Their so-called ‘quarterlife’ goes online

quarterlife webisode screen shotTonightMonday night comes the big premiere of Marshall Herskovitz’s webisode series “quarterlife,” about college grads facing the big bad real world. Pumped up? We thought so. Please keep reading anyway.

The venues for the 8-minute show are MySpace and quarterlife.com. MySpace gets dibs, in a bid to access the social network’s massive audience.

“We only care about our site,” Herskovitz said at a recent USC screening (according to the L.A. Times). “We don’t care about MySpace, because they’re not paying us. But they’re bringing us a lot of eyeballs, so it’s worth something.”

quarterlife.com calls itself “A new community for artists, thinkers, and doers.” Visitors are invited to create profiles, and then upload videos and images. But mostly it’s home to a great-looking screen on which to unspool the series. The trailer shows young people getting through life together and blogging about it. “You blog to exist,” the lady says to the audience. Yeech.

This stuff looks familiar, straight from the network template for young adult women. No doubt “quarterlife” has heart and no doubt it’s manipulative. The show might be good but don’t expect a format breakthough from these guys.

My so called life imageHerskovitz, you may or may not recall, created “My So-Called Life,” just released on DVD by Shout! Factory. Before that, it was the critical favorite “thirtysomething,” the model for hip family dramas such as “Brothers and Sisters.” He did these shows with his longtime partner Edward Zwick.

Paying for the new twentysomething series are big league advertisers such as Toyota and Pepsi.

Herskovitz wrote an opinion piece for the Times announcing that he and Zwick were done with network television. “Networks today exert a level of creative control unprecedented in the history of the medium …,” he said. “The problem, of course, is that these executives often have little background or qualification for making creative decisions. … This season’s new shows have been a good indicator of how successful that strategy is.”

He went on about the importance of the “quarterlife” experiment:

“We’ve worked very hard, and spent a great deal of our own money, to make it as good as anything we’ve ever done on television. And we’ve gotten calls from every guild and virtually every producer we know, all of whom are curious to see if this little experiment can succeed. Because if it does, it will prove that there’s a way to independently produce, finance and distribute ambitious content on the Internet.”

Of course, Herskovitz and Co. have the money and power to bolt from the nets and make a credible Internet series. Pretty much everyone else wanting to work in professional episodic video has no choice but to work for Big Media.

YouTube fun aside, the reality is almost all of the (legal) watchable stuff on the Web comes from real television. The networks repurpose their shows without additional compensation for the people who created that content. That’s what the current writers strike is all about.

One theory I’ve heard here in L.A. is that the networks are in no hurry to settle the walkout because they’re saving money they would have poured into their new crop of flop shows. Reality TV is cheap, relatively, and enough viewers will put up with it to keep the ads coming. Check out these comments about the strike savings from Peter Chernin, president of Fox parent News Corp.

The networks seem to be enjoying their speedy downhill ride. The strike’s disruptions to their primetime shows — and the defection of major talent such as Herskovitz & Zwick — are just two more bits of inspiration for viewers to conclude they have better things to do than watch network TV. Power off.

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ESPN laterals HD games to Xbox Marketplace

ESPN high definition logoESPN has checked into the game in the Xbox 360 Live Marketplace.As of this morning, the Worldwide Leader was offering five recent college football games for download, all of them pretty good: Auburn vs. LSU, South Florida vs. UConn and some Pac 10 action.

The Marketplace promises to upload one or two ESPN/ABC college games a week, within 48 hours of the broadcast’s end. NCAA basketball is in the game plan as well.The NCAA football games all come as widescreen downloads, available in 480p (standard definition, $3) or 1080i (high definition, $4.50). They are commercial free (not even those totally acceptable ESPN house ads intrude).Why would people pay for 2-day-old games that a DVR would capture just as well, especially since ESPN almost always reruns its games? One possible reason: commercial-free HD copies for fans without HD DVRs. When your lousy directional school knocks off Michigan, it’s a keeper. The boys in Iraq might find this worth a few bucks as well.

X Games LogoESPN series such as “Madden Nation” and “The Contender” are part of the program, in old-school full screen, 480p, as are the “X Games” segments. The trio of World Series of Poker downloads are a mixed bag of screen ratios and resolutions. The surfing series “Down the Barrel” came in one hour-and-a-half blast, widescreen 480 or 1080. Those shows follow the Marketplace’s pricing for other TV shows, $2 SD/$3 HD.

The downloads provide a brief video preview that’s just the first minute or so of the broadcast, cut off abruptly.

“This is a natural fit for us, as so many Xbox 360 owners are huge sports fans,” read your canned quote from Ross Honey, senior director of Microsoft’s media and entertainment group.

“We are dedicated to providing our diverse community of Xbox Live users the premium entertainment content they want, and partnering with ESPN is a great example of our continued dedication in the video-on-demand space, especially in high-definition.”

Best Buy makes end run on YouTube

Best Buy video logoBig-boxer Best Buy thinks YouTube has left something on the table — but isn’t entirely clear on what that is.

The retailer has teamed up with British startup Mydeo for a subscription video storage and sharing service, with subscriptions from $7. Unlike YouTube, they say, it’s safe to put up that video of Jr.’s first messy minutes in the world.

The idea of what is basically a high-end YouTube sounds like a great concept. Let’s see if this is it:

Here are the features, straight from the Best Buy Video Sharing pitch page.

Real people! What a concept.

The service allows users to control who else is allowed to see the videos, if anyone. YouTube also allows this. Videos can be embedded anywhere, with subscribers in control of their own links. Eh? YouTube also allows this.

The other main pitch is that the videos never will have ads, unlike the increasingly commercial YouTube.

Best Buy also assures users that it makes no claim to have control of the video content, as most free video-sharing sites do, in the small print. Here’s the part of YouTube’s terms of service that should concern uploaders of personal content: “You retain the copyright for your content, but by submitting it to YouTube you are giving YouTube the right to use the material in any form that it may desire.”

A Best Buy plan that allows loading of videos up to 30 minutes in length and with storage of 100 minutes goes for $6.97. The tier that allows uploading of videos up to 90 minutes with 250 minutes costs $10.47. The premium plan, “ideal for small businesses,” includes video email and viewing stats. There are various ways to save a few bucks.

Kevin Winneroski, a vice president at Best Buy, has your canned statement all ready:

“With the growing popularity of video, fueled in part by social networking sites, we’ve actually seen an increase in customer demand for alternative video sharing solutions. Many customers, particularly families with children, don’t want their personal memories available for anyone to see in the public domain nor do they want to share them in a cluttered environment that includes advertising.”

Best Buy has taken a minority stake in Mydeo, apparently because no U.S. company could provide the service.

The TOS includes a ban on copyrighted material, so your dream of a little bijou just went splat, sorry. Also, none of those really private home videos, bucko.

The site also has a free page with some basic but helpful links to information about video editing and streaming and whatnot.

Best Buy also has a digital music store.

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