Oberon Interactive creates TV division, first show to air this fall on Global Television

Oberon Interactive Inc. will shortly begin shooting a television series with its newly formed broadcast division, company co-founder Luda Tovey tells Canadian NEW MEDIA. The new entity, Oberon Television and Video (OTV), has sold its first show, Second Chance: Making it Work, to CanWest Global Communications Corp. for airing this fall on Global Television, and has nearly a dozen more projects in the hopper. Tovey, a veteran new media producer and TV insider, is touting the show as an early example of converged TV/Internet programming, incorporating both a traditional broadcast series and resource-based web site. The company is now hiring its television production crew, to be headed by TV veterans Michael Prentice (Bloody Aleutians) and Ian Shaw, who will focus on generating sponsorship for the web site and broadcast. Its first show, Second Chance, will document the challenges faced by women returning to the workforce after an absence such as having children. Tovey says it will help create a survival guide by profiling real-life cases. "The concerns are really magnified when women return to work after a long absence," she says. "Can I still have an adult conversation after four years of Harry Potter straight through to where technology has gone since I left? The web site that’s in behind it probably telegraphs to you what it will be about. It’s going to enrich the value to viewers and will actually be a resource pool." Tovey says the web site will incorporate a broad range of resources, including career advice, job searches, skills training, re-orientation to the workplace, and other appropriate and complementary material. While the site hasn’t been funded yet, Tovey is examining a number of avenues for it and is also in the preliminary stages of finding content partners that could cross-promote their products. "Regardless of whether our full conceptual vision is funded, there will be a complementary web site that will grow over time if that’s how we have to do it." While CanWest has come under fire in past by producers for the slow speed at which it adopts converged TV/web content, Tovey says the partnership has been fruitful to date. She explains that Global’s willingness to take the project on is part of a larger trend of broadcasters coming to terms with the Internet component of their properties. "The trends that I’m seeing – and they’re very good trends – is that I’m seeing the television industry start building web sites that complement their television properties. But in many cases, they aren’t fully integrated. They really are fan sites or they’re ads. They don’t necessarily fully exploit what the web can do to complement a broadcast property and vice-versa. We do think that we’re breaking new ground. At the large corporate level, we’re seeing huge enterprise-type mergers where the holdings are newspaper publishers with television networks and so forth, but again, the actual integration of the content itself is coming slowly. We’re moving very much into uncharted territory and it makes very good sense to us." TV builds owned IP Tovey also tells CNM that she recognizes the role a TV production unit can play in building up Oberon’s store of intellectual property. "It’s much more difficult to do strictly within the Internet world because revenue models are much less mature but the cross-promotional value is definitely there." In negotiating with CanWest, the company has retained full rights to both the TV and Internet properties and has only agreed to link the web site to CanWest’s as part of the agreement. It’s too early to tell, she says, how that cross-linkage will evolve. Still on tap, she says, are a variety of converged programs, most of which are informational in nature. Tovey says the company is pitching other broadcasters on those projects.

Oberon Interactive creates TV division, first show to air this fall on Global Television

Broadcast | March 27, 2002

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