Television Is Spreading in New Directions
The Price Is Right was looking a bit long in the tooth when Fremantle Media bought it in 1996. The game show, which invites contestants to “come on down” and guess the value of various consumer goods, had first appeared on television 50 years earlier. Since 1972 it had been hosted by one man, Bob Barker. Its audience was aged.
These days the show is a multimedia phenomenon. It has been turned into computer games and slot machines. Perhaps inevitably, there is an iPhone app, which has been bought more than half a million times. Bally’s, a casino in Las Vegas, puts on a theatrical version of the competition five days a week. Now with a new host, the show is chugging along on daytime television, not doing at all badly.
Once people fall in love with a brand, they want to interact with it in all sorts of ways. This would be true even without prodding from media firms. Winter Sonata, a South Korean soap opera, sent honeymooners flocking to the places where it had been filmed. There are plenty of unofficial tours of famous TV locations in New York and Los Angeles. Media firms have learned to capture more of this demand and profit from it. About one-third of Fremantle’s revenues now come from consumer goods and other spin-offs.
Popular TV shows routinely spawn toys, websites, computer games and comics. Germany’s Gute Zeiten, Schlechte Zeiten soap has an eveningwear collection. Indeed, the point of the television business is no longer simply to make shows but to create branded entertainment franchises made up of many products of which television shows are merely the most important.
These days you can hardly watch a TV show aimed at young people without being invited to visit a website. Find out what music is playing in the background! See some footage that did not make it into the final version! Discuss the show with other fans! And, of course, see some more advertisements. The websites of big-budget American dramas are dense and well designed. The shrewdest producers have realised that this profusion of spin-offs opens up a new approach to storytelling.
One of the buzzwords in Hollywood these days is “transmedia”. It refers to a kind of storytelling that goes beyond both a single platform and a single narrative. Big-budget TV shows like Lost and Heroes pioneered the use of web episodes to flesh out minor characters. The Heroes website hosts cartoons, subsequently printed and bound into graphic novels that go off on tangents to the main story. Such extensions create deeper, more immersive experiences for fans.
It is not yet clear that transmedia storytelling is profitable in its own right. Its value is not measured in advertising dollars but in audience engagement.
Have content, will travel
When a TV show goes off the air for the last time, the online community that had gathered around it tends to vanish. The games stop selling, too. Television brings audiences to all these other activities and gives them life. It is also an excellent vehicle for carrying stories and characters to other countries, where the whole merchandise-rich ecosystem can get going all over again. Indeed, it is almost the only means of doing so.
Overseas markets are the healthiest, fastest-growing part of the television business. Discovery Communications, which ventured abroad early, now derives a third of its revenues from outside America. It helps that Discovery produces a lot of documentaries and natural-history shows: programmes with voice-overs can be readied for export simply by recording a new narration.
A few have even sneaked hits into America. The Spanish-language telenovelas that Mexico’s Televisa supplies to Univision frequently draw bigger prime-time audiences than English-language shows. Europeans dominate the worldwide reality-TV business. Fremantle Media, which is owned by Bertelsmann, produces American Idol. Endemol, a Netherlands-based firm, churns out the kind of reality shows that Americans love to complain about — and love to watch. But these are localised versions of imported formats. Most Americans probably do not realise that American Idol or Dancing with the Stars originated in Britain. Only Hollywood routinely exports its shows unaltered.(https://www.daowen.com)
An international beauty contest
To see why the big studios are so successful at selling overseas, conduct a test. Get hold of a copy of a drama made by Hollywood for American broadcast TV — CSI, Glee or Heroes will do fine — and, at a random moment, press the pause button. What do you see? Handsome actors, no doubt. But also a well-composed shot that resembles a photograph, with the actors well positioned within the frame. The shot will be well lit, too. Now do the same for a show made by a foreign broadcaster. The result? Probably less impressive.
Finely crafted television like this is expensive. It costs more than $3m for an hour of drama that is good enough to pass muster on an American broadcast network. The visual acuity of Hollywood’s best shows is a big reason why they can compete against home-grown products that are more culturally relevant. Their advantage is growing as households across the world invest in bigger, sharper televisions.
A few years ago there was much talk of localising television shows. Stung by charges of cultural imperialism, which were particularly loud in France, the big media conglomerates encouraged their foreign subsidiaries to develop their own programming.
Television companies have gained more leeway in part because worries about cultural imperialism have shifted from Hollywood to Silicon Valley. Television has lost its monopoly over the creation of cultural anxiety.
Words & Expressions
spin-off：副产品，衍生品
franchise：特许权； 专营权
telenovela：浪漫电视肥皂剧
footage：一组（电影或电视）镜头
buzzword：时髦术语，流行语
churn out：大量生产，大量炮制
leeway：余地，退路