I continue to watch for signs of how the current Writer’s Guild strike will affect the entertainment industry.
This article, written from the NATPE Conference this week, focuses on a couple of potential developments.
One possible change: “the death of the upfronts as we know it,” predicted Matt Seiler, president and CEO, PHD North America.
Seiler said the real business of buying and selling ad time actually takes place in advance of upfront “extravaganzas.” Distributors and advertisers have to think differently about future relationships, he said, but “we’ll all be better for it.”
Laura Caraccioli-Davis, executive vice president/entertainment director of Starcom USA, predicted that TV schedules will be very different after the strike. She and other panelists expect shorter, more self-contained series.
Here’s an earlier article from Multichannel: NBCU’s Zucker Hints At End Of Upfronts. The significance is this. Broadcast networks develop programming in advance. They spend a lot of money developing more shows than they actually end up putting on the air. Once they’ve settled on the shows they plan on showing in the fall, they first must sell them to advertisers during the upfront presentations in the spring.
Broadcasters can no longer afford a development system like that in 2007, when $500 million was spent on script development, resulting in 80 pilots, only eight of which were picked up as shows, [NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker] said. None of those eight were great hits, he noted.
The strategy at the some of the NBCU cable networks is to buy into a concept and order that series straight to air, he said. Six episodes can be created for the estimated $10 million it costs to make a pilot, a film which frequently does not represent how the series will ultimately look on air, he said.
In the film business, the studios also spend a lot of money developing far more movies than ever get made, although once they buy a script, they don’t let that property go, even if they have no intention of ever making it.
So, the networks/studios (since the two have now merged) may be more efficient in how they produce shows and may schedule them differently, running shorter, more compact series, rather than dribbling out a couple dozen episodes out over the course of an entire season. We’ve already seen some trending in this direction.
Tags: Writer’s Guild, strike, WGA, Hollywood, NATPE