Netflix
Amazon has been positioning themselves as a competitor to Netflix for a long time. For example
It wouldn't surprise me if Netfilx started selling books soon just to get revenge.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Well, suffice to say that spreading their dollars across numerous pilots instead of one single show gets you what you expect: utter trash.
You can't compare the budget with House of Cards with the budget spent on these episodes. Amazon didn't make these pilots as an alternative to spending a lot of money on a single show. They did it as a prelude to spending a bunch of money on one or two shows.
I'm pretty certain Netflix produced a bunch of pilots which were equally as shaky as the Amazon work. The only difference is that those weren't shown to the general public, just focus groups and Netflix execs, and they picked the ones that they thought had the most promise. Many, if not most shows start out with a pilot that isn't nearly as good quality as the finished product, and not all series air a pilot as the first episode.
Your reaction to the pilots is pretty much why pilots don't get shown to the general audience: because most people go in with an expectation built up over years of watching final products.
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
Sounds like back to the '80s, exactly what you'd expect with the conflict of interest (Amazon can't do anything really edgey or they'll get boycott threats from this and that group).
They were released yesterday! You're slow, /.! :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Drop the idea of "TV show". They've been done and you probably do not have any better ideas than the networks have.
Instead, look at the books you're selling. Create "mini-series" type programming from the literature that is already out there. Focus on story arcs where you can have a beginning and an end.
The Black Company by Glen Cook.
Vlad Taltos by Steven Brust.
A steam-punk version of Doc Savage.
Perry Rhodan.
Neal Stephenson either The Baroque Cycle or Cryptonomicon.
Go big. Bigger than the networks. Bigger than the movie studios. Fill the niche they aren't willing to.
I pay for Amazon Prime, all the the pilots are available for me to watch, and I'll bet some of them are great ... but I'll probably never know.
The steam consistently dies in exactly the same spot a few seconds in. No, not buffering, just dead in the water.
My browser and flash player are up to date, no other sites have a problem streaming flash video to me. It sounds like a lot of other people are having similar problems, if Amazon's discussion boards are any indication.
Seriously, Amazon? These kinds of problems are sooo five years ago. If your actually expect this to take off, you need to get your shit together.
I can see the comedies flopping in Germany, after all they are the least funniest people in the world !
Betas wasn't too horrible. It was a bit cliché, but entertaining and applicable to the entrepreneurial/tech crowd.
When the focus group is that big, it means that if a promising show isn't picked up, it will more likely become known to fandom in general, leading to the possibility that large groups will come together to ask that a particular show be made. I could see that making a difference.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Most pilots suck, that's just the way it is. Leave you feedback and watch another : )
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Keep embarassing yourself Jeremiah Cornelius http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3581857&cid=43276741 since you posted that using your registered username by mistake (instead of your usual anonymous coward submissions by the 100's the past 2-3 months now on slashdot) giving away it's you spamming this forums almost constantly, just as you have in the post I just replied to.
The Zombieland pilot was mildly amusing. I'll probably watch a couple more to see how it's going to develop.
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
The vast majority of pilots are utter crap. That's why they usually don't release them to the public. Very proposed series that produce pilots get greenlit, even fewer last beyond one season, and much rarer than even that is one that's actually any good.
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