Full TV Episode Download To Begin Next Year

The commercial TV networks have signalled expansive plans for full TV episode downloads next year but are likely to shun charging users for the bulk of their content in favour of an advertiser-funded service.

Seven does not offer full episode downloads, Ten has experimented in a small way with shows such as Supernatural, and Nine, via ninemsn, continues with its year-long trials of McLeod's Daughters, Sea Patrol, CSI and Madmen for $1.95 an episode.

However, Nine and Ten have signalled their intention to launch free full-length episodes of local and international programs next year, with some negotiations under way with advertisers.

Seven did not know its position on full-length episode downloads, although some in the network said Australian audiences were so far only interested in short-form wraps to catch up on plots or to preview episodes.

However, the experience in the past 12 months of the US broadcasters, particularly Seven's big US output partner, the Disney-owned ABC, is the opposite.

ABC dropped its pay-per-episode service last September and launched its own broadband video player on ABC.com, which it says has resulted in more than 140 million episode views being "initiated" - the broadband player only allows US users to view the material.

ABC's downloadable shows in the US include Desperate Housewives, Dancing with the Stars, Grey's Anatomy and Lost. Three weeks ago ABC also struck its first distribution deal with a big online portal, AOL, in which a co-branded version of the TV network's broadband player will allow AOL users to view the ABC's new season line-up of TV shows free, hours after the broadcast.

NBC announced at the same time it would offer a slate of its programs online free from November, with TV commercials in the downloaded episodes.

Disney-ABC International also struck a potentially threatening deal in September for its broadcast partners outside the US - the Seven Network included - after finalising an agreement last month to allow the Finnish commercial TV broadcaster, Nelonen, to release hit ABC shows such as Ugly Betty and Lost via broadband up to 12 months before the TV schedule. Finnish users will pay €3 ($4.72) for each episode.

The director of product and strategy at ninemsn, Jane O'Connell, would not disclose the number of episodes its users had paid for the four shows in its fee-based line-up but said the first instalment of Sea Patrol, offered free as a launch promotion earlier this year, generated four times the downloads as the paid service.

Ms O'Connell said ninemsn saw great opportunity in advertising-supported downloads. "We expect to see something significant in the next six months. The biggest challenge is wading through the [intellectual property] rights.

"The only thing holding us back is broadband speeds. Audiences would love it."

She said ninemsn had streamed about 250,000 short-form "catch-up" TV segments in September of its drama shows, Sea Patrol and McLeod's Daughters.

Ten's general manager of digital media, Damian Smith, said the network would make available more full-length episodes in 2008.

"We want to be in free content with ads. In 12 months from now you will see a lot more free full episodes," he said.

Mr Smith expected online audience numbers to be between 10 and 20 per cent of the broadcast TV figure for popular programs but climb after that. "The reality is the mass audience is still with the broadcast channel. Then you've got the passionate 20 [per cent] who clearly want more and that's where online and mobile steps in."

The research firm IDC says the number of Americans who watch mobile TV will more than triple from 7 million to 24 million in the next three years.

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Heroes, Everyday People With Extraordinary Powers

Just like one of his characters, Tim Kring has undergone a strange and rapid transformation in the past year. Now his life will never be the same.

The 50-year-old Californian was a solidly successful television writer-producer with credits for character-based dramas like Chicago Hope, Providence and Crossing Jordan.

But then he came up with the idea for Heroes, a drama about everyday people discovering they have extraordinary powers - and a higher purpose (All together now: Save the cheerleader, save the world").

US Network NBC had come to Kring in 2005 saying they needed a serial to give the channel its own Lost or 24. Kring had an idea, inspired, he says, by the fearful state of the world.

"I wanted to come up with a show that could deal with these larger issues and that is why I stayed away from typical cop show or law show or medical show because they couldn't speak to these giant issues that we face," he says from his Los Angeles production office where he's about nine episodes into the second series.

Heroes started screening in the US in September last year. It became a ratings and critical hit. Quickly renewed for another series, its second season began there last month and will start screening on TV3 next week, just as fans wade through the depths and detail of the seven-DVD set of the first season.

Along the way, like Chris Carter (X-Files), J.J. Abrams (Lost), Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) before him, Kring has become a venerated pop culture figure, a telly geek guru.

While he appreciates the attention to show he still finds it odd.

"It's strange because I had a 23-year career as a TV writer before I discovered overnight success with these particular fans. So it's been fun and strange all at the same time.

"It was not intentional but yet I knew these kinds of shows have a sense of personality attached to them and that is very important, so there has been an amount of pushing me in front to fulfill that role. Shows like Buffy and X-Files were centred around a single personality at the top of them and this particular audience tends to understand that and want it and appreciate that."

The funny thing is for a show with so many allusions to the arcane world of comic books, its creator isn't a comic book fan - though he's employed a fair few though in his writers' room.

But he didn't want Heroes to be a show destined for a short screen life and everlasting cult appreciation. Just because it was about fledgling superheroes, didn't mean it had to be a genre show. He says he brought a wider character-based perspective to it.

"There was some combination of my experience as a character-based drama writer and television writer working within this idea of borrowing from the comic book world that made it an accessible show to a mass audience, not just the genre audience.

"I came up with all these characters and all of their powers based on their needs or desires ... you take this character Nicky played by Ali Larter and I started thinking wouldn't it be great to have a single mother who is stretched very thin trying to make ends meet and not very capable and not very educated and wouldn't it be great if there was some alter ego who was pure Id who would take care of her - literally the idea of being in two places at one time.

"So each character I came at from a psychological character-based desire and just stumbled and landed on these big archetypes who had been done many many times in the comic book world."

Kring chuckles about the discussions in the writers' room where he sometimes has to remind the staff, hey, we're making television here.

"One of the problems is too many geeks left to their own devices will fall back heavily on to their knowledge of the comic book world and it can start to spin out of control."

"Every once in a while I will come into the writers' room and encounter a conversation that will make my head spin and I'm the guy who brings them back to reality: `wait a minute, why would anyone ever believe that could happen?"'

Kring freely admits the debt Heroes owes to Lost. But then again, one of his own former offsiders from Crossing Jordan, Damon Lindelof, was one of the show's writer-creators. In Lost's formative years Kring says he was an informal sounding board for his friend.

"In many ways that show softened up both the networks for how to do a show like this and the audience for how to watch a show like this.

"Every show has to teach the audience how to watch it - there is a certain vocabulary that comes with every show and a lot of that was taught to the audience by a show like Lost.

What Lost also taught Heroes is how not to leave your audience exasperated by yet another mystery within a mystery, seemingly only designed to drag the show out. "We watched a lot of the pitfalls that shows like Lost had to deal with. It's a very difficult premise and a much more difficult premise to service than ours and they do it really artfully.

"And taking nothing away from them but we were able to see where the frustration levels of the audience were. Let's answer questions faster' and that sort of thing."

In the commentary to the pilot episode in the DVD set, Kring talks about an initial terrorist storyline which was ditched after NBC got nervous that it would affect what time the show could screen.

Looking back he says it worked out for the best - "I don't know whether I would have wanted to tell that story every day of my life."

However, the first series still pivoted on preventing an apocalyptic event in New York - complete with heavy 9/11 allusions.

When Kring talks about the political themes behind his creation, he can sound positively Al Gore-like. But he says part of the reasons for the show's success that it captures the mood of the times and tries to do that with a global reach - with its American characters joined by those from India, Japan, Haiti and in the forthcoming second series, an entire subtitled storyline in Spanish (see sidebar).

"I don't know whether it's political but it has a message of hope and a message of interconnectivity of people around the world; of empowerment and unity that people from around the world are as valued as we are here.

"It has an anti-xenophobic message to it and in a culture where we both have a media and a Government which disseminates a lot of fear it puts out a message of hope. It's very disguised in a pop entertainment show about superheroes."

And yes, he does know where it's all going. More or less.

"We have big tent-pole ideas and we head towards those, which allows the show to be very organic in between and go where it wants to go. In many ways we have the big ideas of the season worked out and in very very broad ways a third season.

"Not a whole lot past there. Just a couple of lines jotted down."

Tim Kring on the second series:
"Volume two is called Generations and it's about this idea there was this other generation of people that we started to meet at the end of the first series - as exemplified by Malcolm McDowell and George Takei's characters. They were these other people who had these powers and were the parents and this second volume deals with the idea of the sins of the parents being visited upon the children.

"Where the first season was about ordinary people who become extraordinary the second season is about how these extraordinary people try to figure out how to be ordinary and go back to their lives - only to find that their lives can never be ordinary again."

"We are doing a storyline that is set in Spanish about. a brother and a sister who are making their way up - it's very timely here in the United States - through Central America and Mexico to cross the border into America and she has a very dark power although she is not a very dark character.

"And then we are doing a story set in post-Katrina New Orleans that in some ways is the closest thing we have to a [traditional] superhero story, about someone who uses their powers to help a tough and needy neighbourhood."

LOWDOWN

Who: Tim Kring, creator of Heroes

When: First season "Volume One" out now on DVD; Second season begins Monday October 22, 8.30pm, TV3.

Trivia: Kring's first writing credit was for a 1982 episode of David Hasselhoff's Knight Rider.

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Matthew Vaughn's Regrets On X-Men

Matthew Vaughn claims X-Men: The Last Stand would have been "a hundred times" better if he had directed it.

The director - who pulled out of the project just weeks before filming began - insists he could have made a better version of the action blockbuster than director Brett Ratner, who took over at the last minute.

"As it happens, I could have made something a hundred times better than the film that was eventually made," Matthew told Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper.

"It sounds arrogant, but I could have done something with far more emotion and heart.

"I'm probably going to be told off for saying that, but I genuinely believe it."

Matthew - who has a four-year-old son, Caspar, and three-year-old daughter Clementine with supermodel wife Claudia Schiffer - also revealed he would have loved to direct the film, but just didn't have enough time to commit to the project.

The Stardust director said: "What happened with X-Men 3 was I didn't have the time to make the movie that I wanted to make. I had a vision of how it should be, and I wanted to make sure I was making a film as good as X-Men 2, and I knew there was no way it could be. I just suddenly knew it wasn't the right thing for me to do.

"It was a tough decision, because it was a hell of an opportunity, but I was trying to make a career as a director, and I didn't want to be the man accused of making a bad X-Men movie.

"It could have been a death knell too. I had to be very, very careful because Hollywood could have said, 'Who does he think he is? He walked off a big movie.' So it was quite scary for me doing Stardust. "

Fairytale fantasy Stardust has an all-star cast including Michelle Pfeiffer, Robert De Niro, Claire Danes, Sir Ian McKellen and Peter O'Toole.

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Can Hugo Chavez's Cinema Villa Studio Contend With Hollywood?

AP

Unhappy with what he considers Hollywood's monopoly on the silver screen, President Hugo Chavez is bankrolling Venezuelan movies through a state-run film studio. Now rolling: a biopic about Luis Posada Carriles, the former CIA operative who lives freely in the United States despite allegedly masterminding a jetliner bombing and trying to kill Fidel Castro.

Scenes were being shot in and around Caracas during September for the movie about Posada, considered by Chavez to be a Latin American version of Osama bin Laden. Due for international release next year, it is one of a growing number of films the socialist government is funding in a fusion of politics and art.

The trend is a boost to homegrown cinema in Venezuela, but critics say it reeks of Soviet-style propaganda efforts.

Chavez has long demanded that the United States extradite Posada to stand trial in the 1976 Cuban jetliner bombing, which killed 73 people. Posada allegedly masterminded the attack while living in Venezuela, where he was a member of a secret police force dedicated to rooting out Marxist rebels.

"The film argues he should be condemned and returned here to Venezuela or to Cuba to be tried for his actions," director Eduardo Barberena said during a recent filming session.

Cameras rolled recently among the wooden shacks of a modern-day shantytown in Guarenas, near the film studio east of Caracas. An actor playing a communist rebel in 1970s Venezuela rode a bicycle down a dirt road, destined for a shootout with Posada, as lights illuminated a row of shacks where barefooted children stood watching.

The $US900,000 ($A1.02 million) movie is one of several being produced by the Cinema Villa studio, which Chavez founded last year with $US13 million ($A14.8 million) in government funding as an alternative to the "dictatorship of Hollywood."

The studio's first feature film will be released in October - a movie about Venezuelan independence hero Francisco de Miranda that includes American actor Danny Glover in a supporting role.

A third production in the works is about Ezequiel Zamora, who led a 19th century land revolt in Venezuela and is a key ideological figure for Chavez.

"Venezuelan cinema for the world," Chavez exclaimed, praising what he called a "cultural revolution" as he excitedly described the films recently during his radio and TV program and criticised the global influence of US films. "They make us admire Superman, Spider-Man," Chavez said.

Spider-Man 3 was a hit in Caracas, both in theatres and through pirated DVDs sold in the streets, and most Venezuelans, like people all over the world, continue to be big Hollywood fans. But left-leaning documentaries are already altering Venezuelan television, appearing on government-supported channels alongside the traditional soap operas of commercial channels.

And Barberena, who has mostly made TV commercials, sees Cinema Villa as a chance for Venezuela to expand a tiny movie industry - which has made only a few internationally known movies, such as El Pez que Fuma (The Smoking Fish) in 1977 and Secuestro Express (Express Kidnapping) in 2005.

Three dozen feature films, documentaries and television programs are now in production at the centre, according to Culture Minister Francisco Sesto. They include Imagining Revolution, about the development of Chavez's socialist movement, and Venezuela Petroleum Company, about corporate exploitation.

The new film centre is both financed and controlled by the government, similar to how Cuba runs its Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry. Scripts are selected by a committee that includes Venezuela's culture minister, who reports directly to Chavez.

Cinema Villa director Lorena Almarza said the goal of the state film centre is nothing less than the "transformation of the cultural hegemony" that has long bombarded Venezuelans through their televisions and movie screens.

Some critics see a heavy government hand that will result in lousy art.

Communications professor Antonio Pascuali of Venezuela's Central University accuses the Cinema Villa of "putting political slogans above the quality of their productions," just as the Soviet Union did in the Stalinist years.

But Barbarena denies getting any pressure to make his movie conform to Chavez's political views. Although the thriller takes a clear stance on Posada, the script "allows a bit of freedom for him to defend himself," the director said.

Posada, 79, denies involvement in the 1976 jetliner bombing off Barbados. He escaped from a Venezuelan prison in 1985 and was detained in Florida in 2005 for entering the US illegally, but was freed in May when a judge dismissed his immigration fraud case. The Cuban and Venezuelan governments want him tried for murder and treason in Venezuela, where he holds dual citizenship.

But a US immigration judge ruled in 2005 that he could not be deported to Venezuela, saying he faces a possibility of torture.

Posada, who trained with the CIA for the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, also allegedly plotted to assassinate Castro, and allegedly planned the 1997 bombings at tourists sites in Havana.

Barbarena says filming will move to Havana later this year to recreate the 1997 bombing of the Hotel Copacabana, which killed an Italian tourist. The movie's title, Bambi C-4, combines the explosive allegedly used by Posada and the nickname he used years ago in Venezuela.

Despite a dislike for some Hollywood movies, Chavez has enjoyed visits by sympathetic American stars including Glover and Sean Penn. Kevin Spacey met Chavez recently after touring the film studio. He didn't speak to reporters but according to state media was impressed by the Cinema Villa.

After Chavez's government recently offered $US18 million ($A20.49 million) to finance Toussaint, a film directed by Glover about Haitian independence leader Toussaint Louverture, Venezuela's two independent film organisations said the money could be better spent making more Venezuelan movies.

Chavez insists Venezuela will be doing plenty of that - "making movies about our reality, which reflect who we are, what we've been."

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