Valleywag: Quarterlife

Why Web video isn't ready for prime time after all

Mary Jane Irwin — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 13:40:58 PST

Quarterlife, the stapled-together-for-prime-time Web-video series about twentynothing artists, flopped so hard that NBC is kicking it off the team. It sucked in a measly 3.1 million viewers during its NBC debut last night — half what programs on ABC and CBS pulled. As penance, "Quarterlife" will be riding the pine on Bravo's minor-league roster. Ben Silverman, cochairman of NBC Entertainment, described the original deal to bring Quarterlife to the airwaves as a "revolutionary step in the creation of television." In retrospect, it's easy to say he should never have bought the show, if only because watching Quarterlife makes me want to punch myself in the face. But would any other Web video have fared better. Perhaps, if NBC had followed this playbook:

Pick a more accessible topic. Folks who opt to sit home watching television on a Wednesday night, instead of enjoying a recreational pastime like drinking, know what the Internet is. They just don't care about it like the readers of 4chan or Quarterlife's Web viewers do. Prime-time fare needn't be lowbrow, but it should be accessible.
Make ads that entice. Quarterlife promo campaign, the 14-word version: Walking talking hugging flashes to a website really stupid quip eating more hugging grunt. It's hard to make typing at a keyboard and looking at a screen exciting, but NBC's marketing team didn't even try.
Leave it on the Web. For the Internet, Quarterlife still counts as a hit. Even cocreator Marshall Herskovitz says, in hindsight, that he didn't think it could survive on network TV. Why didn't NBC just toss it on Hulu, where it belongs? It would have been cheaper, and possibly more profitable.

Quarterlife's bad online-video bet

Mary Jane Irwin — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 17:00:54 PST

Hollywood, abetted by Internet pundits, has drawn the wrong lesson from the rise of YouTube: that the only way to make cash on the Internet is to offer bite-sized chunks of content. Hence Quarterlife, the microshow about 20-nothing artists. The only reason anyone cares about it is NBC picked it up for broadcast distribution, impressed by Quarterlife's 700,000-viewer debut, and will splice together 8-minute Web segments into six hour-long episodes that will air on broadcast TV this February. The only problem is that Quarterlife episodes, shown on YouTube and MySpace, are now averaging a mere 100,000 viewers.

That's nothing to sneeze at, but Quarterlife has been touted as the "first television-quality production for the Web," and 100,000 viewers would mean instant cancellation on broadcast TV. TV-level production values plus Internet-size audiences is a recipe for financial disaster.

But the real draw of YouTube isn't that the content is short; it's that it's easy to find and share. YouTube only implemented a 10-minute limit in an attempt to slow the flow of copyrighted content; users got around it by breaking up longer shows into 10-minute chunks. Plenty of people watch full-length shows online; indeed, that's one of the supposed draws of Hulu, NBC and News Corp.'s video joint venture.

The numbers are compelling. The number of people snagging free content off Pirate Bay has doubled to 8 million in the past year. According to SumoTorrent tracker, 50 percent of BitTorrent traffic is devoted to downloading television shows. And the audience viewing TV shows online is 25 percent more engaged with the show their couch-sitting counterparts.

The lesson: Web users can stomach full-length episodes. There's no reason to chop up narratives into bits for the sake of online attention spans. No, the real quandary is finding a big enough of an audience to support broadcast production values. Doing things the old way doesn't work: Eisner, the former Disney CEO, lost buckets of money on his "hit" Prom Queen, claiming it cost him $3,000 for every 90 seconds of footage.

"Quarterlife" beats Lonelygirl15 to network TV

Nicholas Carlson — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 10:43:29 PST

"Why do we blog? We blog to exist," Dylan Kreiger told us in episode one of Quarterlife, your favorite Web TV show from real TV show Thirtysomething creators Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zick. And now we know why Herskovitz and Zick produce: They produce to exist. On network TV.

NBC will put "Quarterlife" on the air starting in February or March, after its Internet run is complete, according to the Wall Street Journal. Herskovitz told the Journal the whole experience of starting a show on the Internet was "thrilling, nerve-wracking and exciting." And don't you just know what he means, fans? It's just like how you wonder if Dylan's friends will stay mad at her, or finally come to respect her for her honesty.