Dear stupid fucking television executives: Here is what not to do with the content you own.
I've been trying to keep my mouth shut about this, I really have. But then this headline came across my way in my news reader this morning...
This is not the first time, either, that I've seen executives at television properties become complete fucking morons when it came to online options. So yes, I guess it's finally time to sit down and explain some basic lessons about creativity, to all these executives in charge of online distribution of television properties.
First and most importantly -- you can't just sit down and cut an hour-long show into random four-minute segments, then present a random selection of segments in a random order online and have any of it make any sense. I mean, I get it, I get why you try to do it -- you see millions of kids enjoying nonsensical four-minute video snippets at YouTube, and you suddenly see an opportunity to sell exactly one ad with each of these millions of video snippets, and to even get the kids to advertise the snippets for you via MySpace and Digg. And you think, "We don't just have a 44-minute drama or a 22-minute comedy for airing on television; we have 11 new four-minute snippets of original dramatic intellectual property each week, 5 new comedy ones each day, each of which can have an ad sold, getting around the problem of people TiVoing over traditional blocks of ads like before."
But you can't just take an hour-long story, remove a random 240 seconds of it, run it by itself and expect it to make any sense. You just can't do that, no matter how much you want to. A dramatic story has a beginning, middle and end -- a point A, B and C -- and the audience needs all those moments in order to experience the entire story and be satisfied. And here's where a lot of you executives are making a mistake, frankly; that a lot of these successful online so-called "viral" videos actually do have a beginning, middle and end, just simplistic ones that fit within a four-minute timeframe. Many of you executives are mistaking that with simply having four minutes worth of high-budget videotape, showing a chase scene or a couple of jokes, or in other words what you have after cutting a full-length show into random chunks.
So please, executives, stop. Get into the habit of releasing the entire episode, beginning to end as an uninterrupted chunk, or with single commercials embedded within them which seems to be working well at your websites. Viacom executives, you're the fucking worst of all of them, so I especially hope you all are paying attention. I get that you want to divide The Daily Show and The Colbert Report into a dozen monetizable and Diggable little chunks each day, perfect for the meatsack undergraduates to repost on their blogs and MySpace accounts; but you're ruining the entire goddamn show by doing so, and by presenting the bits in a random order away from how they were originally performed, and by cutting out all the segues between bits, and by just not posting some of the bits at all. Cutting up a show like this and presenting it this way will ruin it; you are ruining your shows as you speak, when you do this. And then you all sit around and conclude that audiences simply must not want online versions of their favorite television shows because of this, like the fucking morons you are! Argh!
Okay, glad I got that off my chest. So, once you take care of that, then I'd like you to tackle the following:
1) Stop removing shows from websites after a certain amount of time. You should be doing the opposite; adding more and more back shows as quickly as possible, to have as complete an online library as possible that can be accessed by anyone at any time.
2) The only time that charging money for TV episodes made sense was when you had to pay for those millions of DVDs. Now that the distribution is digital, your revenue should come from advertising only, just like when it originally airs. The competition, then, should be long-tail in nature; over which network has the largest and most complete library of shows online, and hence can charge the most money for advertising.
Let's face facts: what I describe above is what fans of BitTorrent are doing for free right now anyway, on their home hard drives. And with BitTorrent clients becoming more and more automated, and hardware setups like Apple TV and Windows Media Center becoming more and more prevalent, it's only a matter of time before customers are simply programming their own viewing habits this way on their own, leaving your chopped-up attempts at rapid monetization in the dust whether you like it or not. And really, do you want to fall into that poisoned trap the music industry now finds itself -- where they're suing tens of thousands of their customers (including such infamous cases as newborn babies, grandmothers and the technically dead), turning into both a national joke and a national enemy in the eyes of the very people they're simultaneously advertising to? Seriously, television executives, do you really want to get to that point yourselves?
Embrace what I'm talking about; embrace what your most cutting-edge customers are already doing as we speak, and find a way to make money from it now while it's still somewhat in your hands. And let me finally have the chance to watch The Daily Show in some form other than chopped-up little slow-loading four-minute chunks that make no narrative sense, which you're doing after all because you think your audience is a bunch of dim-witted ADD-addled morons. Seriously, Viacom executives, stop releasing your shows online that way!
