In a move that only an evil mastermind like Walter White would approve of, Dreamworks Animation CEO Jeffery Katzenberg let slip at the Mipcom TV Festival in Cannes that he had made a failed pitch to pay 75 million dollars for three new episodes of AMC’s Breaking Bad which he would then air online in six minute chunks.
This idea alone was enough for me to hear my inner supervillain start to giggle, but that giggle grew into a full-on Joker level maniacal laughter when I learned that Katzenberg had went on to reveal to UK newspaper, The Guardian that viewers would have had to pay for each little tidbit.
“My idea was literally that you’d pay 50 cents a day for 30 days, so it would be $15, and I actually think there are 10 million people around the world that would have done that.”
Sadly for Katzenberg, every Breaking Bad fan knows that this would have worked. We would have forked over the $15 up without a second thought. He could have went and littered the snippets with ads, piping even more money into the coffers, and we still wouldn’t have complained. He could’ve made enough cash to make Scrooge McDuck weep.
The real scary part is that while this deal may never happened, something very much like it might be in our future. As long as media companies play relatively fair with their consumers, this could grow into a viable way for viewers to get content, choosing to only pay for whatever they decide to watch. This could however, also quickly turn into a way to gouge prices, withhold content, and just plain outright abuse the consumer. People who get their content online often binge watch and it isn’t too hard to imagine someone clicking their way into the poor house because they got hooked into a show and just had to see what happen next. Much like Mr. White had all the junkies begging for their next quick fix with his trademark blue meth, the media conglomerates may soon decide to do the same thing to us.
So what do you fine folks have to say on the matter? Let us know in the comments below!
Via BBC News
