Those of us who lived through successive waves of the media industry’s infatuation with the Internet from 1996 through 2000 or so may have thought we’d seen every possible folly that can arise when people mistake the Web for a broadcast medium. We had Webshows and Netshows and Netcasts and all manner of awfulness from MSN and AOL, Time-Warner and the TV networks and Disney. (I fumed in Salon about this profusion of “channels” on the youthful Web back in 1997.) When the dot-com bubble broke, it seemed we could finally bid farewell to the delusion that you can “program” for the Web just like you program TV. Through all of that nuttiness, Yahoo was one of a small handful of companies that seemed to understand the fundamentally un-TV-ish nature of the Web, and it profited steadily from that understanding.
So I nearly sputtered out a mouthful of coffee Saturday morning when I read the New York Times’ piece about Lloyd Braun, the former TV exec who is now running a big chunk of Yahoo.
As chairman of ABC’s entertainment group, Mr. Braun had a penchant for big offbeat concepts like “Lost,” which won the Emmy for best drama. At Yahoo, why not create programs in genres that have worked on TV but not really on the Web? Sitcoms, dramas, talk shows, even a short daily humorous take on the news much like Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” are in the works…. So Mr. Braun’s job is straightforward: invent a medium that unites the showmanship of television with the interactivity of the Internet. |
If you read the entirety of Saul Hansell’s piece, it seems clear that Braun and his boss Terry Semel aren’t entirely ignorant of the nature of the medium they’re working in. They know that Net-based video comes in little pieces, gets remixed by the multitude and spreads virally. But I guess they can’t shake off the habits of their professional lifetimes, because it sure sounds like they’re saying something remarkably similar to what we’ve heard from the discredited peddlers of “Net shows” past: Move over, all you amateurs and geeks, and let some real broadcasters teach you how it’s done! They may be publishing material on the Web, but they still think in terms of big-splash Events and boffo shows.
I know that a lot of smart people who deeply understand the way the Net functions work at Yahoo. The company made a savvy move in bringing on Kevin Sites to lead their first real effort in original content — he’s a versatile journalist who’s been living in the online cross-currents for several years now. Maybe Yahoo will prove my skepticism wrong, and its programmers will be the first of the multitude to go down the road labeled “Let’s make the Net more like TV” and find that it’s not a dead end. But it seems more likely to me that we’ll be reading headlines in two or three or four years about Yahoo shutting down a lot of its experiments in this area, just as its predecessors did.
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