An interesting article over on TVSquad.com about two fairly well know producers who are creating an “internet only” TV series.   I have to admit to having never seen the shows these producers are known for (“Thirtysomething” and “My So-Called Life” were before my time and “Once and Again” is just a show that I never watched) but I think they all had some degree of success (I know the names at very least). 

A lot of the article focuses on the “why” of the whole thing which basically boils down to the producers not liking all the restrictions put on TV by the FCC.  I’m sure that part of it is interesting to some people, but not really to me (at least, not when I’m in a “tech centric” mindset) 

 Here’s the part that I found the most interesting… 

According to Herskovitz, you can produce an hour or content on the internet for as little as $30,000. In contrast, it takes millions of dollars to produce content for TV. This is why many of the people I know (independent filmmakers and struggling TV and film writers) are excited about the prospect of launching our own projects on the web. If it works -- and if someone like Herskovitz and Zwick can prove it works -- then what's to stop the rest of us from following this DIY model of TV production? 

Now I’m sure this does not include the money needed to actually pay for all the viewing bandwidth but that is still pretty impressive.

If true that means a company could, in theory, create their own primetime network for $660,000 a week (3 hours per night and 4 on Sunday).  That really isn’t terribly expensive particularly when you consider the fact that one hour of Reality TV costs $700,000 and one hour of regular TV can cost up to $2 million. 

Plus, since the rules and regulations are far fewer (going back to the complaints in the TVSquad article) you’d be able to draw creative people who want to do more than TV will allow them to do.  It’s basically the long tail theory applied to the Television industry.

I certainly don’t think anything like this is going to materialize anytime soon and there are some serious quality issues to consider here (I don’t think anyone believes a show like LOST could be produced for $30,000 an episode) but it’s still an interesting thought.  If you could have 20 primetime networks instead of just 5 you’d have a lot more content to choose from. 

This is an interesting topic to me so, in lieu of a really long post, I’m going to come back to it tomorrow with some other thoughts. 

Mary Jo Foley has the story on a  new Windows Live Toolkit from Microsoft.  This release is just a CTP but you can expect Microsoft to push this into production fairly quickly.  For the most part the article is just the standard "Microsoft is releasing X" article but one part did interest me...

When Microsoft first shared its plans for the Windows Live toolkit in September, officials said to expect the new add-ons to work a lot like the Facebook Developer Toolkit that Microsoft announced in May 2007, given that the new Visual Studio Toolkit for Windows Live was being developed by Microsoft’s Doug Handler, who did a lot of the work on the Facebook toolkit.  

Microsoft has always been a better competitor than they are an innovator but this may very well be the one arena where it isn't quite appropriate.  Say what you will about the "thousands of Facebook developers" out there it's still a miniscule number when compared to Microsoft Developers and Micrsoft still has far more experience in dealing with developers.  Don't get me wrong, I suspect this is just good PR ("hey Facebook developers, we're cool too!") but if it isn't Microsoft should really reevaluate their priorities.