EVOLUTION
Interesting news on the mainstream media front, as NBC gets ready for transitioning it's venerable late-night "Tonight Show" from Jay Leno to Conan O'Brien next year. More details from the New York Times:
"With a new round of shake-ups in late-night television set to begin next year, Lorne Michaels has decided to try to get a jump on things by starting NBC’s next edition of “Late Night,” with its new host Jimmy Fallon, as a nightly entry on the Internet.
Mr. Fallon has been named as the replacement for Conan O’Brien when Mr. O’Brien takes over the “Tonight” show from Jay Leno next year, and Mr. Michaels, the long-time boss of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” who also serves as executive producer of “Late Night,” told television reporters here Sunday that he wants Mr. Fallon to work out as many of the rough spots in his presentation as possible in performances on a website.
Mr. Michaels said he did not know yet which site he will use to post the shows with Mr. Fallon, but he was sure of several of the plans:
The web performances will likely begin in the fall, long before the transition from Mr. Leno for Mr. O’Brien is set to take place. The entries will not constitute anything like an entire hour-long show. “I expect that we’ll do something like five or 10 minutes,” Mr. Michaels said.
But he said they most likely will be on every night, to try to establish the rhythm of a nightly show. And he said, “I’m going to post them at 12:30 every night, so people will begin to look for Jimmy at that time.”
So far, the news has been fairly well-received by web media, with this reaction from SIA being an example:
"This is the equivalent of a Broadway show opening out of town to work out the kinks, and it sounds like a great idea to us."
"Plenty of other television shows have “webisodes,” short clips of original footage from a television series that play on the web, but this is the first time the web will be used as a minor leagues of sort for the big leagues of traditional television."
I agree it's a natural evolution of the video content on the web, from the chaotic, bubbling, organic soup of "user-generated content" (aka UGC), to more traditional media content, on web properties like YouTube.
But I can't help but ask the question in my mind...how long before a major "TV show" debuts on traditional media to "work the kinks out", before being released on the web, to the real global audience?
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