Early in 2011, Kyncl began meeting content creators in a variety of media—film, TV, music, print—whiteboarding the future of television, and inviting them to participate in it by creating new YouTube channels. He offered several million dollars in funding, in the form of advances against future ad revenues, to be used as development money. Once the advances are earned back, YouTube will share ad revenues with the creators. YouTube will have an exclusive right to the content for a year, but the creators will retain ownership. YouTube will be responsible for selling ads but will not invest in promoting or marketing the channels in the way that traditional television channels do. (There will be no lavish premiere parties, and no billboards in Times Square.)
Michael Hirschorn was among the people who heard Kyncl’s presentation. Hirschorn began his career in print but made his name in television, at VH1, where, as the head of programming, he oversaw hits like “Flavor of Love” and “Celebrity Rehab.” He now runs an independent production company called Ish Entertainment. Larry Aidem, the former president of the Sundance Channel, knew Robert Kyncl, Hirschorn told me, and he said he thought they should meet. “None of the stuff Robert described was happening yet, of course, but I felt, having been late to several revolutions previously, that we needed to go all out for this,” Hirschorn said. “I called Larry and said, ‘We need to start a company now.’ ”
In all, Kyncl received more than a thousand proposals for new YouTube channels. He and his staff heard more than five hundred pitches, and winnowed them down to just over a hundred channels that would be awarded advances. Hirschorn attended more than twenty meetings. The winning proposals—branded “YouTube Original Channels”—were announced late on the Friday evening just before Halloween, at a time usually reserved for scandals and resignations, signalling that the third age of television, whatever it might be, would not be show business as usual.
Hirschorn and Aidem’s company, IconicTV, has been given advances for three channels: Life and Times, which will focus on Jay-Z’s cultural and artistic interests; 123UnoDosTres, an urban channel for Latin American young adults; and myISH, a channel for scouting musical talent. Madonna and her longtime manager, Guy Oseary, are developing a dance channel called Dance On. Amy Poehler is creating a channel called Smart Girls at the Party. Shaquille O’Neal is behind the Comedy Shaq Network, and there is a skateboard channel, RIDE, from Tony Hawk. Brian Bedol, who started the Classic Sports Network in the nineteen-nineties, and his partner Ken Lerer, the co-founder of the Huffington Post, got funds for four channels: Network A, an action-sports channel; KickTV, featuring soccer; Official Comedy, a standup-comedy showcase; and Look TV, a fashion-and-beauty channel. The Onion, Slate, and the Wall Street Journal are also creating channels, as are Hearst and Meredith. Even Disney, which had not made its films available to YouTube until November, agreed to partner with the company.
Although most of the entertainment channels fall into the variety-show format (a staple of the early years of television), some creators are attempting long-form dramas. Anthony Zuiker, who created the crime show “C.S.I.” for CBS, got a deal, along with his colleagues, to develop a channel called BlackBoxTV, a “Night Gallery”-like chiller theatre. When I asked him what attracted him to the opportunity, he said, “This world of online video is the future, and for an artist you want to be first in, to be a pioneer. And that time is now. We’ve had amateur content on the Web, and we’ve had network shows rebroadcast on the Web, but now we are combining those two into a bigger game.” He added, “You know, even with a hit show like ‘C.S.I.’ there’s a lot of cooks in the kitchen. There is a lot of interference and a lot of rules. With YouTube I will have a very small crew, and we are trying to keep focussed on a single voice. There aren’t any rules. There’s just the artist, the content, and the audience.”
