GLEE THE MOVIE

This TV season Glee has become the #1 new hit show of this year's TV season. And it's a hit by any measure: ratings, music downloads, touring, press, star making and the list goes on. But is FOX leaving money on the table by not green lighting a Glee theatrical feature for Summer 2011? It should not be a continuation of or the season finale of the TV series. It should be its own stand alone feature. And don't do something contrived like send them all to the same summer music camp. I can't help but think that FOX isn't monetizing this asset and the difference in the business models between FOX and Disney.

As the Disney Channel has clearly demonstrated, a studio can make a lot of money taking a successful TV show and transferring it to the big screen. High School Musical started out as the highest rated TV movie on the cable. HSM had a more successful sequel and then the 3rd film made $252 million dollars in worldwide box office. That's not counting DVD's, music sales, consumer products....High School Musical is a textbook HBR Disney synergy case for why its the only entertainment blue chip stock and a member of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. High School Musical also helped elevate new Disney studio chief Rich Ross into his current job under the even more brilliant Bob Iger as the CEO of Disney. I didn't think it would be possible to outdo the business acumen and savvy of Michael Eisner, but Bob Iger has clearly become the teacher.

Wake up FOX, Glee is a global hit on TV. You can make a Glee movie for $25 million that will end up grossing $200 million worldwide. Now that's revenue to sing about.

A SERIAL KILLER IN SLOW MOTION?

Today, Joran van der Sloot was arrested in Chile for the killing of another young woman in Peru. I remember watching the shocking documentary on Dutch television where a skillful reporter worked for months on a story about getting van der Sloot to admit to the killing of Nathalee Holloway. And now, almost 5 years ago to the day, van der Sloot took another life.

While I am not sure he can be considered a serial killer with only 2 murders, it does draw strange parallels with the O.J. Simpson case. Both O.J. and van der Sloot literally got away with cold blooded murder. It must effect the psyche of the murderer to realize they have gotten away with their crime. O.J. wrote a "fictional" account of the murder of his wife, that was largely true and van der Sloot unknowingly confessed to murder on international television. If you can get away with it once, why not twice? O.J. is now in jail for breaking and entering a casino with a loaded weapon (a big No, No in Nevada), and van der Sloot took another life in Peru.

No justice system is perfect, but let's hope fewer and fewer people literally get way with murder: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/06/08/world/AP-LT-Peru-Van-der-Sloot.html?_r=1&hp

NEVER WASTE (ANOTHER) GOOD CRISIS

The Obama Administration needs to take a page from its own playbook and not waste the horrible ecological disaster that the Gulf Oil Spill has become. The Administration should quickly pass financial reform and take the rest of summer to push cap and trade legislation through Congress. Like the Great Recession before it, this crisis should not be wasted.

I dare any major energy company this summer to go before Congress and testify that they do not want a cleaner environment. I love the ocean so much and living on a beach was never ending set of happy experiences for me. I loved swimming in the ocean every day and every weekend that I could in Miami Beach. I love the ocean water, the waves, the tides, the sea life, the calm beauty and ferocity of the waves. To see that spoiled is painful. My parents house in Florida is a 5 minute walk from the Gulf of Mexico. And the oil is so ugly, that to see it on the beach would cause anyone physical revulsion.

With all the damage we have done to the ocean, we should look upon this opportunity to pay Mother Nature back for all that we have and make concrete legislative steps to help heal the Earth. We did it before with acid rain in the 1980's, and we can do it again now with cap & trade. Let's all make the right choice for our country, the environment and globally for our collective future.

WHAT ABOUT THE LIVES LOST AND THE RIG?

So where are all the Republicans now with their cheerful, "Drill Baby, Drill" slogan. Mr. McCain? Mrs. Palin? Anyone?

Never in my life have I witnessed an ecological disaster of this magnitude before. And there is the very real possibility that I will be personally effected by it since I own property on Miami Beach, which is wholly dependent on an international beach-going population for its revenue and livelihood.

But there are 3 major stories that I feel are being glossed over by the media. First, what about the 11 lives that were tragically lost with the rig catching on fire and sinking? We should all say a little prayer for those poor souls who perished that night. Where are the write ups on their lives? Second, what about the recovery operation on the rig? Hundreds of tons of burnt steel sitting on the ocean floor and that cannot be good for the already heavily damaged environment in the Gulf of Mexico.

The 3rd unnoticed but good story that no one is reporting on are the Gulf State residents whose lives are being ruined by this disaster standing up to BP and the government. After listening to all of the help "government" was going to "give" them after Hurricane Katrina, no one is signing waivers for the right to seek redress through the court system for this disaster. The Gulf States may be Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, but good for the residents of those states. "Fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice, shame on you."

DEUX EX MACHINA & 121 EPISODES OF LOST

Last night was the series finale of a groundbreaking television show that I have watched since I first saw the pilot in September 2004. There's a lot that I liked and will miss about LOST. I really like the characters, the acting, the Hawaii setting, the mystery, the twists and all the turns that kept me and the world guessing for 6 years. However, the series finale of LOST was a big cop out. It reminded me of my Greek playwriting class.....

In Greecian times they called it the "deux ex machina", which loosely translates into "the God machine." Basically in Grecian tragedies, the mother would sleep with the son, the father would kill the mother, the famine would destroy the city-state, the people of the village would burn, the priest would defy the gods, etc. All hell would break lose and after 3 hours of sitting on stones with no backing in an amphitheater at night with no air conditioning, the playwright couldn't leave the audience with an ending like that, so the deux ex machina was born. At the very end of the play, a god (usually Zeus, but any of the other major gods would do) would descend from Mount Olympus and magically fix everything, restore order, make everyone alive again as if the past 3 hours of misery had never happened, and POOF! Happily Ever After. It was a cop out in 2000 B.C. and it's still a cop out in the 21st century.

Here's why: http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/05/one_hundred_unanswered_lost_qu.html

Also, is it me, or does ever great TV show not know how to end? LOST joins great television shows such as Seinfeld, and The Sopranos with not knowing how to end a great television series.

UPDATE YOUR WEBSITES!

As the United States and the world economically continue to act like a sick patient (recovering, relapsing, rinse and repeat....), and with all the drama of the Great Recession, it's easy to forget the previous economic crash in 2000 from the Dot Com Bubble bursting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble

I was thinking about the early days of the internet and how from 1995-2000 how much businesses constantly evolved and updated their websites. I have also been spending a lot of time on over 10 major airline sites, and the most consistent thing I realized about the airline websites is that none of them have changed in over 5 years. Now, almost every corporation has settled on their website design and they almost never change. And I think that's a bad business decision.

As a business in the 21st century your website should be update yearly with the latest web enhancements to make your business stand out. Consumers directly relate to your company and your brand online. It's their own personal experience with your business. What are you saying to consumers if you don't update your website for 5 or 10 years? What would you think as a consumer if you walked into a retail store and it hadn't been changed, updated or dusted in 5 or 10 years? You'd walk out.

And the airline industry is not alone in this. Most companies are not updating their websites yearly. At Warner Bros. International Television we update our business to business website every year for the LA Screenings. For some of our clients, this is the only time of year that they interact with our website. And each time they do, we want them to see that as a company, we are as new and fresh as the programming we are selling them each TV season.

On the internet, even Google is getting a little too comfortable with itself. Microsoft is building a smarter search home page than Google's. Google has recently made some improvements to its search, but there's much more it can do to stay easy, but be updated in consumers' mind.

DVR COMMERCIAL SKIPPING SOLVED

For years, the DVR has been unfairly portrayed as the enemy of TV advertising. When Tivo was invented, the television industry was caught completely unaware. There was a palatable shutter as the very foundation of the TV advertising revenue business model was under attack from a box consumers could buy online or in any electronics retailer nationwide.

The DVR is basically the next evolution in the VCR. Instead of using tapes to record your favorite TV series and movies for personal use, someone at Tivo got the brilliant idea to put a hard drive into a VCR box and record TV & movies that way. Of course, the trade off was that you couldn't just give a videotape to your friend to watch in their VCR, but who really did that in the 80's and 90's anyway? In fact, to solve the tradeoff problem, early Tivo's allowed recording to videotapes, but I digress once again....By putting a hard drive in a box and an easy menuing systems, BANG! You have a "renewable" VCR with no need to buy expensive, costly and messy piles of tapes. Tivo faced strong headwinds from a business perspective to answer the multi-billion dollar question that is largely the same businesses risks that Apple faces today, (only Apple currently does it better than any technology company currently), which is "How do you create consumer demand for a device no consumer is demanding?"

Tivo was a poorly mismanaged company that immediately came under attack from both the TV & Advertising industries. And like all small, undercapitalized technology companies, the majors attacked them with lawsuits. And to make matters worse for Tivo, the cable and satellite companies figured out how to build their own boxes to have the same DVR functionality of Tivo with none of those messy patent infringement claims. Tivo also sold its intellectual property to the cable companies for a fee, which they were then cut out of. The gospel according to Tivo with its ability to fast forward through commercials, pause, stop, replay would spell the end of the free, advertiser supported television in the United States. Or would it?

The VCR first hit mass consumer adoption in 1980 and within 10 years had gone global. In the United States VCR penetration was up to 95% in just 1 decade. DVR's went mass market in 2000 and now, 10 years later, it's only in 35% of American homes, and plateauing. What does this tell me? DVR's are a transitional technology. There's an opening for another device with 95% penetration. (Another blog on this later.....)

First, some myth busting: Big hint Advertising industry - no one was really watching your commercials before the DVR came along! Most consumers used the standard non-skippable television commercial as an excuse to grab a snack or a bite to eat, go to the restroom, make a phone call, run a quick errand, turn something off that was on, doing dishes, basically anything you could do quickly in the 2 minutes or more of commercial breaks, you did. That's what commercial breaks were for - feeling active while you were being lazy watching TV. So consumers were already "skipping" commercials.

Second, a little insight into consumer DVR habits. Studies have shown that consumers that have DVRs love them, but utilize them in largely the same way that they did before: an excuse to grab a snack or a bite to eat, go to the restroom, make a phone call, run a quick errand, turn something off that was on, doing dishes, only now, you could do it for longer. In fact, most consumers with DVRs now use them to run errands for longer than 2 minutes because they know they can just rewind what they missed. I would postulate that consumers with DVR are MORE exposed to commercials than they were before. Commercials are start/stop points in your TV viewing. As a consumer, when you want to come back to your TV program, you rewind back to the commercial to start your show, which is then your 2nd exposure to the commercial, because your first exposure is when you got up, you have already heard the brand at the start of the commercial. In fact, studies have shown that people with DVRs will watch commercials that appeal to them. If a man is shopping for a car or a woman for a phone, male or female, people will watch commercials that interest them. So the "ad avoidance" factor that everyone was worried about is largely irrelevant.

Leave it to Hollywood to figure out a way around the DVR commercial skipping problem. Consumers with HD televisions are already expecting to watch programming in the letterbox format. That leave a black blank space above and below the TV picture. And what better place to put the name of your movie and the opening date than in that blank space? So now, even if you fast forward past a Sex & City 2 TV commercial, you do see the name of the movie and the opening date, whether you fast forward through the entire commercial or not. Actually, as a viewer you see it in a much simpler form with a much more direct and simple message that you can visually process easier. See? DVR commercial skipping has been solved.