Herskovitz: Are the corporate suits ruining TV?
One of my brothers in law, Justin, works for Marshall Herskovitz, co-creator/producer/writer of many excellent entertainment products that you’ve probably consumed. Mr. Herskovitz wrote an Op-Ed piece for the LA Times analyzing our state of affairs in the world of big budget content creation:
Because the business of television has become an exclusive club, closed to new members, some producers are turning to the Internet to have a voice. And, of course, the Big Six are doing everything they can to own and control that as well. Already, it’s impossible to make an “overall deal” — the time-honored arrangement in which producers are kept on retainer to develop shows for a particular network — without agreeing to be exclusive to the network on the Internet as well as television. The logic of this defies all laws of economics; producers pledge fealty to networks because they (the producers) don’t have the millions it takes to shoot, distribute and broadcast their own programs on television. Producing for the Internet, on the other hand, costs as little as $30,000 an hour, and “broadcasting” costs much less. Virtually anyone can do it.
We’ve been talking about this for so long that it hardly sounds like a revelation to me anymore. Maybe it’s my close proximity to one of the major epicenters of new content delivery, but realizing that the internet is your next hub of entertainment just isn’t a new idea for me. 
Aha, but, what *is* interesting here is that this is Marshall Herskovitz trumpeting this concept… in the LA f’ing Times!
Uh oh, Big Media. Some of the smarter (and, honestly, richer) kids are tired of you bullying them and they’re taking their ball to their own back yard, which isn’t as small as you remembered it being. And they have their own playground. And cameras. And fat internet pipes. Uh oh.
I think Mr. Zwick and Mr. Herskovitz’s challenge is to not fall victim the very situation they despise once their plans start to pan out in the direction they want. The fact that they’re debuting to MySpace, and not “MySpace, Facebook, and iTunes” goes to show that we have a long way to go still. The institutional gatekeepers seem to exist in every mature system, don’t they?
Anyway, I do wish them the best of luck with their quarterlife project! I’ll be watching.
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