Category: The TV Biz

YouTube is Kicking TV’s Financial Butt

…This couldn’t be happening to a more worthy group of people…on both sides of the kick:

youtubefuture

by Ben Popper

For the last three years, YouTube has put on a series of increasingly extravagant parties meant to convince advertisers that the video platform is the best place to spend their marketing dollars. The fourth annual Brandcast took place last night at the Javits Center, and compared with previous versions, it was decidedly more self-assured. In the past, YouTube spent a lot of time assuring the brands in attendance that its content was safe, high-quality, and watched by more than just bored teenagers. This time YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki cut to the chase.

“Today, I’m happy to announce that on mobile alone YouTube now reaches more 18–49-year-olds than any network — broadcast or cable. In fact, we reach more 18–49-year-olds during primetime than the top 10 TV shows combined,” she said, citing data from a Nielsen study  of US viewers commissioned by Google. “At a time when TV networks are losing audiences, YouTube is growing in every region and across every screen.” read article

Why aren’t streaming services bringing us more great black shows?

Reruns! Once upon a time they were the bane of TV viewers. Now, we spend vast numbers of online hours looking for the great TV shows of yore. Many times we find them…others, well, not so much:

by Alyssa Rosenberg

Living_single_dvd_coverWhen I graduated from college and got cable for the first time, I discovered the wonderful world of reruns. And so, long before binging TV shows became an actual sociological phenomenon, I regularly fell into happy fugue states with the “Law & Order” franchise, and with “Living Single,” Yvette Lee Bowser’s brilliant sitcom about a group of friends living in New York, starring Queen Latifah as magazine editor Khadijah James.

But when I got a “Living Single” craving last week, I discovered something frustrating: The series isn’t streaming anywhere, and only the first of the show’s five seasons is available on a DVD release. “Living Single” is every bit as sprawling and funny as “Friends” or “How I Met Your Mother,” and its female characters beat “Sex and the City” to the spiky, complicated punch by five years. But if you wanted to watch the whole thing, start to finish, and to watch it in order, you’d have to DVR the TV One reruns and assemble the episodes in order yourself. read article

Google Tolls the Death Knell of Old TV

As fans of excellence in all arenas, but especially TV, this affirmation of the future we’ve always hoped for makes us wanna shout!

Hollywood Googleby Matthew Hussey

Not content grabbing ad dollars from TVnetworks across the world, Google went a step further by announcing that the adverts it serves on YouTube are better at convincing watchers to buy stuff.

In a report seen by the Guardian, Matt Brittin, Google’s head honcho in Europe will say that 80 percent of the time, YouTube ads were more effective than TV ads later this week at an advertising conference. read article

Everything You Need to Know About Adult Swim

Here it is, girls and boys, the intel you’ve been waiting for. How the hippest network in the history of TV got that way.

Future TV network creators, take note. (We sure as !#@ have.)

read article

5 African American Female Television Writers Who Paved the Way

We at TVWriter™ love us a good pioneer tale, and this article delivers five of ’em. Read on and see what we mean:

feliciadby K. Nicole Mills

Over the past two years, we have witnessed history in television.  This has been the most diverse time period in the history of the small screen.  The amount of diverse content available to audiences has drastically increased, and people of color currently headline numerous shows on every major network and digital platform.   We have made great strides considering the fact that when ‘Scandal’ premiered in 2012, it was the first network drama with a black woman as it’s lead in almost four decades.  Many attribute the shift of developing more diverse characters to the “Shonda Effect,” a term inspired by Shonda Rhimes who has continuously hired people of color in lead roles on all of her shows.  She simply creates television shows that mirror the reality of the world that we live in.

“I’m normalizing TV. I am making TV look like the world looks. Women, people of color, LGBTQ people equal way more than 50 percent of the population. Which means it ain’t out of the ordinary.” – Shonda Rhimes read article