Pundits Discuss the Internet's FutureMay 5, 2006
In the past 10 years the Internet has emerged as a global network that enables instant communications and borderless commerce. The popularity of blogs and the roll out of high-speed wireless connections have already begun to reshape the Web, but what will the Internet look like a decade from now?
The Wall Street Journal Online invited Web pioneer Vint Cerf and tech pundit Esther Dyson to discuss what they expect in the next 10 years. Mr. Cerf envisions an interplanetary network, while Ms. Dyson ponders a loss of privacy and an information glut. Their conversation, carried out by email, is below.
Mr. Cerf begins: Mobility has entered the world, big time, during the past ten years and the Internet is adapting to it. Geo-indexed information has increased in value as users query "where is the nearest..." and get answers because the system knows where you are when you ask, thanks to the Global Positioning System. Combining media in processing information is increasingly common. Voice a question but get the answer back on your laptop's display, the car's navigational display or your mobile's small but high-resolution screen. Take a photo with the phone and send it automatically to your blog which you just dictated.
THE PARTICIPANTS
Vinton G. Cerf is the chief Internet "evangelist" for Google Inc. where he is responsible for identifying new technologies. From 1994 to 2005, Mr. Cerf was a senior vice president at MCI. Mr. Cerf co-designed the TCP/IP protocols and basic architecture of the Internet. In 2005, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work on the Web. He has been chairman of the Internet's regulatory body, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, since 2000.
Esther Dyson is editor at large at CNET Networks Inc., where she is responsible for its quarterly newsletter, Release 1.0, and its PC Forum executive conference. Before selling her business to CNET in 2004, Ms. Dyson had co-owned EDventure Holdings and edited Release 1.01 since 1983. She is a technology investor focused on emerging markets and serves on the board of several start-ups. She was chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation from 1995 to early 1998 and founding chairman of ICANN from 1998 to 2000.
Broadband is finally coming, and is highly penetrant already in some communities such as Hong Kong, Seoul and Tokyo. Our experiences with entertainment video will almost certainly change as we tend to download and watch later rather than watching only what is currently being transmitted. Channel surfing will be replaced by menu selection. And advertising will change in very interesting ways as a result -- but that's for another installment.
By the end of the decade, we will have a two planet Internet in operation as the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is prepared to serve as a store-and-forward relay to ground-based rovers, a mobile science laboratory and other future missions to Mars. The Interplanetary Internet, serving robotic and manned missions, will grow from this simple configuration to a more complex backbone of interplanetary links as each new mission is launched to the planets and satellites of our solar system. Virtual visits to our near-space neighborhood will be as common as a trip to the local supermarket as we amass enormous amounts of information about the region of space in which we live. Kids will have virtual field trips to visit the Spirit and Opportunity sites on Mars and other places from which we have gathered so much information already and will gather in the next decade.
Ms. Dyson writes: The Internet will have become more ubiquitous but less visible. It will still exist as PCs and monitors, but it will also be all around us in other devices: everything from buses and luggage transmitting their locations so they can be tracked, to friends and children signaling their presence anytime you might want to reach them. Rather than being a separate virtual world, the Internet will encompass the physical world as well; most things will have Internet identities available remotely as well as a physical presence available only if you are nearby.
SHARE YOUR VIEW
2
What will the Internet look like a decade from now? Join a discussion3.
For most people and applications, the biggest issue will be not search but filtering: So much will be knowable, but what do you want to know. People will initially be overwhelmed with choices, but vendors -- competing vendors, I hope, rather than monopolies or governments -- will make default choices for individuals. My hope is that those defaults will be socially valuable, but visible and easy for any user to change for himself; "Paradox of Choice" author [Barry Schwartz] has called this "libertarian paternalism."
Mr. Cerf: Esther is spot-on about the Internet of devices: they will be manageable through the network and various services will help us to do that. Entertainment equipment and other consumer electronics will likely be the first to undergo this transformation. Household equipment will be next and then office equipment and the things in our cars and festooned on our bodies.
As to the information glut, we'll use all the tools we've used in the past to cope with too much information. We don't read every book, newspaper and magazine published. We don't see every movie. We don't listen to every radio broadcast. We look for clues from friends, trusted sources, personal experience, interest to refine and select. We'll use all those tools and our automated search engines to help out here.
Ms. Dyson: I think you'll see a fundamental shift in the balance of power towards individuals. Individuals will declare what kinds of vendors they want sponsoring their content, and then those vendors will have the privilege of appearing, discreetly, around the user's content. There will be much less "advertising" and much more communication to interested customers. Advertisers will have to learn to listen, not just to track and segment customers.
So the message to marketers is: If you can't sell your product (assuming it's already in the market), fix the product! Don't try to change the situation by advertising.
Consumers will publish wish lists for marketers to scan. Also, their choices will be influenced by their friends' comments much more than by marketers' messages.
On the other hand, it will be much harder for consumers to get free content anonymously, because advertisers will want to know more about the people they are paying to reach. In many cases, whether email or ads, users may even get a share of the marketer's payments. (See AttentionTrust.org4 or my op-ed on Goodmail5 or my post on Release 1.06.)
This makes sense from advertisers' point of view, but it has a social downside: People who buy Porsches can earn more from marketers than people who buy used cars. People without money will find it harder and harder to get free content -- which means a role for nonprofits in funding access to content for all.
Mr. Cerf: Advertising is going to be different on the network as broadband kicks in. "IPTV" is a sort of misnomer that misleads into thoughts of streaming audio and video when in fact it is an opportunity to download and play later. In addition, it offers an opportunity to download ancillary material that expands on the video, perhaps adds some interactive software that might be relevant to it, or even download advertising material associated with products placed into the video program. One could even imagine freezing the screen (pausing the video) and mousing around to click on objects in view. Some of these might have had advertising material downloaded. And since it might be known roughly where you are and at what time you are watching, the advertising might contain live/Web components that are tailored to these factors.
Ms. Dyson: I'm going to take this in a slightly different direction…
There's a lot of, er, attention being paid right now to the so-called "attention economy." Indeed, O'Reilly [Media Inc.] subtitled its recent (March) Web 2.0 conference "The attention economy." It even featured author Michael Goldhaber, who wrote about the concept some 14 years ago for my newsletter Release 1.0.
But people are generally missing the point; Mr. Goldhaber has trouble getting attention for the mirror he is holding up. Most commentators see the attention economy as the intention economy, where attention = intention (to buy). That version of the attention economy is all about sales leads and monetization of attention, and radical ideas include the notion of users getting paid for their attention, as I mentioned earlier, whether in the form of surfing behavior (www.root.net7) or a willingness to read email.
LOOK BOTH WAYS
8
WSJ.com marks its 10th anniversary with a package of articles that looks back at news and trends from the past decade -- and ahead at what the future may hold. Full coverage is at WSJ.com/10Years9.
But Mr. Goldhaber's thesis is far more radical, and people aren't really paying ... attention yet. It's that attention has its own intrinsic value, independent of money. People go on the Web in search of attention; they don't want to give it as much as get it. People judge their own worth by their number of friends (Friendster) or fans (MySpace) or business contacts (LinkedIn). They may tell you that they're seeking business success, but oftentimes they seem to value contact lists in the thousands for their own sake.
While adults worry about privacy, kids seek attention. They post poetry, photos, exaggerated tales of personal exploits, music in order to create an online presence that garners attention.
Doesn't this all come down to money in the end? you might ask. Don't kids buy things in order to get attention? Sure. And in the same way, the new financial-industrial economy all came down to food and shelter as we made the transition from an agrarian, feudal economy. But there are new dynamics worth noting. Most users are not trying to turn attention into anything else. They are seeking it for itself.
For sure, the attention economy will not replace the financial economy. But it is more than just a subset of the financial economy we know and love.
Mr. Cerf: This is an interesting observation and frankly I'd not thought about it in quite the same terms that Esther uses. I must admit that the behavior patterns do look as if some of these users (many of them young) feel "paid" when they have lots of "friends" or lots of hits on their Web sites. I wonder how much of this is youthful "I am ME! Look at ME!" Is any of this a kind of search for identity? Is it exploration of different personas (as in the role-playing games)? Some of this might be attributed to a natural desire to feel part of a group (gangs, cliques, teams, etc.).
To some extent, the infrastructure needed to support this potentially self-centered behavior is being paid for through advertising revenues, making it appear to be free to many or most users.
Ms. Dyson: Yes indeed, it is youthful behavior etc. - just as it once was youthful behavior to be obsessed with money and to want more money than you could use, which horrified the sages who cared more about old-fashioned values. The shift is not absolute; it's where society focuses (or where some societies are starting to focus). Indeed, Mr. Goldhaber has been writing about this for many years. In some ways it's an outgrowth of TV as much as of the Net. TV makes people want attention; the Net enables them to get it.
And yes, advertising supports most of it. It's just that the advertisers are not the center of attention the way they would like to be!
Mr. Cerf concludes: The Internet reaches only about a billion users so there are another 5.5 billion to go. It is beginning to include a good deal of information in many languages, but the domain name system needs to be outfitted with a similar capability. Access speeds are increasing but in a very non-uniform fashion. Business models for supporting various parts of the Internet are also in flux with new models being tested almost daily. Mobility is a component of the Internet that is plainly of increasing importance and will drive a variety of new applications. Entertainment media will be augmented with Internet counterparts with results that may not be entirely predictable but which will almost certainly have an interactive component missing from the traditional media. A plethora of "things" will become Internet connected and managed. There will be inventions for the use of the Internet that will come from academic and user settings to surprise us all when they appear, as they have in the past, in unexpected ways -- propagating through viral advertising. There's an Internet in your future, resistance is futile.
Ms. Dyson closes: Let me add just a couple of points:
The Internet so far has existed mostly in cyberspace, linking computers fed data by humans and by other computers. The Internet of the future will be much more tightly linked to physical space. First of all, many of its future users will connect via cellphones, and the net will know more about their physical locations and their identities than it does about those who reach it by computer. Beyond that, as Vint writes, the Internet will link things in space (on Earth as well as in off-Earth "space").
The Net of the future will know much more about the physical world and all the things in it ... and of course that information will be available to human users. The big challenges in the future will be limiting distribution of that information (security, privacy, confidentiality, etc.) on the one hand and filtering it out on the other (not search, but data-mining, exception-reporting, spam filtering, friend recommendations, behavioral targeting and the like). The big questions are who controls the filtering: individuals, organizations or governments? Will it be done transparently?
6.07.2006
The New Reality
Jeff Gaspin's job: figure out how to make online entertainment pay
By BROOKS BARNESMay 15, 2006; Page R3
When people ask Jeff Gaspin to describe how important new media has become to the old-line television networks, he brings up an embarrassing story.
While conducting meetings a few years ago at the Bravo cable channel, Mr. Gaspin, now president of cable entertainment and digital content at NBC Universal Television Group, says he could never remember the name of the executive who oversaw the online unit. "For an entire year, I just couldn't remember it," he says. "I was truly embarrassed, but it just didn't seem important enough that I remember his name."
THE JOURNAL REPORT
See the complete Technology report.
The 46-year-old Mr. Gaspin believes that these days he isn't likely to suffer the same fate. "Now, the online guy is the most important guy in the room," he says.
The New Frontier
As the television networks race to figure out their strategies for delivering shows to viewers in new ways, Mr. Gaspin is the person NBC Universal has charged with coming up with programming that runs on the Web, cellphones and on other digital platforms that haven't yet been invented. He has to figure out what kind of content will work in this new realm, how to generate revenue and prod Hollywood writers, producers and agents for ideas. It's a totally new job in an industry that, when it comes to programming, hasn't changed much in the past few decades.
In many ways, General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal is staking its future on Mr. Gaspin's job. The network, which is trying to pull itself out of the prime-time ratings hole it fell into with the departure of the hit sitcom "Friends" two years ago, has been particularly aggressive when it comes to developing unique TV content for the Web. This summer, for instance, the network will run 10 mini-episodes of the popular sitcom "The Office" exclusively on the Web -- the first of the Big Four networks to attempt such a project.
So far, NBC and others aren't generating much revenue from their online projects, especially compared with the money they make through television advertising. But everyone is trying to devise a formula.
"We are going to figure out a way to make it pay," says Jeff Zucker, chief executive of NBC Universal. "The only way to do that is to bring something new to the party. It's about having the content."
JEFF GASPIN NBC's digital guru
Mr. Zucker has dubbed his initiative to deliver new content in new ways "TV 360." And he says he asked Mr. Gaspin to oversee the effort in part because of his track record in the reality-TV genre. "Jeff is great at taking an emerging business and figuring out how to make it a mainstream one that makes a lot of money," Mr. Zucker says.
Mr. Gaspin is regarded as one of the founding fathers of reality TV, the genre that exploded in the late 1990s and gushes profits for networks because of the low production costs. Among other projects, he created the juggernaut series "Behind the Music" for Viacom Inc.'s VH1 music cable channel and developed Bravo's hit makeover show "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy."
Mr. Gaspin's journey into the digital realm started in a routine strategy meeting held last summer in New York with GE Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt. At the time, Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. were getting lots of attention for their stock prices, and Mr. Gaspin says that Mr. Immelt wanted to know what NBC's broad strategy was for the Internet and mobile devices. Mr. Gaspin says he was given eight weeks to put together an extensive presentation.
A Huge Shift
Mr. Gaspin, who is based at NBC's studio in Burbank, Calif., says he set up meetings with everyone from Google to his own online people. "It was a 180-degree shift," he says. "We went from not paying enough attention to this being our complete focus."
Among his first projects: A reality show called "StarTomorrow," which NBC will launch on the Web in July. The "American Idol"-style show, produced with Tommy Mottola, the former chief executive of Sony Music Entertainment, represents the first time a major broadcast network has developed a series exclusively for the Internet.
MEET THE NEW BOSS Scenes from an online episode of "The Office"
But Mr. Gaspin's big test will come this fall, when NBC will start running its first full batch of shows that have offshoot components for the Web, cellphones or Apple Computer Co.'s iTunes online music and video service. Viewers will be able to go to NBC.com and watch such programs, known as Webisodes, free of charge. Programming for mobile phones, called mobisodes, will be available free to people who have a video-ready cellphone and subscribe to a video package from their wireless carrier. All of the content will likely feature a combination of banner ads and video ads, although NBC says it hasn't decided yet how they will be incorporated.
One extensive project involves "The Black Donnellys," a new drama series about four brothers involved in organized crime, which will debut in September on NBC. The show also will feature exclusive content for both the Web and mobile phones. There will be Webisodes with the show's narrator divulging the history of the Donnelly family. There's also a blog from the executive producers focused on putting the show together.
Today, NBC is scheduled to unveil its fall lineup to advertisers in a major presentation at New York's Radio City Music Hall.
In on the Action
NBC isn't alone in its quest to serve up programming everywhere and in every way. Virtually all broadcast and cable networks are frantically building out a digital division.
News Corp.'s 20th Century Fox studio is developing TV content for the company's various Web sites and other platforms, and the company just created a unit called Fox Interactive Media to coordinate the effort. Already, Fox is a leader in developing original content for video-ready cellphones. It recently announced a spinoff of its "Prison Break" series to be viewed exclusively on cellphones. And original mobisodes of Fox's hit counterterrorism series "24" ran on cellphones late last year.
NBC and the other networks also face competition from Internet companies themselves. Yahoo is working on creating its own content, including reality shows to be distributed on the Web. But the online company also is partnering with television networks to stream content.
For instance, Yahoo will be streaming episodes of CBS's news program "60 Minutes" starting in September. Immediately after the broadcast, one segment will be posted on Yahoo with expanded footage and interviews, along with a totally new segment based on the week's news.
Meantime, upstarts like New York-based Rocketboom LLC are getting in on the action with their own original programming. Rocketboom runs a popular video blog where a few friends post a daily satirical news report with Internet-related content.
Greater Workload
Within NBC itself, the network faces the tough task of wringing more content out of existing employees. Like other networks, NBC isn't yet keen to spend much money on digital initiatives.
So, for instance, "The Office" Webisodes for this summer were written by some of the writers of the original series -- for no extra money. NBC and other networks have relied on corporate muscle to demand such extras.
An NBC spokesman says: "We don't separate out compensation for these services; it falls under overall compensation."
This is a festering problem for Hollywood's writers and other unions, which are starting to talk of a strike -- and one that Mr. Gaspin will be called on to help resolve.
"We need more resources if we're going to go full bore with this," says Ben Silverman, executive producer of "The Office" and several reality shows for NBC and other networks. "The good news is that I think the networks realize this."
Writers are used to developing half-hour or hour-long shows -- not Web clips and mobisodes. And they are used to big payoffs if networks buy a project. "The big turn-off at times is when people realize that there's not the upfront revenue they would like there to be," says Bob Levinson, head of world-wide television for Los Angeles-based talent agency International Creative Management.
When it comes to creating digital tentacles for their shows, Mr. Gaspin says some producers have the attitude of, "I don't need it, I don't want it, leave me alone."
So how does he handle those situations? Mr. Gaspin says he talks about the attention such efforts can bring to a show, and tries to give a tutorial on the digital universe without tripping over any egos. "Very few shows are so well run that the producers have extra time to do anything," Mr. Gaspin says. "We understand there are constraints. But the world has changed."
If nothing else, producers are starting to realize the promotional power of the Web. NBC credits its decision to make episodes of "The Office" available on iTunes with helping the show notch a sharp ratings increase. And creating online dieting clubs around the reality show "The Biggest Loser" -- where people compete to lose the most weight and win $250,000 -- helped the series blossom into a modest hit last fall. The clubs, which charge members $20 a month, offer message boards and diet and exercise tips from the cast members of the series itself. The six-month-old venture has 40,000 members to date, according to Mr. Gaspin.
"When you have little successes like that," he says, "it helps take the barriers down."
Online Incubation
In scouting for potential projects, Mr. Gaspin has started relying on a handful of talent agents, including Mr. Levinson.
At a recent pitch meeting, Mr. Levinson tried selling Mr. Gaspin on an animated project set in the future. The project would start as a Web series and then, if successful, be spun into a video game and then a TV series or even a film. By starting on the Web, the project could be incubated without incurring high costs, says Mr. Levinson. "With luck, a hit on the Web would then move elsewhere."
It's Mr. Gaspin's job to figure out what pitches are worth taking a chance on, and he says it was immediately clear that Mr. Levinson's project was worth a serious look.
"It worked out exactly as we were hoping," Mr. Levinson says. "Instead of us having to go to various divisions and sell something over and over to people who may or may not be talking to each other, we were able to go to one person. By the end of the day, Jeff had talked to all of those people for us."
Jeff Gaspin's job: figure out how to make online entertainment pay
By BROOKS BARNESMay 15, 2006; Page R3
When people ask Jeff Gaspin to describe how important new media has become to the old-line television networks, he brings up an embarrassing story.
While conducting meetings a few years ago at the Bravo cable channel, Mr. Gaspin, now president of cable entertainment and digital content at NBC Universal Television Group, says he could never remember the name of the executive who oversaw the online unit. "For an entire year, I just couldn't remember it," he says. "I was truly embarrassed, but it just didn't seem important enough that I remember his name."
THE JOURNAL REPORT
See the complete Technology report.
The 46-year-old Mr. Gaspin believes that these days he isn't likely to suffer the same fate. "Now, the online guy is the most important guy in the room," he says.
The New Frontier
As the television networks race to figure out their strategies for delivering shows to viewers in new ways, Mr. Gaspin is the person NBC Universal has charged with coming up with programming that runs on the Web, cellphones and on other digital platforms that haven't yet been invented. He has to figure out what kind of content will work in this new realm, how to generate revenue and prod Hollywood writers, producers and agents for ideas. It's a totally new job in an industry that, when it comes to programming, hasn't changed much in the past few decades.
In many ways, General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal is staking its future on Mr. Gaspin's job. The network, which is trying to pull itself out of the prime-time ratings hole it fell into with the departure of the hit sitcom "Friends" two years ago, has been particularly aggressive when it comes to developing unique TV content for the Web. This summer, for instance, the network will run 10 mini-episodes of the popular sitcom "The Office" exclusively on the Web -- the first of the Big Four networks to attempt such a project.
So far, NBC and others aren't generating much revenue from their online projects, especially compared with the money they make through television advertising. But everyone is trying to devise a formula.
"We are going to figure out a way to make it pay," says Jeff Zucker, chief executive of NBC Universal. "The only way to do that is to bring something new to the party. It's about having the content."
JEFF GASPIN NBC's digital guru
Mr. Zucker has dubbed his initiative to deliver new content in new ways "TV 360." And he says he asked Mr. Gaspin to oversee the effort in part because of his track record in the reality-TV genre. "Jeff is great at taking an emerging business and figuring out how to make it a mainstream one that makes a lot of money," Mr. Zucker says.
Mr. Gaspin is regarded as one of the founding fathers of reality TV, the genre that exploded in the late 1990s and gushes profits for networks because of the low production costs. Among other projects, he created the juggernaut series "Behind the Music" for Viacom Inc.'s VH1 music cable channel and developed Bravo's hit makeover show "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy."
Mr. Gaspin's journey into the digital realm started in a routine strategy meeting held last summer in New York with GE Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt. At the time, Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. were getting lots of attention for their stock prices, and Mr. Gaspin says that Mr. Immelt wanted to know what NBC's broad strategy was for the Internet and mobile devices. Mr. Gaspin says he was given eight weeks to put together an extensive presentation.
A Huge Shift
Mr. Gaspin, who is based at NBC's studio in Burbank, Calif., says he set up meetings with everyone from Google to his own online people. "It was a 180-degree shift," he says. "We went from not paying enough attention to this being our complete focus."
Among his first projects: A reality show called "StarTomorrow," which NBC will launch on the Web in July. The "American Idol"-style show, produced with Tommy Mottola, the former chief executive of Sony Music Entertainment, represents the first time a major broadcast network has developed a series exclusively for the Internet.
MEET THE NEW BOSS Scenes from an online episode of "The Office"
But Mr. Gaspin's big test will come this fall, when NBC will start running its first full batch of shows that have offshoot components for the Web, cellphones or Apple Computer Co.'s iTunes online music and video service. Viewers will be able to go to NBC.com and watch such programs, known as Webisodes, free of charge. Programming for mobile phones, called mobisodes, will be available free to people who have a video-ready cellphone and subscribe to a video package from their wireless carrier. All of the content will likely feature a combination of banner ads and video ads, although NBC says it hasn't decided yet how they will be incorporated.
One extensive project involves "The Black Donnellys," a new drama series about four brothers involved in organized crime, which will debut in September on NBC. The show also will feature exclusive content for both the Web and mobile phones. There will be Webisodes with the show's narrator divulging the history of the Donnelly family. There's also a blog from the executive producers focused on putting the show together.
Today, NBC is scheduled to unveil its fall lineup to advertisers in a major presentation at New York's Radio City Music Hall.
In on the Action
NBC isn't alone in its quest to serve up programming everywhere and in every way. Virtually all broadcast and cable networks are frantically building out a digital division.
News Corp.'s 20th Century Fox studio is developing TV content for the company's various Web sites and other platforms, and the company just created a unit called Fox Interactive Media to coordinate the effort. Already, Fox is a leader in developing original content for video-ready cellphones. It recently announced a spinoff of its "Prison Break" series to be viewed exclusively on cellphones. And original mobisodes of Fox's hit counterterrorism series "24" ran on cellphones late last year.
NBC and the other networks also face competition from Internet companies themselves. Yahoo is working on creating its own content, including reality shows to be distributed on the Web. But the online company also is partnering with television networks to stream content.
For instance, Yahoo will be streaming episodes of CBS's news program "60 Minutes" starting in September. Immediately after the broadcast, one segment will be posted on Yahoo with expanded footage and interviews, along with a totally new segment based on the week's news.
Meantime, upstarts like New York-based Rocketboom LLC are getting in on the action with their own original programming. Rocketboom runs a popular video blog where a few friends post a daily satirical news report with Internet-related content.
Greater Workload
Within NBC itself, the network faces the tough task of wringing more content out of existing employees. Like other networks, NBC isn't yet keen to spend much money on digital initiatives.
So, for instance, "The Office" Webisodes for this summer were written by some of the writers of the original series -- for no extra money. NBC and other networks have relied on corporate muscle to demand such extras.
An NBC spokesman says: "We don't separate out compensation for these services; it falls under overall compensation."
This is a festering problem for Hollywood's writers and other unions, which are starting to talk of a strike -- and one that Mr. Gaspin will be called on to help resolve.
"We need more resources if we're going to go full bore with this," says Ben Silverman, executive producer of "The Office" and several reality shows for NBC and other networks. "The good news is that I think the networks realize this."
Writers are used to developing half-hour or hour-long shows -- not Web clips and mobisodes. And they are used to big payoffs if networks buy a project. "The big turn-off at times is when people realize that there's not the upfront revenue they would like there to be," says Bob Levinson, head of world-wide television for Los Angeles-based talent agency International Creative Management.
When it comes to creating digital tentacles for their shows, Mr. Gaspin says some producers have the attitude of, "I don't need it, I don't want it, leave me alone."
So how does he handle those situations? Mr. Gaspin says he talks about the attention such efforts can bring to a show, and tries to give a tutorial on the digital universe without tripping over any egos. "Very few shows are so well run that the producers have extra time to do anything," Mr. Gaspin says. "We understand there are constraints. But the world has changed."
If nothing else, producers are starting to realize the promotional power of the Web. NBC credits its decision to make episodes of "The Office" available on iTunes with helping the show notch a sharp ratings increase. And creating online dieting clubs around the reality show "The Biggest Loser" -- where people compete to lose the most weight and win $250,000 -- helped the series blossom into a modest hit last fall. The clubs, which charge members $20 a month, offer message boards and diet and exercise tips from the cast members of the series itself. The six-month-old venture has 40,000 members to date, according to Mr. Gaspin.
"When you have little successes like that," he says, "it helps take the barriers down."
Online Incubation
In scouting for potential projects, Mr. Gaspin has started relying on a handful of talent agents, including Mr. Levinson.
At a recent pitch meeting, Mr. Levinson tried selling Mr. Gaspin on an animated project set in the future. The project would start as a Web series and then, if successful, be spun into a video game and then a TV series or even a film. By starting on the Web, the project could be incubated without incurring high costs, says Mr. Levinson. "With luck, a hit on the Web would then move elsewhere."
It's Mr. Gaspin's job to figure out what pitches are worth taking a chance on, and he says it was immediately clear that Mr. Levinson's project was worth a serious look.
"It worked out exactly as we were hoping," Mr. Levinson says. "Instead of us having to go to various divisions and sell something over and over to people who may or may not be talking to each other, we were able to go to one person. By the end of the day, Jeff had talked to all of those people for us."
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