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Disney/ABC’s Stage 9 Digital Media – not quite right

I have often scolded the writers at TechCrunch for not being critical enough lately, but Erick Schonfeld hits the nail on its head in his review of Disney’s Stage9DigitalMedia project.

Erick especially points to the comments by Barry Jossen, an “an Academy Award-winning short-form producer and studio executive” who is the general manager of Stage9:

“While the new media space is loaded with UGC, we feel the audience is missing the quality experience found in other forms of exhibition, and we are answering their need,” said Jossen. “This creative frontier gives us the opportunity to develop new franchises, discover and develop talent and, most importantly, expand the standard of excellence set by our parent company in creating superior episodic programming with great stories and production values.”

If the horror that is Squeegees (whose trailer, by the way, doesn’t even have sound on the Stage9 page) is anything to go by, I much prefer “user generated content” (and what a horrible word that is). Naked window-washers hanging in front of a group of kindergartners wasn’t funny twenty years ago, and now it’s just creepy.

What outright confuses me though is Stage9’s strategy of spreading out the content between YouTube, ABC Online, and sites specifically designed for the shows. There doesn’t seem to be a central site to find them.

And why turn off embedding? The acting in the shows isn’t that great, but at least it’s better than Hannah Montana…

You're confused by the strategy of “spreading out the content”?? It's called hyperdistribution, and it's the strategy every digital studio uses to get their content out into as many different corners of the internet as possible to reach as wide an audience as possible. Have you ever actually written about web video? Most original series have their own sites, but few people watch the episodes there; they exist more as catalogues of the content.

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