The “deep media” approach to storytelling is clearly gaining momentum. At last year’s Future of Television East conference in New York, the focus was largely on streaming TV services such as Hulu—a good idea and a terrific implementation, but not what you’d call revolutionary. This year the focus was on more profound aspects of TV/Internet convergence: breadth, depth, and interactivity. On Wednesday afternoon I led a discussion called “How to Create Successful Transmedia Franchises” in which executives from rival cable networks outlined plans to present narratives simultaneously on TV and in other media—comics, Web video, online games. This was followed by a “Reinventing Advertising” panel in which executives from ESPN, Cablevision, and Google traded thoughts on such issues as addressability. But it was only when Robert Tercek, president of digital media at the Oprah Winfrey Network, gave his talk on “Televolution” that the central dilemma facing the television industry was starkly and fully expressed: How to make the leap from one-way broadcasting to two-way communication.
Things got off to a slightly rocky start when I compared the current state of affairs to my first exposure to convergent storytelling: a 1996 Fortune assignment to visit the set of Homicide, where operatives from NBC Interactive were interviewing cast members in character about the job of crime-fighting in Baltimore. "We're peeing in our pants every day,” one of the Interactive folks told me, a tad melodramatically perhaps. "It's just like the ’40s, when television was starting out live." To which one panelist, Syfy president Dave Howe, retorted that he has yet to wet himself once. Okay, point taken: Television has made tremendous strides since the mid-’90s. But it still has a ways to go, as the rest of the afternoon made clear.
