Even though NYTVF bills itself as independent TV festival, more and more legacy media companies are present at the festival. In the case of this year’s Digital Day, digital studios or digital programming units that are part of established TV networks, channels, and studios were well represented on all panels. The majority of panelists were from legacy media companies, including the digital branches of Comedy Central, the CW, Starz, and Universal. Others represented established players in digital distribution, including My Damn Channel and Vimeo. While the panel make-up depends on who is willing and available to appear, there seemed to be a clear trend toward including legacy media representatives at NYTVF.

The audience—or at least the imagined audience evoked by panelists—consisted of content creators trying to break into the industry. Panel discussions and questions centered on how to catch the attention of the companies represented by panelists and get a pitch meeting. The discussion thus did not center on how to create a web series that one would self-finance and distribute on a platform like YouTube, at least not in the long run. This focus struck me as different from much of the usual discourse around web series and the conversation at least year’s Digital Day, which included panels about Kickstarter or other ways of self-financing and featured creators like Adam Goldman (creator of web series like The Outs and Whatever This Is), not executives.

Another marked shift from previous years resided in the panelists’ description of preconditions an independent creator needs to meet in order to get a development deal. Executives emphasized that they are looking for two things: one, a fully fleshed out show that has a few episodes under its belt and an “established social following”- or, in other words, a guaranteed loyal audience. Ideally, you should also have a marketing strategy. Simply pitching a great idea is no longer enough. As David Katz (VP of Digital Media at Starz) put it, “bring that entire eco-system to me.” Listening to these preconditions made me wonder just how independent the digital TV landscape is; all of the talk of pitches and development deals echoed pilot season rather strongly- except merely having a pilot is not enough to get picked up by Starz or My Damn Channel. Moreover, the financial prospects don’t seem to be that promising, either. As Jed Weintrop (VP, Head of Production, Condé Nast Entertainment) pointed out: “Nobody gets rich here,” which was echoed by other panelists throughout the day.

Finally, the many callbacks to legacy media history surprised me. Perhaps it shouldn’t have. After all, one panel was called “Supply and Demand: Why Indie TV Will Be the New Indie Film.” Throughout all panels, executives evoked the history of film and cable TV to frame the current digital TV landscape. For example, Rob Barnett of My Damn Channel stated that digital TV was like “baby cable” and added that it feels like it’s “’80, ’81,” before the big players in cable had emerged. New Yorker columnist Adam Sternbergh described the discovery of exciting new digital content as “going to Sundance in 1988, ’89.”

Stray observations:

• Panelists identified Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu original programming as “television,” not “digital content.” To panelists, the dividing line was budget and programming length. Aimee Carlson (VP, Digital Development and Production, Universal Cable Productions) defined “digital content” as short form, low-budget, episodic video that premieres exclusively on digital platforms. The half-hour and hour-long programs on Amazon et al do not fall under this umbrella even though they are also made exclusively for digital distribution.
• Jennifer Titus (SVP, On Air Creative, CW Seed) pointed out that the average age of CW viewers for “linear” (i.e. primetime programming) is 38. For their digital content on CW Seed, the average age is 22.
• Another common piece of advice across panels: connect to specific audiences; don’t throw your product at a broad audience. Sam Toles (VP of Content Acquisitions and Business Development at Vimeo) was particularly adamant about this strategy. He stated that millennials aren’t engaging with traditional media/advertising, which is why “indie TV” creators need to connect with them in a targeted way. As a strategy for cutting through the noise of digital content, he advised attaching content to a specific audience already invested in the genre/topic and “seeding a clip across social media so they notice it and start sharing it.”

The monetization panel introduced two options for funding a web series: crowdfunding or a sponsor/brand liaison. Much of the panel’s discussion focused on how to create a crowdfunding campaign that stands out (“offer personalized rewards” was one suggestion) and how to find a sponsor (one panelist remarked that if great content doesn’t fit a brand, it will have less of a chance of gaining sponsorship). The Digital Distribution panel offered insights into My Damn Channel and CW Seed, including the notion that for online distributors, the boundaries between marketing, distribution, and audience engagement are collapsing because content circulates via social media. CW Seed’s Rick Haskins also rejected the long-standing idea that online video content needs to be short in order to be successful, observing that the CW’s statistics show an increase in mobile viewing of hour-long dramas. “A screen is a screen,” he remarked and explained that convenience trumps quality of the viewing experience.

I found the panel on building an audience most intriguing. The panel highlighted only one way to build an audience: social media, by which panelists meant Twitter. The panel might as well have been subtitled “how Twitter will save television.” Moderator Fred Graver, Head of TV at Twitter, emphasized that Twitter has special values by being live, public, and conversational. The liveness of Twitter came up several times during the panel. The panelists focused on two main strategies for building an audience: branded content or ads that appear in the Twitter stream and showrunners’ /casts’ direct engagement with viewers via Twitter. Graver heralded branded content as “closing the loop” between seeing a tweet and watching television, especially via Comcast’s new “See it” initiative.

The singular focus on Twitter surprised me—after all, there are numerous online platforms on which viewers engage with TV. For example, the complete absence of Tumblr at this panel struck me as significant oversight. In addition, this panel conveyed the idea that the industry has never had the opportunity to engage so directly with audiences before when viewers have discussed television online for decades now, and this isn’t the first time that the industry has discovered online audience engagement. Let’s remember articles like Marshall Sella’s The Remote Controllers from 2002, which describes message boards like Television Without Pity. But Twitter’s liveness—and its potential to foster live viewing—is what sets it apart from more asynchronous sites, and offers a reason why the industry is cultivating Twitter as a TV engagement tool: because it fits the networks’ needs and preferences for advertising and ratings. In addition, Twitter tends to be public and centralized. Instead of trying to locate dispersed audience-created content and opinions on various sites, industry insiders can execute a key word search on Twitter that results in easily accessible data for a range of TV shows.

Beyond praising Twitter’s general capabilities for connecting audiences and TV, panelists also agreed that paying attention to Twitter has become a must for showrunners and writers. As Embassy Row’s Mike Davis put it, Twitter functions as a barometer of the audience that is more productive than a focus group (although both are similarly limited in offering only a small and very selective slice of the audience). Law and Order: SVU showrunner Warren Leight shared his experiences using Twitter to build buzz for SVU. Leight candidly spoke of NBC’s disinterest in promoting the show and needing to find ways to promote SVU that doesn’t cost the network any money. NBC only considered using Twitter to funnel audiences toward the official SVU website, an effort that Leight deemed unproductive. Calling TV show websites the “rust belt” of the internet, he highlighted the cast and crew’s tweets as better alternative because their tweets, especially images and links, get picked up by an average of ten to twenty entertainment websites in addition to being spread via retweets. Leight’s comments reminded me of the central argument in Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green’s Spreadable Media, namely that the industry needs to shift away from keeping content and audiences locked in one place (like an official website) and toward making content mobile so audiences can spread it wherever they want (a model that makes tracking impressions more difficult but demonstrates an understanding of how audiences engage with content today).

Leight’s recognition of spreadability’s importance also came across in his anecdote about last summer’s #savebenson campaign. The campaign and hashtag originated (unsurprisingly) in fans’ tweets in response to SVU’s season finale. Leight described the surprise and delight of coming across the hashtag. The writers pushed the hashtag to keep conversation going about SVU over the summer. Despite the new ways of engaging SVU viewers, Leight’s ultimate concern and focus is still on ratings. For example, Leight observed that good East Coast Twitter buzz can translate into a ratings bump for the West Coast and highlighted the potential of guest stars with a large Twitter following who can tweet about their guest appearance, which might also translate into an increase in ratings. While there is ultimately no way to correlate Twitter buzz/engagement and ratings increases, Leight’s analysis says much about his investment in Twitter as a space of maintaining interest in a show that is off the network’s (and critics) radar. Overall, Leight described his cast and crew’s Twitter engagement as “complete anarchy” because there are no coordinating talking points for what happens on Twitter. While he mused that the corporate world will likely get very anxious about this free-for-all mentality, Fred Graver added that Twitter advises networks not to interfere because it relieves them of responsibility when inappropriate comments surface.

The overwhelming focus on Twitter in the panel on audiences, with frequent gestures to Twitter appearing in the other panels as well, was noticeably different from the previous year, when Digital Day centered on second screen apps offering program-related content. It is interesting to speculate, and invite you to do so in the comments, whether or not this emphasis on Twitter constitutes a silent concession that content-based second screen apps are largely failures because the audience won’t budge from Twitter as virtual watercooler.

For more on the NYTVF, check out Aymar Jean Christian’s Can the New York Television Festival Get Past the Pilot?