The New York Television Festival is taking place this week for its tenth year, and Cynopsis spoke to Founder and Executive Director Terence Gray for a preview.
The big buzzword right now is “storytelling.” How does it affect what we see on TV today, in comparison to when NYTVF was founded in 2005?
Since we started the festival, fewer artists self-identify as a filmmaker, a TV producer, or a web series creator; instead, more call themselves great storytellers, with the goal of telling those stories on many platforms.
On the Digital Day portion of NYTVF there’s a panel on the next wave of digital content development – or studio-backed digital platforms. Why do you think this has re-emerged in our industry?
Today, the industry better understands the digital audience, and it’s a very exciting period as traditional networks and studios re-engage with digital strategies for original content, opening up a lot of opportunities for independent producers to work with these studios. For us, the questions we hope are answered include where the studios are right now as they move forward and create new offerings, what they’re excited about, their creative direction, who their audiences are and how new measurement capabilities are impacting them.
What do you see as the biggest challenge facing the TV industry today?
The migration of the TV audience, in terms of time and space. People have the expectation that their favorite shows will be available whenever they want, on all devices, from their living room to their commute. For an industry built on delivering shows at a particular time on a particular device, this is a monumental change. And while this change is happening, TV is going through one of its greatest golden ages, and the artistic medium of television – telling a story over time – is something that people are in love with right now. While I’m confident that there are people who will figure out all the best business practices around delivering television, it will always be the great storytellers who are in demand with viewers.
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