Over the past two decades, Steven Bochco’s productions shared a network with programming like The Cosby Show and Cheers. Now, with Bochco’s first internet venture on Metacafe, which starts running today, his productions are going to be placed alongside videos with titles like Gorilla Prank and Russian Wedding Catfight.
As we reported back in November, Bochco has a deal with the Palo Alto-based viral video company to produce short-form videos. The first result: Café Confidential, a channel within Metacafe. The series includes 44 clips (at least 15 of which were available Monday morning) of people in their 20s and teens revealing semi-confessional stories under headings like My Craziest Day At Work, My First Time, My Weird Family, and so on. Each clip is roughly 12 minutes long.
The LAT reports that Bochco, who has won 10 Emmy Awards for his television work — six for Hill Street Blues, three for L.A. Law and one for NYPD Blue, views the project as a way to create entertainment outside the confines of traditional Hollywood. Meanwhile, Metacafe wants some professional-backed content as a way to enhance its appeal to advertisers.
Metacafe is also betting that Cafe Confidential will develop a life of its own and inspire amateur auteurs into submitting their own creations. Bochco told the LAT: “The idea is that this becomes an electronic online campfire around which we sit and tell stories. I’m the camp counselor.”
Both Bochco and Metacafe CEO Erick Hachenburg insist that the videos won’t resemble the almost-anything-goes quality of YouTube, saying the site publishes only the best 10 percent of clips submitted by users.
“We want to be more of an online video destination where you can reliably go to see the best videos. And we’re hoping to seed that with professional content,” Hachenburg said. In terms of viewers, Metacafe still has a ways to go: compared to the 34 million visitors to YouTube in February, Metacafe attracted 4 million that same month, according to ComScore MediaMetrix.
Bochco also sat down with THR for a Q&A , saying that at some point he’d like to try producing a scripted series for the net, though he cautions: “It’s a very different enterprise than that which you would pursue if you were doing it on a television template. It’s not as simple as saying, ‘I’ll take an hour television show, 10-hour TV show or whatever and split it up into little two-minute segments and just parcel them out in a serial fashion.’ First of all, the internet won’t support the kind of budget—one generally associated with making more complex, bigger stories—at least not at this time. So it’s a little tricky, but it’s very doable. It’s just that you have to really sit down and think that through. Anybody who thinks they can take an episode of CSI and chop it into 2 1⁄2-minute segments and put it out there and expect anyone to be interested is kidding themselves. By the way, I think it would be more likely to be done by a so-called amateur than by a production company or somebody like me because you really do have to do it on a shoestring. You can’t overproduce those kinds of things.”
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-- Steven Bochco Finally Gets His Own Channel—On Metacafe