Elizabeth Guider Reports from NAB: Ben Silverman, Ted Sarandos and More

LAS VEGAS: On site at NAB in Las Vegas, World Screen‘s contributing editor, Elizabeth Guider, recaps sessions with Ben Silverman, Ted Sarandos and Gale Ann Hurd, plus panels on U.S. syndication—with execs from CBS, Warner Bros. and Debmar-Mercury—and "disruptive media," including one with Machinima’s Philip DeBevoise.

Electus’s Ben Silverman

"We gotta keep trying these things," Ben Silverman said in explaining some of the newfangled eventized program opportunities his company Electus is fashioning, including the current commerce-enhanced Fashion Star on NBC and a just announced project with Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson. The founder and chairman of the three-year-old company Electus, Silverman said the company’s chief goal at this point is to make the viewer experience more "real and integrated"" and the advertiser role more "involved" in the process and functionality of programs.

"Advertisers are getting more and more hip. They want an earlier seat around the content—shared goals. Ad-funded systems are going to get more sophisticated and will be seamed into or surround many of these shows."

As for The Hero, the multimedia entertainment outfit, which is an operating business of IAC, is partnering with Johnson on the competition series to find the next great unsung hero. Silverman made a point of noting Johnson’s transformative use of social media on his WWE show, especially his Twitter feed. "Hero will be a big, ambitious, global project plus there’ll be heroic challenges in local communities even as the live show takes place."


The Hero will be led by Johnson, who will executive produce with producing partner Dany Garcia. Electus International, Electus’ global distribution arm, will handle foreign licensing. The idea is to take ordinary people and immerse them in a global adventure. The game play will give three teams simultaneously stationed on three different continents, the chance to prove what they are able to overcome, sacrifice, and undergo for the strength of their team.

Silverman’s company is also one of the chosen providers of premium content YouTube intends to amass as bonafide channels over the next couple of years. "It’s great that Google has opened up for premium content. The channels will likely be a ten-year undertaking before it’s clear if it works. Being an early partner with them should be opportunistic for us," Silverman said.

Although money is still iffy online, Silverman stressed how much he is amazed by what he called "the consistently expansive market," with viewership skyrocketing for most all platforms (other than newspapers). He also suggested that 
talent is excited about all the new opportunities online: "There’s more freedom—whereas in Hollywood a certain staleness has set in, and there are so many execs layering notes."

Indicative too is the fact that YouTube will do its own upfront in New York this spring. They’ve realized, Silverman said, that they "actually now have to make money and go where advertisers are. 
They get now that they can’t algorithm their way through a relationship business." Asked if he thought digital dollars rather than pennies will start to flow (with views continuing to expand), Silverman was optimistic. "There are now four new buyers of premium content who weren’t doing so two years ago—Google, Hulu, Netflix, Amazon are all in and buying professional content. I think the money numbers will soon really start to grow."

U.S. Syndication

Everything sexy that’s happening now did so 25 years ago—it’s all just happening faster and with a different cast of characters. That’s the general view of a trio of Hollywood’s top syndication execs who were at pains to suggest that having new players to sell to is a big plus, but that their own business has hardly been stood on its head by all the hoopla around the newcomers.

During a panel discussion, John Nogawski, the president of CBS Television Distribution, Ken Werner, the president of Warner Bros. Domestic Television Distribution and Ira Bernstein, co-president of Debmar-Mercury—competitors when out on the road selling—see eye to eye when it comes to how new media players are impacting the biz.

The biz now? "It’s like cable was 20 or 25 years ago," Nogawski opined, describing how those erstwhile under-capitalized upstarts began by paying very little for content but as they caught on, they began both to shell out more for premium content and eventually to make original content themselves. They did not turn the biz topsy-turvy; they enriched it was the point being made Tuesday and which the panelists seem to believe applies today.

To their minds, players like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and Google are following a similar trajectory as cable did. "But what took 20-odd years back then is happening much, much faster," Nogawski told attendees.

"The impediments— cash, technology—are not there that cable struggled with," Werner added. These new players are becoming customers, and eventually as they enhance their own original efforts, competitors in the expanding media ecosystem.

And, the three panelists agreed, as these new players start to pay more for content, they move up the food chain in terms of windowing and other deal terms.

As for the general health of the syndication biz—and the local stations that are still sellers’ main clients—Bernstein noted that "a major recovery" is underway and that election ads should help buoy local outlets further.

"What other business has 20, 30 or even 40 percent margins? It’s just not sexy so Wall Street doesn’t properly value it," Bernstein pointed out.

Asked to talk about the challenges on the first-run front, all three syndie toppers focused on daytime, a daypart that Werner said is undergoing "a huge generational shift" in terms of its viewing audience.

But as many pitches from agents, producers, and complete unknowns that they listen to, all three suggested that it’s essentially the same genres that keep on working, albeit with new twists now and again.

"I’d love to find another genre for daytime but I don’t think we’ve run out of gas with Judge Judy—as long as she’s pulling a 7 rating, that’s fine with us," Nogawski said, referring to one of CBS’s mainstay court strips.

Werner too said his group sees all kinds of pitches but so far the tried-and-true genres—talkers, games, court shows and the like—are the ones that "drive the audience."

Next up for fall:

Warner Bros. will be launching a gabber with Bethany Frankel, whom Werner believes will help address the "girlfriend" element missing, he says, in daytime right now.

CBS meanwhile will come out swinging with a show built around Survivor host Jeff Probst, who Nogawski says is "eminently relatable."

And Lionsgate has undertaken the much talked about project toplining Charlie Sheen called Anger Management, whose first ten episodes have been sold to FX (and to several major foreign territories.) If it works on FX, all takers will then be committed to another 90 episodes, Bernstein said.

The big unanswerable: whether Sheen himself can stay the course. 

DISRUPTIVE MEDIA

In a "Disruptive Media" panel Wednesday morning, execs from Verizon, TiVo and a company called Equilibrium grappled with the TV Everywhere concept, predicting that the next five years would itself be "incredibly disruptive" as so many biz models and conduits to reach the ever more mobile, and demanding, consumer elbow for position.

"There’s going to be a battle royale for the consumer’s attention. A lot of business models are jostling," said Louisa Shipnuck, head of Verizon’s new unit, Business Media and Entertainment.

Another of the panelists, Equilibrium’s founder Sean Barger, suggested that too many complex systems and offerings are right now confusing consumers.

"There are way too many ways of doing things, way too many boxes," is how Barger put it, suggesting that "simplicity and elegance" is what is needed in interfaces.

Disagreeing with the other panelists, Barger also indicated he thought content providers like TV Everywhere’s initiators Comcast and Time Warner are already considering going straight to consumers with their content, in effect bypassing or re-windowing their long-term arrangements with cable operators.

In another Disruptive Media panel, Machinima founder-president Philip DeBevoise gave an overview of his company’s rapid rise in three years to one of the key destinations for and content providers to young males, especially gamers.

On the heels of content partnerships with Warner Bros. (For a Mortal Kombat-inspired movie) and with Lionsgate (for a series called Bite Me), DeBevoise said the upstart would soon be, after Los Angeles, setting up a second production office in London and commissioning local original programming on that Continent. (Already some 4,000 regular users of the site upload their original content on a regular basis, along with Machinima’s own in-house originated shows.)

"International is very important. And we’ll be going local—with programming in sci fi, comedy, horror, not just video game-centric material," DeBevoise said.

He would not be drawn on the company’s profitability or prospects for the stock market, emphasizing that for the moment revenue is being pumped back into the production machine.

While in the last decade NAB has morphed largely into a tech-heavy mini-CES, what with cavernous halls full of the latest fancy equipment, content creators and purveyors still draw sizeable audiences at NAB.

Among other well-attended sessions this week were a meet with Netflix content chief Ted Sarandos, who, among other revelations, said the company would pick up four more episodes of the canceled FOX show Arrested Development and renew the Europe-originated mob series Lilyhammer for a second "season," as it were.

Several Arrested Development cast members showed up to hear the applause at the announcement. Sarandos said "Netflix was the perfect home for serialized programs on television."

In another session, devoted to FOX International Channels’ global hit The Walking Dead, producer Gale Anne Hurd and exec producer Dave Alpert talked about how much the popularity of the zombie series has changed the production itself. Apparently too, per audience members, there are now actual "Zombie Apocalyse" courses at certain colleges.

And NAB in its wisdom also inducted Tuesday the irrepressible Betty White into its Broadcasting Hall of Fame for her six decades—and counting—career in the biz.