March 29, 2024

Media Decoder Blog: The Breakfast Meeting: TV Pilots Move to the Web and Fox Prepares to Take On ESPN

TV shows like “House of Cards,” “Hemlock Grove” and the latest iteration of “Arrested Development” are debuting regularly on streaming services like Netflix, signaling a departure from traditional networks and a sea change in the way television is viewed, Brian Stelter writes. Amazon.com and Microsoft are also commissioning original shows for their millions of subscribers. The shows’ production values now rival those of network television, and their proliferation is seen as a good thing for viewers that may inflame cable companies’ concerns about cutting the cord.

On Tuesday Fox will announce its intention to start Fox Sports 1, an all-sports network that will challenge ESPN’s television sports empire, by this August, Richard Sandomir and Amy Chozick report. The channel will carry Nascar races, Major League Baseball games, college basketball and football, soccer and U.F.C. fights, as well as studio shows. Fox will join an already crowded market. ESPN’s many offerings, including eight cable channels, radio network, Web sites and ESPN3 broadband network, collectively generate $6 billion annually. And then there are sports channels from NBC, CBS, the Big Ten and Pacific-12 conferences, and Major League Baseball, the National Football League and National Hockey League. Nevertheless, Fox is regarded as asset-rich, with deals in place to broadcast many sporting events, and has already spent months planning to convert Speed, a cable motor sports channel, into Fox Sports 1, and Fuel, another channel, into Fox Sports 2.

New advertising agencies are proliferating in San Francisco, Stuart Elliott reports. The agencies, often start-ups by people with years of industry experience, have embraced the entrepreneurial spirit of Silicon Valley coupled with a San Francisco independence peculiar to the city’s ad industry. Innovative thinking and offbeat nomenclature are the norm, as evidenced by agencies like Cutwater, Dojo, Eleven, Mekanism, Odopod, Sequence, Signal to Noise and AKQA (for “all known questions answered”).

An advertising campaign for the city of Houston has undergone a makeover, from a focus on celebrities who hail from that city to the lesser-known chefs, restaurateurs, artists, designers, actors, musicians and curators who make the city vibrant, Stuart Elliott writes. The campaign, called “Houston Is,” replaces the “My Houston” campaign, which has run for five years. The campaign, produced internally at the Greater Houston Convention and Visitors Bureau and with an estimated budget of $440,000, will sell the Houston by celebrating the Houstonians who are the driving forces behind the restaurants, museums, galleries and other attractions.

The Walt Disney Company plans to offer advertisers guarantees for video programming from ABC, ABC Family and ESPN distributed both online and on television, Bill Carter reports. ABC has aggressively sought a way to gather data necessary to make predictions for both television and online viewing. Television networks traditionally guarantee advertisers that they will deliver a certain number of viewers in specific demographic groups and provide free advertising if viewership falls short of the guarantees. Online viewing has lacked a service that could provide specific data about audiences — Nielsen is now using data from Facebook to help identify viewer makeup for shows.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/the-breakfast-meeting-tv-pilots-move-to-the-web-and-fox-prepares-to-take-on-espn/?partner=rss&emc=rss