Oslo Taxi
Most TV shows have their own website these days, but now, turning the tables, some websites are actually spawning their own TV shows.
Case in point: Classmates.com, a website where school friends, lovers, prospective lovers and even enemies look to reacquaint themselves, recently got its own reality TV show, in cooperation with News Corp’s Twentieth Television. Each segment of the show will feature one person looking for a long lost acquaintance, old lover or kindergarten friend. The searchee won’t know who is trying to contact them, and the show will profile the people separately, leading up to their reunion.
The business angle? Classmates.com’s 35 million registered users, who not only provide the show’s content (Classmates.com claims to generate about 300 to 500 possible story leads a day), but also represent a massive number of potential viewers and a source of ‘buzz’. Which is what all networks are after, anyway.
Classmates is not the only one expanding from cyberspace to air waves:
– Celebrity crime Web site The Smoking Gun is creating two half-hour shows for broadcast on cable channel Court TV (due to air in August), joining a genre of popular gotcha shows like ‘Cops’. The Smoking Gun was acquired by Court TV in 2000.
– Sony Pictures Television is behind eBayTV, airing live auctions. Due to complications in getting software out to stations, the show’s launch has been postponed until fall 2004, but should be able to benefit from Ebay’s 1 trillion or so worshippers.
– National Public Radio is working with Microsoft-owned online journal Slate on a one-hour weekday program called ‘Day to Day, which will feature news topics of the day.
– iVillage, a popular women’s website with an online community of almost 15 million visitors, is planning a TV series based on internet dating. Tentatively named iDate, the program will follow internet based relationships starting with the initial email exchanges and culminating with the face-to-face meeting. (Sources: AdAge, News.com, TrendCentral.)
Opportunities
Opportunities
Springwise’s suggestion to everyone with a website boasting lots of visitors and good name recognition: start looking for the stories behind your content, visitors, members and customers, then turn it into a TV format and start pitching to the networks. Or, if you are in TV yourself, do some due diligence amongst your favorite websites. Perhaps you should buy one, like Court TV did with The Smoking Gun? May we suggest that Amazon.com set up some sort of book club hosted by one of the thousands of ‘garage influentials‘ who send in their book reviews to the site? We also think that Gawker.com would make for fantastic TV; a daily show loaded with (in their own words) “city news including urban dating rituals, no-ropes social climbing, Conde Nastiness, and downwardly mobile i-bankers” 😉 And that’s just the US: what about UK-based Lastminute.com, one of Europe’s largest online travel players, whose popular weekend trips must be the source of endless stories of romance, deceit and adventure? Last one: a Google.com show bringing us ‘today’s most interesting searches and the people behind it’. Oh well, you get the picture! (more…)
Get Digital
They’ve been around in the U.S. since 1937. It’s about time Krispy Kreme’s hot original glazed doughnuts conquer the rest of the world.
Probably unbeknownst to millions of North American Krispy Kreme doughnut addicts, is the fact that the rest of the world is pretty much Krispy Kreme free. The company, which started way back in 1937, operates 282 stores, raking in close to a billion dollars a year by selling what some consider to be the best and most luscious doughnuts on earth (ranging from ‘powdered blueberry filled’ to ‘maple glazed’).
Krispy Kreme’s focus on freshness and top quality, its in-store experience (doughnuts are made on the premises, for all to see and smell), and its involvement with local neighborhoods give Krispy Kreme a Starbucks-kind of feel and aura.
It is surprising, therefore, to learn that international expansion has only just begun, in 2002 to be precise, with franchise deals having taken place in Canada, Australia and the UK. That leaves another 185 countries or so deprived of ‘hot original glazed’ doughnuts, the kind that makes American consumers literally line up for hours every time Krispy Kreme adds a new doughnut variety or opens a new store.