The ground has shifted beneath what for the better part of the century have been among America’s most reliable and desirable products: movies and television shows.
This thing called the Internet came along. And now anyone, anywhere in the industry will tell you this: Hollywood must adapt in order to survive.
But how?
The industry has faced challenges before. For decades through the end of the 20th century, the multi-billion-dollar economic freight train that is the entertainment business has met each threat posed by innovation by growing bigger still. Video enhanced the revenue stream of movies. Cable broadened the television audience. The international market became a source to rival domestic. DVDs were a bonanza at the dawn of the new millenium.
But cracks have formed in the hard earth that has been the bedrock of the popular culture and media consumed by people around the world.
Those cracks are evidenced in the broad changes in consumer behavior set in motion by Google, Facebook, YouTube, Digg and a host of other new companies that for the most part did not even exist a decade ago.
Some worry that Hollywood’s very survival is at stake. True or not, the changes have already ushered in a cast of new characters that dominate the decisions individuals make about how they spend their leisure time. Millennial-generation digital entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Kevin Rose of Digg are displacing once-omnipotent Hollywood players such as DreamWorks’ David Geffen, who has just retired, or Michael Eisner, the former Disney mogul who has remade himself and is now a minor figure in the world of new media.
Thus far attempts to figure out exactly what a successful digital-era Hollywood venture will look like have met with scant success.
“People truly do not understand the extent to which new media is not a business,” said Marshall Herskovitz, the veteran television producer who last year declared his independence from the networks and created “quarterlife,” a web series and social media hub. “It’s remarkably not a business. I’m speaking from painful experience.” [Read the full interview.]
Herskovitz managed to make money from a single episode of the series that ended up airing on NBC before the show was cancelled. But he lost money on the 36 episodes that were streamed on Myspace and the show’s own site.
There are small signs that a web-based TV business could eventually be viable. Warner Bros Television has resurrected its popular-but-unsuccessful WB network as TheWB.com in August, and is offering their cancelled hits like “Gilmore Girls” as well as original programming for the site, which is attracting about 250,000 unique visitors per month.
But even for the Internet, that’s a moderate-sized audience. Perez Hilton’s one-man gossip site gets about 1.5 million unique visitors per month.
The star TV producer Josh Schwartz, creator of “Gossip Girl” and the “The O.C.,” is writing a series for TheWB.com about a group of friends who hang out in a rock club, with a social media component built in to the show.
