After seeing Google’s YouTube grabbing the king’s crown for himself (along with a good portion of all Internet traffic), News Corp.-owned MySpace is ready to dip its toes into the lucrative movie industry.
Confronted also with the uprising of Facebook, and with the constant menace coming from home ground rivals Flickr or Digg, MySpace is in search for a new identity, which should determine its young audience to return to its servers.
Since YouTube is also in front with the presidential-campaign debates, what’s left for MySpace? The answer is simple: TV-like content delivered exclusively for the Web-viewers.
This is how MySpaceTV was born.
The social networking site announced today it had secured the exclusive international distribution rights for Quarterlife, a new series from Emmy award-winning producers Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick.
The two are responsible among others for Leo di Caprio’s “Blood Diamond” and the ’80 series “Thirtysomething”, broadcast by ABC.
The particularity for Quarterlife is that it’s produced entirely for the Web and will also have its own social-networking representation, at quarterlife.com. The show’s two authors have declared that their intention is not only to find new audiences, but also to express their artistic freedom in a new environment, which could be even more suitable than the television.
The history of Quarterlife goes back until 2005, when the show was called “1/4 Life.” Back then only the pilot episode aired at ABC, which later got into a quarrel with Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick and cancelled all other episodes. However, the debut of Quarterlife on MySpace is not exactly breaking news, since rumors about a possible Web-project for the aforementioned duo have circulated for the past two months, with TV writers and production staff involved.
“We've been talking to [Zwick and Herskovitz] for the past several weeks, and we're delighted to be able to announce this,” Jeff Berman, the general manager of MySpaceTV said. The first “webisode” will be posted on MySpaceTV on November 11, he added.
The cast will comprise a group of twentysomethings whose lives are presented like video-blog flash-backs by one of the girls in the group.
Berman praised the initiative saying that Quarterlife is actually a “landmark moment” for the popular social-networking site, adding that the show would be “the highest-quality serialized content ever to appear on the Internet. We’re talking about the same production values as 24 or Prison Break.”
The Web-show will debut on November 11 is considered by its two creators
as a “gamble”, but a worth-spending-time-on one: "We want to prove there is another way," Herskovitz said.
"When [we] did My So-Called Life and Thirtysomething, the network barely gave us any notes," he added.
"Now I have friends tell me that the network tells them what color to make the walls."
Quarterlife is scheduled to have 34 episodes, with a duration of 8 minutes each and with two episodes debuting each week. They will air on MySpaceTV, which will own exclusivity rights for the webisodes in the first 24 h, according to the contract. After that, the same episodes will be “relocated” to quarterlife.com, where users will be able to take the embed code and paste it into their sites/blogs/MySpace personal pages.
According to Berman, users will also have the possibility to interact with the Quarterlife cast, by posting requests and messages on their respective MySpace profiles. Furthermore, fans of the show will benefit from the site’s social networking features by reviewing the scripts for future episodes and posting suggestions for them.
Like everywhere in America, there’s got to be some money involved into this. Apparently, for the revenue part, MySpace and Quarterlife’s producers will split in half the earnings the show will bring. Although this might not sound too well for fans (YouTube has also tried this with little success), those earnings will come from running ads inside the video, but according to Herskovitz there will also be product placement deals (promotional ads placed by marketers using real commercial products and services in media). According to PQMedia, a consulting firm that tracks the product placement market, 2006 product placement was estimated at $3.07B, and was expected to rise to $5.6B by 2010.
For the investment part, Herskovitz declined to enter into details but confirmed that sums will exceed the current $50,000 to $100,000 most Web-focused shows spend on a single hour.
According to The New York Times, the stars of “Quarterlife” are relative unknowns: Bitsie Tulloch (“The West Wing,” “Lonelygirl 15”) and Scott M. Foster (“Greek,” “Teenage Dirtbag”), among others. In addition to Mr. Zwick and Mr. Herskovitz, writers will include the actor Devon Gummersall, whom they worked with on the series “My So-Called Life” and “Once and Again.”
Forrester Research analyst Josh Bernoff, cited by the Associated Press, said that: "If you create a place where your fans can gather and talk, then you reinforce their coming back and make it possible for them to recruit other people."
According to data from comScore MediaMetrix, MySpace is the king of social-networking sites in the US, with June estimates indicating that more than 70 million unique visitors have accessed the News Corp.-owned domain. comScore also said that total time spent on MySpace by users is three times its closest competitor and the site continues to lead in average minutes spent per person per month with more than 200 minutes on average.