Michael Eisner's Internet Play: Vuguru

With the premiere of Michael Eisner's second web series The All-For-Nots, here's a quick review of the new media world according to Eisner. 

His company's first series was Prom Queen.  According the Eisner, it cost $3,000 per 90 second episode, was seen by 20 million people and made, "a couple thousand dollars."

Though it had more shots of girls in bikinis than the original, Prom Queen's sequel, PQ: Summer Heat, was seen by fewer people and "lost money."

Despite this (and his view that the writers strike was insane because "it [was] over a business and a marketplace that is not evolved enough to even know if there is a business or a marketplace there"), Eisner is determined to make Vuguru "the leader in high-quality, story driven content produced for new media platforms."

He premiered The All-For-Nots with sponsorships from Chrysler and Expedia, distribution on Bebo and Verizon's V-CAST (not sure who paid who for what) and a simple strategy: produce cheap content that makes people laugh and cry. 

With little deference to Eisner's experience producing content that is professional, tear-jerking, and cheap, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington paid Eisner what must be high praise in Silicon Valley when he wrote that Prom Queen was, "as good as much of the user generated content out there."

And though Arrington predicted the show could be "very profitable", he doubted the need for Eisner's lavish $100k production budget for the 80-episode series: "the audience can easily create their own content and distribute it to millions on YouTube. Some of that content will be better than anything Hollywood produces. And it won’t cost even $100k to create."

No word yet on the budget, revenue, the fees paid to talent or the likely profitability of The All-For-Nots.  But if the Lonely Girl people can make millions off their Bebo show, Kate Modern, one hopes the former King of the Mouse House can figure out how to do the same.

Disney Launches Web Content Studio - Stage 9 Digital Media

With a web site and press release that push hard to position the company as revolutionary, Disney today announced the launch of Stage 9 Digital Media. They claim to have 20 web series in various stages of development, ranging from comedy to science fiction. 

Tech Crunch's Eric Schonfeld wasn't impressed by Stage 9's first series, SQUEEGEES: "Lame doesn’t begin to describe this three-and-half-minute comedy about the hijinks of a window-washing crew ... What ABC fails to understand is that when it comes to Web video, authenticity trumps production values." 

NewTeeVees's Chris Albrecht characterizes SQUEEGEES as another example of big-media creating web shows that are merely "shorter versions of what already exists in old media." He calls the show "sit-comy" but funny, and he faults Disney for a cardinal internet sin: not allowing users to embed the show in their own sites. 

The LA Times article about Stage 9 suggests $200,000 as a budget for some of the series, pretty high for internet original content.  I've heard the science-fiction series they're doing - Trenches - is considerably higher than that.