U8TV counting on new revenue streams as second season kicks off on Life Network

Popular Internet/television show U8TV: The Lofters is heading into its second season having exceeded the producers’ expectations for audience numbers in the first, and with new revenue streams secured to balance hard times in the advertising market. Lili Shalev, one of three partners in TVForReal, the production company behind U8TV, says both advertisers and majority partner Alliance Atlantis Communications Inc. have been pleased with the show’s convergence approach, which offers attractive opportunities to reach a large audience with creative advertising campaigns. Shalev also tells Canadian NEW MEDIA that discussions continue to secure carriage agreements for Alliance Atlantis’ proposed U8TV Category 2 digital specialty TV channel. The reality-based Lofters program, which is broadcast 24/7 on U8TV.com and as a half-hour edited program on the Life Network nightly, has proven popular with a broad audience in its first season, which is now wrapping up. The Internet site has been garnering 30 million hits a month or 4.2 million page impressions. That traffic has been growing on a monthly basis. On television, the episodes now reach 380,000 per week, and the company recently announced spinoff productions for digital specialty channels PrideVision and The Independent Film Channel Canada, and Love Shack, a Life Network program. "For Alliance, it’s been great," Shalev tells Canadian NEW MEDIA. "They’ve been really happy with it because, very simply, the audience numbers have been good; it’s Canadian content, which is obviously something that’s very important for them. It’s something they’re always trying to do more of." While spin-off shows to date have only been picked up by specialty networks owned, at least in part, by Alliance Atlantis, Shalev says it is in negotiations with other networks. She says those deals will continue to be important through the advertising slowdown. "Obviously, online ad revenues and overall ad revenues are not where they were a year or two ago. The market is really tough right now. What we’ve managed to do though – we’ve managed to strike some really great relationships with some blue chip advertisers like Bell. We ran a really great campaign with Intel. Budweiser is another one of our sponsors. HMV is a sponsor. So, we’ve managed to stay on top of the whole ad revenue market, although it is a much tougher market than what we anticipated a year ago. So, having the licensing fees from the shows we syndicate helps a lot. I think by having the two revenue streams, it puts us in a really stable position." Shalev says advertisers have been attracted to the show’s two-screen approach, which offers both mass-market appeal across a broad demographic, and to the interactive possibilities of the web. She notes that the television audience skews older, appealing to the broad 18-49 demographic, while Internet viewers tend to be younger, with 70 per cent in the 18-34 age group. Online, there is a 50/50 split between viewers watching the "snoop-cams", which broadcast events in the show’s loft in real-time, and the edited segments. That split, she says, offers advertisers a unique opportunity for multiple types of campaigns. For example, she says, product placement is an important opportunity. Shalev cites the Intel campaign as an example of how clients can showcase their products through multiple means, including special edited segments that highlight new items, through product placement in the 24/7 broadcast, traditional TV ads, online banners, coupons and contests. Those advertising opportunities, she argues, are an important reason why new media initiatives need broadcast partners. Asked why successful properties such as Degrassi or U8TV in the last year have been collaborations between digital players and broadcasters, Shalev says the partnership is essential. "At the end of the day, you need to be able to capture an audience wherever they are.... content that will then entice the audience – whether they’re watching it on TV or online or in the cinema… I don’t think the market has matured enough to let people do strictly online offerings. You need another medium to back it up." In addition to advertising and licence fees, she says a third revenue stream, ecom, was added a month ago. Visitors to the U8TV site can purchase goods from such affiliates as La Senza, or Delivery.ca. The initiative is too new, however, for the producers to have developed a good sense of its success. Still in development, Alliance Atlantis has high hopes to put U8TV on the air as a digital specialty network next year, though Shalev doesn’t provide many details, saying only that " been having some very preliminary discussions with some of the cable guys and we’re going to try to get the digital channel up next year. So, that’s something that’s still very much in the plans." It is widely known that the company was unsuccessful in the run-up to this fall’s launch of new digital services to secure carriage for the proposed channel.

U8TV counting on new revenue streams as second season kicks off on Life Network

Broadcast | November 29, 2001

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