Digital Video - January 2008 - (Page 29) mated channels. Still, Break officials are well aware that they need to bring more to the table besides skateboard crashes and street fights if they’re ever going to get TV-level CPM rates. That is why Break is charging headlong into digital production. Being a new-media business darling has helped of late. Last spring, Break officials announced three separate content deals — with NBC Universal, Endemol and Twisted Pictures — with each of these traditional media mavens eager to produce video shorts for the high-traffic broadband platform. According to a Break spokesperson, several shorts series and a 90-minute truncated movie that gestated from these pacts will soon debut on the site. For several years, Break also has courted a stable of young viral-video comedians, offering small development deals ranging from $1,000 to $7,500 to create shorts for the site. These videos have been among Break’s most popular offerings. Spokane-based Gonzaga University students Luke Barats and Joe Bereta even managed to transition their Break production deal — not to mention copious exposure on YouTube — into a pilot deal with NBC. www.dv.com “From the writing to the digital production, we’ve been mainly focused on advising these guys,” notes Leone, a youthful industry pro who lists the Warner Bros. feature The Dukes of Hazzard among her outside-world credits. That’s about to change. With a staff of four — two site editors, a video editor and Leone herself — Break has begun ramping up its own digital production studio right in the middle of its modest Beverly Hills digs. In fact, the day before DV caught up with Leone, she had purchased the site’s first camera, a $6,000 Panasonic AG-HVX200 HD camcorder. She also picked up a Sennheiser MKH-416 microphone and a Mole-Richardson lighting pack while she was out. “I think we have enough space to build a studio here inhouse,” Leone says. “But we’re investing in flexible equipment so that we can take it anywhere. If we want to do some kind of man-on-the-street thing in Hollywood, for example, we want to be able to get there quickly.” According to Leone, having a production facility on hand — even a small one — will allow Break to exert some level of control over the content that’s being generated for it, whether it be the “XYZ comedy troupe in Hollywood or some kid with a video camera in Ohio” that’s pitching a project. “We have a pipeline of projects and people bringing us ideas — talent agents, sketch comedians and other users who have been successful on our site,” she notes. “All of them come to us with ideas that they think will work. We just want the ability to try things on the fly and attach our own branding that we create to them.” Of course, that flexibility extends to servicing the site’s sponsors. “Depending on what is sold and what (the advertiser) wants to be around, we can better program the channel accordingly,” Leone explains. If anything, Leone seems eager to experiment within a medium in which failure comes at such a small price tag. “You just don’t need everything [that film and TV production pros] do to be successful on the Web,” she explains. “I don’t want to produce bad content, but our users are more focused on the script part of the equation than the production values. That means we can light something once, and it will probably be okay the first time.” Break’s business model doesn’t have to factor a lot of other costs that the big-timers do, such as union wages. “We don’t have to make a $1 million pilot — we can make a $100 pilot,” Leone explains. “And if it fails, it fails.” Unlike the movie and TV businesses, Break doesn’t have to pay for focus groups to tell it what will work and what won’t — site officials merely have to look at the user feedback every day to know that. “We can make a pilot or one episode of something, and know right way whether it’s going to work, which is a huge value-add,” Leone explains. While the creative juice is coming almost exclusively from the outside right now, Leone envisions a day when there’s a “need for in-house writers.” At such a point in time, content partnerships with the likes of Endemol and NBC might not be such oneway endeavors. She adds, “Hopefully, some of our content will end up mixed in their world.” DV dv january 2008 29 http://www.dv.com
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