XplanaZine

Transcript

It’s never a good thing when you find that your tastes are evidently in direct conflict with those of the majority.

One day you think you’re part of the mainstream and the next you find that every restaurant you like seems to close shortly after the last time you ate there. The movies you are drawn to never make it to a theater in your city because of the perceived lack of an interested audience. And your favorite kind of shoes can no longer be found in any store. It’s a sure sign that you have parted ways with the masses.

Or it could be something as simple as falling in love with a TV show only to have it dropped by the network. I mean, you finally find some TV worth watching after all these years and it’s gone before you really have a chance to even enjoy it. That’s exactly what happened to me recently with a show called Wonderfalls.

Now how to describe Wonderfalls? Try this. Picture an irreverent Joan of Arcadia trapped in Twin Peaks with more brains than the average WMD inspector. Her life is a so-called “work in progress” so she’s reduced herself to working in a Niagara Falls gift shop for a mouth-breathing assistant manager not even out of high school. And then, one fateful day a mystical series of strange events empower our heroine, Jaye, to communicate with inanimate objects who won’t stop giving her advice. What follows is a an inventive chain of problem-solving events led by Jaye whose sarcasm and timely angst always feel fresh to us.

For me, the show worked because it made me think of my own strange life experiences and about my seventeen-year-old daughter who has a really big imagination. Unfortunately, they showed only eight episodes of the seventeen actually completed. But the news isn’t all bad. The entire season of Wonderfalls has been released on DVD and I plan to buy a copy. I don’t care if I’m the only one.

Now, if you think all of this makes me more convinced than ever about the importance of narrowcasting and matching your content to the right audience, you are 100% correct. But it also makes me think about how clever the Fox executives are to realize that just because you have a show that doesn’t meet your numbers expectations doesn’t mean you can’t make a little money on it anyway. Wonderfalls had too small a following for TV, but the audience was loyal enough to buy DVDs and make the network money just the same.

So the lesson here is about content created for one channel but pushed to another. The movie industry has been doing it since video became popular. They are the ones who made popular the saying “straight to video.” The TV industry hasn’t gotten that far yet, but they will.

What is just as much fun is wondering which channel will surface next for TV content. My guess is that the progression from mainstream channels to cable channels to DVD will continue its outward push until it hits the Web. The Web? That’s right, the Web. It’s not hard for me to see that in the not-too-distant future there will be more than ten times the programming we have now that is distributed asynchronously over the Web. After all, bandwidth is getting cheaper and cheaper and the number of people with high speed Internet connections continues to grow rapidly.

More importantly, TV-to-the-Web makes sense because the means of production have become so cheap. So, in addition to independent film makers, we will have independent TV studios (in people’s garage but broadcasting to much larger audiences than “community” TV). They’ll distribute their content only on the Web both through synchronous and asynchronous formats (hence the importance of vodcasting). And, in a reversal of the current state, when the shows get really popular, they will be released to DVD.

Broadcast Information

podcast feed
i-podder download