What if TV Networks Aired All Their Pilots?
freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com
freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com
There is more to the cost of airing a pilot than just the production cost of the pilot, and this even assumes the network has agreed to assume the cost of that.
There is the cost of lining up advertisers for the commercial breaks during, before, and after the pilot.
There is the displacement of the show(s) that would've otherwise filled the time-slot the pilot occupies.
There is the opportunity cost of the advertisers you might have lined up if you hadn't punted the incumbent for the pilot.
The more pilots you elect to air, the more often you have to make these trade-offs. If there are a sufficient number of incumbents that can be thoughtlessly traded for pilots like this, I'd wonder about the general program management of the network, and how long they've been allowing things to stagnate.
Even if you just sacrificed a week, that is a huge amount of potential revenue to sacrifice for the sake of picking the "right" set of shows.
And, even if all the economics for airing every pilot works out, it still doesn't guarantee much. You are still gathering data based on what people say they might want to watch based on a snapshot. I can't imagine this is going to be particularly predictive of a series's performance. This seems similar to someone taking a vote on whether a movie sequel ought to be produced from an audience who had just seen the original; I can see far more people asking for that many Scary Movie sequels as actually went to see them.
If you make it homework ("watch every one of these shows by friday!"), you've lost the public.
"What if a network devoted one week, maybe in early summertime, to airing all its pilots for the fall season, with viewers voting on their favorites? You turn your otherwise failed pilots into content for a weeklong American Idol-style competition"
Every pilot, now matter how ridiculously niche, would attract some grouping of die-hards creating petitions, fan-fiction, costumes and more.
'Please reconsider your decision to cancel Large-Nostril Boris, an excellent character representing all of us with above-average nasal volume and providing hope to everyone around the world. Sign on if you agree, or read my Boris fan-fic here!'
They can also measure things such as: what percentage of people decided to stop watching halfway through.
If pilots were all released on HULU, then a season filled with middling to poor pilots would be reviewed as such. And then no matter how much a studio might try to improve the best of the lot, they'd have those negative reviews dragging down performance of the ultimate product.
If pilot feedback is reasonably controlled, the studios have the option of polishing an almost-there concept (or more cynically: the best turd of the bunch) and not having reviews of its dodgy pilot dragging down performance of the final show.
This also means you can't manipulate the results by dumping shows in awkward time slots (interpreted another way, you avoid having to match each show to a time slot when its potential audience is likely to see it).
Which is probably what you meant, but your phrasing was (to me) a bit off.
However, targeting certain demographics by way of traditional advertising, like paying to interrupt everyone watching a broadcast television station, can suck as bad or worse, depending on the demographic.
As far as I can think of, it comes down to a couple of decisions: how much do you believe the medium, and not just the content, is going to affect the number of hits you get; and, how much is the feedback data you gather from your medium going to help your advertising campaign become more successful. There may be fewer people on Hulu, but your television does not provide a "thumbs-up" button at a per advertisement granularity.
So, while I think that the metrics would be bogus for trying to get a representative sample of a collective demographic who might watch motion video on any medium, I also don't think there is no worthwhile demographic information to be gleaned from posting one's media content on Hulu. It feels like a game of tradeoffs, and one you can probably only make an informed decision on by doing test runs, and seeing what data comes back.
Hopefully, this doesn't seem too pedantic; I just thought your assertion was too broad.
BTW this would work even better if there was a futures market in the success of all these trial pilots. one person = one vote is a fairly primitive and inefficient system.
In this case, it is much more efficient than letting the viewers vote on the show. The handful of executives make their vote based on long-range criteria. They want a show that has staying power, is attractive to both advertisers and viewers, and fits in with the rest of their lineup.
The viewers aren't as savvy. Their vote will be based on how much they like a single episode. Viewers only see one side, they don't care about how much money the network can make from advertising.
The people picking the shows should be the people who can balance the needs of the viewers with those of the network. Those people are the executives.
Of course, just as often as not, this is how executives ruin otherwise promising shows.
I never saw the shows we watched become actual series -- but if they had, the pilots would have had to have been refilmed to reach broadcast quality. So that might prove a barrier to opening up the unaired pilots -- while they're called 'pilots', they're not yet what audiences expect of a 'series premiere'.
Even if they've got potential, the participants might be embarrassed to have their rough form available to the public. Also, it might prove harder to tinker with the premise once fans develop -- swapping an actor or changing a character could generate an online backlash before episode one.
How dinosaurish. Flippin put them all online. Youtube will pick up hosting bill and even track how often they are viewed for you. I'm assuming air time is too valuable and limited to waste is why a "handful of TV executives" send 2/3rds of piolets to /dev/null