Kent’s Official Blog

So says Les Moonves.

The door has been opened a crack, the business model of mass audiences is in a tailspin, and the big boys are starting to panic.

What does it mean for you?

It means the Indie TV movement is on the rise.  The club of show runners is now open to anyone with a dream and the entrepreneurial skills.

This is the golden age.  Sundance in the 80s and 90s.  A time when you can create something new and fresh, get seen by millions and have the chance to retain ownership over that property as it enters the big media system.

Yesterday I tested out the iTunes rental feature by renting “Once” — the film that won the best song at the Oscars.  It’s a sweet, sentimental and sad at the end.  Something you don’t get in the Hollywood system.

Put aside the fact that the dude is 37 and is dating her (she’s only 19 and they’ve known each other for five years — creepy).

$160k was the budget for 86 minutes of content or about $2k/finished minute.  Not bad and definitely in the range of where webseries are right now.  It also shows you what you can accomplish at that budget range.  (And yes it was a film nto a series, but I think it could work broken up into 5-10 minute chunks).

$5 million for a pilot is about $110k/finished minute for a 46 minute pilot.

So, basically you can get a whole Once for each minute of a network pilot.  Yikes.

What does that $5 million get a network?  It buys a track record of success (from the creators of…), it buys exclusivity and the underlying IP (which means you’re only going to see the show on their network and movies based on it from their studio).

If the studios do in fact move away from this model, then it opens all sorts of interesting possibilities.

You’ll start seeing directors and producers that would have produced an indie film, move into the indie TV space.  Because now there is a method of distribution and a pathway for it to join the system.  Produce a high-quality show, either get it watched online or create demand for it using your own ingenuity (i.e., at some sort of festival, or private screenings, etc.), and then license it to a big media company.

Also the death of the overall deal is actually good too.  Overall deals are deals that studios make with creators where creators get a steady paycheck for a few years and the studio gets all of your ideas during that timeframe.  It’s cozy, but if you create a hit you’re already locked in.

When you’re freelance, you can use that as leverage to license the rights for online, film and TV separately.

This will be a radical change, and it will happen slowly over the next five to ten years.  But I think we are still looking at the seeds of an indie driven TV movement like the American cinema saw in the 60s and 70s.