From 500 TV channels to 1 channel
By Melissa Bell,
Charlie Sheen’s recent tiger-blood-fueled rant had its detractors and its fans, but to Brian Bedol, who has made a career out of building TV networks, it doesn’t matter what Sheen said, so much as how he said it.
“He used technology to go from being on a network to being a network,” said Bedol, a television executive and founder of the sports television channel Classic Sports Network, which was later sold to ESPN. “This guy went from being on Monday night on CBS to having a 24-hour-a-day relationship with tens of millions of people.”
To Bedol, Sheen, who will be starting a 21-city stage tour, is a harbinger of a new media paradigm: a socially driven, multiplatform way of delivering media to an audience.
Sheen started tweeting, conducting live talk shows on UStream.com, created small comedy skits for Funny Or Die and visited nearly every single morning talk show (or at least it felt like he did). For better or worse, the actor escaped the constraints of single-channel television, maneuvering his material before a hungry digital audience without CBS.
Bedol believes the entire video industry needs to follow Sheen’s lead: Break out from a single platform, allow talent and creators to engage directly with the audiences and use social media to drive interest rather than rely on old marketing methods.
Bedol hopes to implement some of these rules in his new company, BedRocket, a media and entertainment group that will launch later this year. Though he’s reluctant to go into specifics, the company aims to create programming for every type of media platform, including social networks, as opposed to limiting their products to one single television channel.
Breaking out of the box, accepting that the boundaries between the Web, the television, the tablet and the smartphone will likely not exist within a few years, is the next challenge for video creators. The confluence of products has Bedol and his partners comparing this time to the introduction of cable TV in the 1980s, when the options moved from 35 channels to 700 channels. Only this time, instead of going up to 5,000 channels, it’ll move to only one channel: the viewer’s personalized creation. And the best way creators can get their material to an audience will be through their social networks and grouping like-minded content.
It’s impossible to say if BedRocket will help create that more personalized media future, but plenty of programs are helping people more easily find movies and other video material tailored to their tastes. Netflix and Amazon have long realized the potential in suggesting related products based on viewers’ previous tastes. Netflix, in particular, has quite the way with words for its taste groupings. Are you a fan of “witty workplace TV shows” or “goofy opposite attract comedies”? I am. At least according to my Netflix suggestions. YouTube has recently started to break its videos into “channels” divided by topics of interest. VideoHunters, an iPad application, helps hone those YouTube topics into even more personalized interest-driven channels.
Movies and television shows are increasingly becoming untethered from the home DVR and DVD player. Zediva.com, which lets you stream new releases more quickly than Amazon or Netflix, and Facebook movies have recently added to the availability of videos online. Meanwhile, television set-top boxes such as those from Roku or XBox Live, bring the Web to the home television.
No worries, though — the Web won’t kill television stars. Soon, they’ll just be one and the same.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/from-500-tv-channels-to-1-channel/2011/03/28/AFRKFbLC_story.html
No comments:
Post a Comment