Top-10 Stupid Things Network TV Executives Actually Said About Online Video

Nine television executives survey the landscape of production, profits and the emergence of digital delivery (Source: The Hollywood Reporter, via ReelPop).

Here’s the list of the top 10 stupidest thoughts:

1. Warner Brothers: My personal experience is people are watching more television than ever before, and they’re watching in more and various ways.
2. NBC: Primarily right now it (digital’s value) is promotional.
3. Warner Brothers: The principal and most immediate and obvious advantage and opportunity that exists is really in marketing… Eventually, there will be additional value to our content as well.
4. CBS: We don’t see it all that differently from how we looked at “Entertainment Tonight” and those facets of publicity when they came along a long time ago. It was just another way to get eyeballs to your show.
5. Fox: Is it impacting the way we develop shows? Not really. We do look at the DVD marketplace and the international marketplace and try to be savvy about the arenas that we go into.
6. Lionsgate: We support the marketing side of it completely, but as it potentially devalues the back-end, it’s not so interesting for us.
7. Fox: Quite frankly, I think the chances of finding someone (on a viral video site) who is very interesting and a person you can build a show around are slim.
8. Fox: If a show breaks out and becomes a hit, you’ll probably see us shift more to protect the asset so there can be a revenue payoff down the road. The DVD was the first way of doing it.
9. Warner: We have to compete with each other for not just a great script, great story and great writers, but also for great scope as well. This has caused production costs — for our pilots and our series — to be absolutely astronomical. Fortunately, we’re in a very robust international marketplace, (and) that helps balance some of these costs. It’s still a great business if you have a hit.
10. TouchStone: The viewer has become very, very sophisticated in what they want to see. It has to feel and taste and almost look like a feature.

(The round-table dialogues were held Aug. 24 with Lionsgate TV’s Kevin Beggs, NBC Universal TV Studio’s Angela Bromstad, Touchstone TV’s Mark Pedowitz and Warner Bros. TV’s Peter Roth; and Aug. 25 with CBS Paramount Network TV’s David Stapf, Sony Pictures TV’s Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg and 20th Century Fox TV’s Gary Newman and Dana Walden.)