Andrew Sorkin wrote a smart piece in the NY Times this week on Jeffrey Katzenberg’s stumping for a $2B raise on his vision for NewTV.
Per the post, NewTV is just barely an idea, albeit a very big one, more transformative than disruptive in the normal tech sense.
Katzenberg believes there is both a platform and corresponding content chasm for short-form video storytelling that no one is thinking about in bold enough terms.
Amazon and Apple are in effect trying to fit new content to existent platforms rather than step back and create a brand-new art form and corresponding platform built for this market from the ground up.
Some 72% of all video is consumed on our phones. One and a half billion people consume 45 minutes or more of video on their phones each and every day.
Huge. Almost everyone everywhere.
Katzenberg’s idea—and per Sorkin it is just that– is that platform not content alone is king. The real opportunity is to build both for a new small-time slot, most likely 10-minute piece of content, produced at Game of Thrones production values at costs of up to $100,000 a minute.
Using A-list stars at full-length production rates, pushing both production values and a platform built to fit the story format, not the other way around.
Miniaturizing Hollywood into short-form mobile storytelling segments that can be consumed by people on the go. Your favorite segment of a mobile only episodic NewTV show viewable in its entirety on a ride to TriBeCa from 14th street for example.
I’ve sat in the room with Katzenberg back in my days moving 3D into the theaters and am aware of his presence and chops.
And honestly this is how movies get pitched and funded. If you happen to be him with a recent $3.8B sale of DreamWorks, people will listen. And they are.
I’m not at all certain that this is a crazy idea nor potentially a crazy investment, no matter how large. No matter how inchoate.
If we have learned anything from episodic TV changing the landscape of media and storytelling, it is that the impossible becomes reality damn fast when it touches the hearts of audiences for stories on their terms that fit into a rhythm of their lives.
Someone is going to do this.
Maybe it won’t be a platform but a studio which will force a platform change or get swallowed up by Apple or Amazon.
This is a game changing bet on a medium that doesn’t exist as yet.
Like Elon Musk conceptualizing an electric grid from solar roof panels to subterranean boring tunnels without the hardest pieces of tech defined, let alone solved.
There are so many hard parts to this, changing formats, platforms, business models, pay scales for actors and on and on.
I think it is meant to be.
Maybe a bit early but the redefinition of storytelling with Hollywood production values to every mobile device on the globe, will in effect redefine TV. It is already out of the living room, with long-form stories squished into short-attention-span consumer cycles.
Cracking the format means nothing less that changing how you and I and billions of others will engage with characters and emotions and plots on the move.
A massive library of content that rivals Netflix or Amazon out of the gate to an already captured market is the plan. Inherit the planet and the attention span of the mass global market is the upside.
Equally as powerful as owning the spice trade from Dune.
There are really four questions being raised here.
Does this idea really make sense as a new, subscription-based medium for a mass-market mobile audience?
To me yes—uncover the format and you are the storyline for the world.
Do you need to be a platform ala HBO to do this or can you simply fund the content?
I’m unsure, this is the bigger bet as if you are the platform then everyone can be your partner, even the competition.
Is Katzenberg the person to do this?
Two billion is a huge raise. It’s going take someone like him to pull it off and maybe have the chops to lead it. This is not a change that will iterate up. This is hyper mega-studio model reminiscent of traditional old school Hollywood where they owned the theater chains as well as the stars and the production studios.
Is this a bat shit crazy investment with little but scratches on a napkin?
Who knows really but let me sum it up this way.
I won’t personally have an opportunity to play in this as an investor though it will touch much of what I do professionally and personally as a consumer.
If this was an ICO, would I invest let’s say 2% of my net investing dollars in this crazy idea on the back of brilliant creative’s envelope?
On a NewTV coin rather than put my dollars into one of thousands of 60-page white papers floating out in space from people I don’t know and can’t really vet?
In a heartbeat.