This Christmas, a cartoon version of Santa's Home Page, a site developed in December on AOL's Greenhouse Network, will air as a half-hour special on ABC, becoming the first creative online property to hit the small screen. But with a raft of network or syndication deals in the works for companies from Microsoft down to Cybergrrl, the new migration of Web brands into TV may be just beginning.
"If the Net wants to become a mass media, it has to start looking to mass audiences for those figures," says Jupiter analyst Steve Mitra. For Net-based properties and AOL to continue to grow, notes Mitra, they will be forced to promote their brands offline, into the traditional media like television "where the audience is."
Perhaps an unlikely choice for a television show, Santa's Home Page brought together families with a sly commercial twist, a trick that may prove difficult to reproduce on television. The original site featured the dispatches of a mischievous elf, Ernie, that kept kids coming back with questions like, "Is Rudolf going to quit the reindeer team?" Kids could write email to Santa, browse the site for toys, then send a version of their wish list to parents for "great commercial opportunities," describes Greenhouse spokesman Anne Bently. The storyline will change slightly for the TV special to accommodate the change in format, Bently says, and AOL will also be promoting an companion book in bookstores.
For months now, AOL has clearly been preparing to exploit television for brand-extension. In March, AOL acquired LightSpeed Entertainment, run by The Spot creator Scott Zakarin. As part of that deal, AOL created the Greenhouse Entertainment Network under the aegis of producer Brandon Tartikoff to develop properties specifically for TV, of which the Santa deal arranged last month was one. The first of these projects, Beggars and Choosers, about a struggling TV network, is expected to air this fall on Showtime with a cross-promoted site launch on AOL.
Bob Freidman, head of New Line Television, which co-produces AOL's channel network, The Hub, said AOL is looking to build critical mass for its audience. "AOL is in 10 million homes," he notes. "They're a mini-cable network." Within the year, Freidman, who helped to create MTV, expects a handful of Hub properties like Tarot to Go or Dr. Judy the sex columnist to air on TV. "We always believed if we created a successful brand [with the Hub], that we would take that brand to other media," Freidman adds.
The field is quickly crowding with prospective projects, but many producers are hesitant to go public with their deals until networks have signed "pay-pilot" contracts to guarantee exposure for their work. Microsoft's content-development wing, M3P, has multiple projects which could air this fall, and Cybergrrl is shopping around a cartoon project, but final deals have not been secured.
The television industry, however, remains skeptical of online brands brought into television. "I used work in Broadway, and every off-off Broadway show was 'Broadway bound,'" says agent Jonathan Trumper at William Morris. "More people talk about cyberprojects being headed for TV than actually being the case in the end."
For Trumper, the Web projects themselves have a ways to go before they could work as episodic shows. "What really works is a compelling character," he says, "and in terms of the slickness of TV formulas ... a lot of [work online] is just clunky."
From the Wired News New York Bureau at FEED magazine.
