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Marlee Matlin launches reality series on YouTube
March 30, 2010 | 5:13 pm
Marlee Matlin had an idea for a reality show that she hoped would bring some insight into the lives and struggles of deaf people and how they cope. But while reality TV has brought us wife swappers, party girls, aging rock stars and dieting divas, apparently no one was ready for something that real.
So instead, the hearing-impaired actress who won an Academy Award as lead actress for her role in "Children of a Lesser God," took her show "My Deaf Family" to Google's YouTube. You can watch it here.
"Deaf and hard of hearing people make up one of the largest minority groups," she said in an interview through her interpreter, Jack Jason, "and yet there has never been a show, a reality documentary series that features what life is like for them." Matlin financed the show, which tells the story of a family in Fremont, Calif. All the family members are deaf, except for the oldest son, Jared, and the youngest, Elijah. It is narrated by Jared.
Matlin shopped her pilot to network executives, who purported to "love it." But none would take the plunge.
"They didn't quite know if they could pull it off, or even how," Matlin said.Refusing to give up, Matlin turned to the Internet, more specifically to YouTube, the world's default broadcaster of Web video.
"I didn't want to wait for the networks to warm up to the idea of whether the show would be a hit or not with audiences," she said. "So I decided to put it out there on my own terns. YouTube is akin to having my own [TV] network."
There's another reason Matlin chose YouTube. The Google subsidiary in November introduced an automatic captioning system for its videos. The system is a mash-up of Google's speech-to-text voice recognition technology used in Google Voice and captioning software that syncs the text with the video.
Right now, the experimental program can only recognize spoken English, but once transcribed, it can translate the text to 50 different languages.
"Google’s mission is to make all the world’s information universally accessible," explained Ken Harrenstien, the software engineer who led the captioning effort. "We’re about accessibility to everyone for everything."
Because YouTube is inundated with a constant stream of videos (about 24 hours of videos are uploaded to the site every minute), it does not automatically caption every piece that comes along. Instead, viewers have to request that a particular video be captioned. Once the request is made, it takes about 24 hours to deliver the captions.
Harrenstein cautions that the captions aren't going to be perfect. Ambient noise can affect the translation. But the software is also prone to error. YouTube is hoping that the owners of the videos will upload corrected captions through a quick process it has designed.
That's good enough for Matlin, who said, "The process isn't 100% there yet. But they've done it. And that's a good thing."
For an edited transcript of our interview with Matlin on her project, click on the continue reading link below.
Tell us about the show you're premiering on YouTube. What's the premise? What's your involvement with it?
Matlin: My intention was to do a show unlike any that's ever been seen on television; a show about what life is like for 35 million Americans who are deaf or hard of hearing from the perspective that everyone could identify with: a young 15-year-old hearing teenager. It's called "My Deaf Family," and that pretty much sums up in the title what the show is about. I like to think of it as a deaf/hearing version of "Little People, Big World."
It was an idea that grew out of my own family (I have 4 children who are hearing, and I'm their mom who is deaf) and the experiences of my business partner and interpreter, Jack Jason, who is hearing but who grew up with deaf parents. I produced and financed the pilot and shot it fast -- in one and a half days with the help of a great director, Donald Bull, who has a list of credits longer than my arm in the reality / documentary arena.
How did you come up with the idea for the show?
Matlin: After I did "Dancing with the Stars," several networks approached me about doing a reality show about my family because I'm a crazy deaf mom. Unfortunately, my husband works in law enforcement and we were concerned about security, so we set out to find another compelling deaf/hearing family to do a documentary reality show about. We found the family we wanted, on a fluke, from a friend of Jack's who also grew up with deaf parents.
Deaf and hard of hearing people make up one of the largest minority groups in the USA and the world and yet there has never been a reality/documentary series that features what life is like for them on a daily basis. After doing a nationwide search, we hit upon the Firl family of the San Francisco Bay Area.
The Firls have an interesting background. The mom and dad both work at the largest schools for the deaf in the country, the California School for the Deaf, a fascinating community unto itself in Fremont, Calif. Everyone signs there -- baristas at Starbucks, gas station attendants. It's just wild. Our pilot episode even features a deaf basketball tournament with cheerleaders from all over the country who are deaf. It kind of feels like a sign-language version of "Glee"! All of this is told from the perspective of one cool teenager, Jared, who is 15 and who is hearing. I've just never seen another show like it on TV!
Did you shop it around to the various broadcasters? What was the reaction?
Matlin: The network executives loved it. The reaction couldn't have been more positive. But as is the case with me and a lot of ideas that I've pitched over the years involving story lines with deaf characters, they didn't quite know if they could pull it off or even how.
I assured them that, having been around for 25 years in the business and watching how it was done on shows like "Picket Fences," "Seinfeld," "The West Wing" and "The L Word," we could do it. But they balked. I even said it worked in reality TV, as demonstrated when I hosted "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" and, of course, "Dancing With the Stars." But they still hesitated because they had no idea how an audience would react to characters signing with voice-overs and occasional subtitles. Anyone who watches reality television will tell you that they employ subtitles a lot for dialogue that's difficult to catch on the fly. But I wouldn't give up.
So you went to YouTube. Why?
Matlin: I didn't want to wait for the networks to warm up to the idea of whether the show would be a hit or not with audiences, so I decided to put it out there on my own terms. YouTube is akin to having my own network. After a small initial outlay, I am putting the show out there myself for all to see, hoping that the reaction will be great and that sponsors and networks will see that the show can work. Plus, the show can be viewed worldwide on YouTube, an audience greater than anyone could imagine.
Will you be doing more with YouTube? Have your own channel on YouTube? Air more episodes? Or just this one?
Matlin: This is my pilot. Hopefully the reaction from viewers and word of mouth will be positive. We have plenty of episode ideas in the can and ready to go at a moment's notice. And the family is ready too.
Tell us a little about the state of closed-captioned content.
Matlin: You'd be shocked to find out how much of what is already captioned on TV is not captioned when it moves to the Internet. Popular broadcast shows and movies have their closed captions stripped when they go to the Internet. Even worse, it appears that the motivation to provide access for millions of viewers who rely on closed captions for access -- also for people learning English as a second language, children learning how to read, not to mention people in noisy environments -- is just not there.Just like in the early days of captioning when I had to go Capitol Hill and force broadcasters to provide closed captions through legislation (and won), it looks like the battle has to be fought all over again with broadcast content that is moving to the Web. Google, as usual, is one step ahead of everyone and provided the means where all videos on YouTube can be automatically captioned through voice-recognition technology without having to be told that it's the responsible thing to do.
The process isn't quite 100% there yet. But they've done it. And that's a good thing. Now I'm waiting for the other content providers (I won't name names, but let's say it's about 99% of websites that provide streaming video content as well as video on demand) to follow Google's example.
What's your goal with this show? Do you want a broadcaster to pick it up? Do you want to just keep the show exclusively online?
Matlin: To make good TV with characters you've never seen before but which you can easily identify with. Isn't that what it's always been about? And yes, I'd love for a broadcaster to pick it up. I guess in this world where economics, number crunching and demographics are what drive decisions, you have to roll up your sleeves and find other ways to prove that your show is good TV. I wouldn't mind an exclusive online agreement or network agreement, as long as I can find the means to tell more stories about this fascinating family.
Do you want to make money on the show as part of the YouTube partner program? Or do you see it mainly as a marketing vehicle for your show?
Matlin: Much as I wish I could, I'm not a wealthy millionaire who can fund my own studio and productions, creating shows out of my own pocket that I think people would like to watch. I do have to earn a living as an actor and producer, and I thought this was the best way to do it.
I viewed this process much like what Lucille Ball did way back when she created "I Love Lucy" with her husband, Desi Arnaz. She told me once that the networks balked big time when it came to casting her real-life husband, Desi, as her TV husband. No one wanted to watch a guy with a Cuban accent on TV.
Without any network interested in financing the production, Lucy and Desi took their show out on the road and sold it to America their way. We all know the rest is history.I wouldn't be so bold as compare my show with "I Love Lucy," but the idea is still the same. At the end of the day, "My Deaf Family" is about a typical family that all of us can identify with but told from an unusual and what I believe will be a fascinating perspective. I just have to find the way to sell it and convince people this is what people want to see.
-- Alex Pham
Top photo credit: Lord of the Wind Films. Bottom: Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times.
More in: Reality TV, YouTube
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Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Marlee Matlin launches reality series on YouTube | Company Town | Los Angeles Times
Friday, March 26, 2010
South Park Memo - Letters of Note: P.S. This is my favorite memo ever
Recent Letters
Wednesday, 30 September 2009
P.S. This is my favorite memo ever
Before we begin: the content of the following memo is absolutely filthy. If you're easily offended, please don't read it. Thanks.
South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut is a feature length movie based on the animated series,
The first picture is of the whole memo. Below that is a close-up of the text.
Transcript
Here is our new cut of the South Park movie to submit to the MPAA. I wanted to tell you exactly what notes we did and did not address.1. We left in both the "fisting" and the "rimjob" references in the counselor's office scene. We did cut the word "hole" from "asshole" as per our conversation.
2. We took out the entire "God has fucked me in the ass so many times..." It is gone.
3. Although it is not animated yet, we put a new storyboard in for clarification in the scene with Saddam Hussein's penis. The intent now is that you never see Saddam's real penis, he in fact is using dildos both times.
4. We have the shot animated that reveals the fact that Winona is not shooting ping-pong balls from her vagina. She is, in fact, hitting the balls with a ping-pong paddle.
5. We took out the only reference to "cum-sucking ass" in the film. It was in the counselor's office and we took it out.
6. We left in the scenes with Cartman's mom and the horse as per our conversation. This is the one joke we really want to fight for.
Call with any questions
Matt
P.S. This is my favorite memo ever.
Labels: censorship, cinema, humour
Monday, March 15, 2010
Entertainment: How Madison & Vine Moved to Silicon Valley - Advertising Age - Madison+Vine: News
Stay on top of the news, sign up for our free newslettersHow Madison & Vine Moved to Silicon Valley
With Web Video on the Rise, Brands Are Increasingly Creating Their Own Digital-Entertainment Properties
by Andrew Hampp
Published: March 15, 2010LOS ANGELES (AdAge.com) -- If you're looking for the intersection of Madison Avenue and Vine today, you're more likely to find yourself somewhere in Silicon Valley.
When Madison & Vine made its debut in Ad Age in 2004, branded entertainment was still somewhat of a novelty to many sectors of Hollywood and the ad community. Cut to 2010, and the connection between brands and entertainment is cemented, and a robust ecosystem has flourished.
--> Today, brands are increasingly seeking to develop proprietary content and in some cases are becoming media producers on their own. This innovation is taking place on the web, and the key players producing original branded content come largely from outside of Hollywood's circle of A-Listers.BIG SCREEN HITS THE WEB: Breyer's 'Smooth & Dreamy.'
Efforts from stalwarts such as ABC Studios, Turner and United Talent Artists have folded, and a crop of mostly digital branded-entertainment shops has grown in their place. The web has emerged as the biggest breeding ground for branded entertainment, as sponsored web series crop up by the dozen.
What killed off some of the first entrants into the space was the belief that the web could be like TV, at least economically, and that eyeballs would naturally follow. But producing TV-like projects with six- and seven-figure TV-like budgets without sponsors or a network to offset the costs upfront quickly became unsustainable. Now, brands and producers are partnering earlier and more extensively than ever, with marketing budgets often replacing the thumbs-up from a network executive as the new greenlight.
New class
Perhaps nothing illustrates this better than the influx of production companies and branded-entertainment divisions at media agencies and the TV networks that have cropped up to develop and distribute these new webisodes -- from the MSNs, Yahoos and MySpaces of the web-portal world to indie production companies such as Jordan Levin's Generate, "Lizzie Maguire" creator Stan Rogow's Electric Farm, Michael Eisner's Vuguru or Ashton Kutcher's Katalyst to recent online forays from established TV producers such as Reveille, Endemol, Fremantle and Magical Elves.Even PR firm Edelman recognized the web as an emerging destination for branded storytelling -- in 2006, it acquired production company Matter Entertainment to develop projects for its marketing clients that could accomplish more than any press release.
Nathan Coyle, who leads the branded-entertainment practice at Creative Artists Agency and helped kick-start the next wave of sponsored web video by introducing brands into YouTube's "LonelyGirl15" series, credits the 2008 Writers Guild of America strike as a point of motivation for these new players.
"When you can't do your job, it accelerates your creativity and the metaphorical and actual bandwidth to create these new projects," he said. "We learned with shows like 'Quarter Life' [on MySpace] that the publishers aggregating the eyeballs aren't equipped to manage talent, so if you're going to find the money to make these shows, you have to go straight to the advertisers."
It's difficult to quantify the exact figure spent on such deals. PQ Media estimates branded webisodes and in-game advertising, or advergaming, grew 15.1% to $306 million in 2009, with the web accounting for a small, additional chunk of the $3.95 billion spent on product placements last year. If Madison & Vine was about collaboration between marketers and media companies, then this new digital stage is about control. "Five years ago, the content creators were reluctant to collaborate; they didn't see the brands had any place in the conversation with networks," said Scott Donaton, who launched Madison & Vine and wrote a book of the same name in 2004 while editor of Ad Age. "[On TV], there's a lot of objectives the brand has no control over. In the digital space, you can work the other way to develop and design the content and control the audience. Now you have a chance, as a brand, to meet your objectives and find your audience."
Overwhelmingly digital
In his new role as CEO of Ensemble, a division of Interpublic Group of Cos., Mr. Donaton oversees branded-entertainment projects for media agencies Universal McCann and Initiative, and estimates 60% of the new-business pitches he receives from clients are for digital projects, while 35% are for TV and the remaining 5% for music and film.For some, investing in digital content is a post-recession efficiency play. It's possible to delve into digital content for the same or often less cost of 30-second TV commercials. One branded-entertainment veteran said productions can cost as little as $20,000 or as much as several million dollars, depending on the number of locations, the quality of the video production and the cost of the talent. Although A-list stars aren't paid TV-level fees for their web work just yet, they're often earning paychecks "well into the six figures," said the executive.
Pepsi is leading the charge of marketers investing heavily in web video as an alternative to TV. That's Pepsi behind the sponsored "Blue Room" in the just-launched "If I Can Dream," a live-streaming talent competition from 19 Entertainment, producers of "American Idol" and "So You Think You Can Dance," and Mtn Dew behind the MySpace/Paramount digital series "Circle of Eight." Up next: an animated series for Sierra Mist and collaborations with IAC's CollegeHumor and Electus, the production company created by former Reveille producer and NBC entertainment chief Ben Silverman.
As Frank Cooper, Pepsi's chief consumer engagement officer, put it, "Yes, more money is moving into digital and should move into digital, but we have to maintain a healthy budget on TV. However, you should push that TV button at the right time in the process for communicating to consumers -- it should not be your default switch."
Breakthrough hits
Unilever, along with media agency MindShare Entertainment, has produced what have arguably become web video's biggest branded success stories. It started in 2007 with "In the Motherhood," an MSN series created for Suave and Sprint starring Chelsea Handler and Leah Remini that eventually became an ABC sitcom, or "The Rookie," a "24"-themed series for Degree that also aired during the Fox series, both produced with Santa Monica, Calif.-based Science & Fiction.More recently, its projects have become 30-second spot/webisode hybrids, pairing celebs such as "30 Rock"'s Jane Krakowski with Breyer's Ice Cream ("Smooth & Dreamy"), Megan Mullally with I Can't Believe It's Not Butter ("Turn The Tub Around") and Marisa Tomei with Bertolli Pasta ("Into the Heart of Italy"), all in the name of using TV as a push to original content on the web.
--> "The wonderful component of digital is that there's an unbelievable amount of tracking and monitoring of consumer engagement," said Rob Master, director of media for Unilever North America, which has been active in the digital space since 2007, when it launched "In the Motherhood." "We're looking at everything from time spent to where users are viewing the content on our site, our partner sites and the rich-media units themselves, to length of time of these webisodes or entertainment shorts. There's really no clear-cut answer, yet other than it depends on the brand, objective and target. But we're starting to understand how much time a guy wants to spend with short-form content vs. a woman, and that insight is helping us."Suave and Sprint's 'In the Motherhood'
There have been casualties along the way. Many web shows are sitting on the shelves of digital studios waiting for an advertiser to rescue them. Meanwhile, sponsor budgets and renewals for existing projects came in later and smaller than most companies could afford -- if they came at all. Startups such as Mania TV and Ripe Digital drained their venture funding while waiting for advertisers.
"If you think about the videos that do well online, it takes time to develop that audience," said Albert Cheng, ABC's exec VP-digital media, of Stage 9, which distributed two series, "Squeegees" and "Voicemail," before folding. "It could also very well be the nature of the content we were putting on. People weren't ready for that type of production quality."
Keeping at it
That doesn't mean they're not ready for TV talent on the web. The web's few major success stories -- Joss Whedon's "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog," Marshall Herskowitz and Edward Zwick's "Quarter Life" and MSN's "In the Motherhood," directed by "30 Rock" and "Roseanne" veteran Gail Mancuso -- were all the direct results of having proven storytellers.ABC.com, for its part, took its learnings from Stage 9 to focus on creating web spinoffs of popular on-air shows such as "Ugly Betty" ("Mode After Hours"), "Lost" ("Dharma") and "Grey's Anatomy" ("Seattle Grace On Call").
And not all the big networks and studios have given up. NBC, meanwhile, has been leading the charge of TV networks fully invested in creating original digital content, recently attracting sponsors such as Hidden Valley Ranch ("Garden Party"), American Family Insurance ("In Gayle We Trust") and Nestea ("CTRL") and name talent such as Jennie Garth and "Arrested Development's" Tony Hale.
Fox recently hired comic-book veteran Roger Mincheff to run its branded-entertainment division and develop projects for News Corp.'s digital entity. CBS is expected to put a larger stake in the game in the near term, and Viacom's Atom.com has been doubling as an in-house studio to develop branded content for Comedy Central, Spike and GameTrailers.com for brands such as Ford, Sony, Intel and Trojan condoms. Even young-male-targeted Break.com planted a bigger stake in the game last year when it acquired HBO's digital studio after the pay-cable network struggled to find sponsors for its digital series.
"Four years ago, clients were dipping their toe in branded entertainment. Now we're at the lessons-learned stage," said David Lang, president of MindShare, the WPP agency that produced many of Unilever's webisodes, and created 14 projects in 2009 alone. "It's very important to not just have the touchy-feely soft data points but verified proof that we're meeting our clients' goals and objectives."
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Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Once-fading MySpace focuses on youthful reincarnation
By Jon Swartz, USA TODAYBEVERLY HILLS — Facebook thumped it, and Twitter threatens it as a source for entertainment news and real-time searches.But MySpace, nestled in the entertainment capital of the world, thinks it can survive — even thrive — as a repository for all things music, Avatar and Twilight for the under-35 crowd.
"It would be silly to count us out," says Jason Hirschhorn, who, with Mike Jones, runs the company as co-president. They replaced Owen Van Natta, who was jettisoned as CEO last month after less than 10 months on the job.
"There is a pulse of pop culture on MySpace," says Hirschhorn, a former MTV executive. "It is the place where 100 million people congregate, and hundreds of thousands sign up every day,"
They have their work cut out. MySpace, a unit of News Corp. Digital, has stumbled through two CEO resignations in the past year, while Facebook and Twitter surged. (Van Natta's predecessor, Chris DeWolfe, left in April 2009.) Nonetheless, MySpace remains one of the Internet's most enduring brands. It is profitable, and it is expected to haul in more than $350 million in revenue this year — mostly from ads.
Hirschhorn acknowledges that every major brand goes through plateaus, but says the strong ones overcome them. He and Jones concede that MySpace's online traffic had flattened last spring, user engagement was down, and its products lacked focus and vision. But with an ambitious rebranding now underway, they foresee a renewal in its fortunes. The company is hiring engineers designers and marketers in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle.
MySpace is moving back to its original DNA: appealing to self-expressive, creative under-35-year-olds who are into games, music and movies. More than half of MySpace's estimated 100 million users are 25 and younger, according to market researcher ComScore. The 13-to-34-year-old demographic spends 84% of all user time on the service.
MySpace intends to appeal to that demographic with a mantra of "Discover and be discovered," a fancy way of saying it wants to be the online venue to find new friends, movie trailers, little-known bands and social games.
The rebranding is illustrated in design mockups splashed across the walls of a user-experience lab here: simple, clean pages with vibrant looks designed to draw artists, hard-core social-media users, brand managers and others. There is even talk of a new company logo.
In its pursuit of customers, MySpace has reinvented itself in several ways:
•New user home pages, released last month, are heavy on live personal content, but without the clutter once associated with the original MySpace design. "The product got too big and congested," Jones says, looking at a simplified new interface mockup. "It became unfocused."
•Forthcoming profiles for celebrities such as Lady Gaga and Angelina Jolie are easier to navigate and offer encyclopedic data on their subjects.
•Social-gaming firm Playdom is helping MySpace reinvigorate its gaming channel. This month, it launches Wild Ones, a shoot-'em-up already available on Facebook, on MySpace. More games, including ones exclusive to MySpace, are on the way. "Thirty percent of our users play games; we think it should be at least 50%," says Jones, a former AOL executive.
•Through its constant tweets on Twitter, MySpace has developed into a heavy-duty entertainment news service for music, celebrities and youth-oriented movies such as New Moon and Alice in Wonderland. Twitter and MySpace have also synced services, so tweets or status updates on one service are automatically duplicated on the other.
MySpace is not only reinventing itself, but recasting the competitive climate. "When we think about Twitter and Facebook, we don't think about competition as much as we think about partnership, distribution and synchronization," Hirschhorn says.
Yet can MySpace — once the undisputed king of social networking — remain relevant as a scaled-down Web portal for music and entertainment news? Industry analysts, including Debra Aho Williamson, aren't so sure. They say MySpace faces an obstacle course of competitors, starting with the omnipresent Facebook and now including Google Buzz.
"For months we've heard about the company's plan to refocus on its historic roots in music and entertainment," says Williamson, of market researcher eMarketer. "But the turnaround has been painfully slow, and this shakeup will only reinforce the perception that MySpace can't be fixed."
Though millions of people use MySpace Music, the company "clearly needs to find its next big" thing, says Richard Greenfield, an analyst at investment brokerage BTIG. "This is no easy task and may require a meaningful acquisition, maybe of a social-gaming company like Zynga or a start-up."
Since Facebook's audience overtook MySpace last May — 70.3 million unique users vs. 70.2 million — it has widened its lead dramatically. Today, Facebook boasts 400 million members, about four times as many as MySpace.
As audiences melt from MySpace, so are marketers, says researcher eMarketer. Facebook will surpass MySpace in advertising revenue this year for the first time — a year earlier than expected, it says.
EMarketer estimates ad spending on MySpace will fall 21% this year, to $385 million, worldwide. It expects Facebook to rake in $605 million in ads worldwide this year, up 39% from 2009. If not for a three-year, $900 million search deal with Google that is set to expire by midyear, MySpace's revenue would be lower, Williamson says.
MySpace's Jones says his company is still in discussions with Google to possibly extend the deal, or it could partner with others in the future.
"MySpace has been good at monetization, and others notice that," he says.
Privately held Facebook, by comparison, could vacuum up $700 million to $1.1 billion in revenue this year, based on estimates from analysts including Forrester Research's Augie Ray. However, Trip Chowdhry, of Global Equities Research, says $350 million to $500 million is more accurate.
"MySpace rested on their laurels, got complacent and failed to innovate," says Jeremiah Owyang, a partner at market researcher Altimeter Group.
Return to its roots
Facebook's dominance notwithstanding, MySpace and others can thrive in fragmented spaces, such as music and entertainment news, says Eric Mandl, head of large-cap tech banking at UBS.
MySpace remains a force in music. More than 13 million bands, from Pearl Jam to garage bands, find it a vibrant tool to communicate with fans.
"Their brand was born in the music community, as a hub for attracting bands and fans," says Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora, an online music service."There still is a tremendous loyalty toward MySpace, and it is a monster audience. They were the first mass destination and home for DIY artists. Bands remember that."
And, yes, MySpace's appeal lingers for celebrities and creative types.
Cindy Margolis, a former Playboy Playmate with 16,000 people on her MySpace fan page, still finds it a useful marketing tool. It is part of her PR strategy to promote her Fox Reality Channel show, Seducing Cindy. She also uses Facebook and a personal website.
"To keep my loyal cyberbuddies, I need MySpace," she says. "It is a huge vehicle to gain, and maintain, thousands of followers. Facebook is more intimate. They are two different spaces."
"It's great to get feedback on the shows that I do, which can be complicated," says Bobby Roth, who has directed episodes of Prison Break, Lost and FlashForward. He has 10,000 friends on MySpace.
MySpace's enduring appeal to millions, with the backing of Fox, has not been lost on software developers like Jon Siegal, CEO of Fan Appz, a Facebook application that helps celebrities and athletes market themselves to fans. Siegal and others are interested in working with MySpace.
"The game isn't over for (MySpace)," Owyang says. "They still have a strong foothold, the opportunity to try new tactics, if their management team — and internal culture — can quickly come into alignment."
Says Hirschhorn, "We will always be culturally relevant. And we'll be here in five, 10 years."
Think MySpace is dead? They don't.
