Google woos Family Guy's Seth MacFarlane
WEB search and advertising company Google has signed a deal with Seth MacFarlane, 34, creator of the Fox animated TV show Family Guy to produce short cartoons for the web.
Google spokesman Daniel Rubin announced this week the cartoons will be paired with Google's AdSense advertisements placed on targeted websites, and will also be available on the Google-owned video-sharing site YouTube.
The series, titled Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy, will consist of 50 clips no longer than two minutes.
Each clip will have a variety of short ads embedded in them, with MacFarlane receiving a percentage of ad revenue.
MacFarlane is one of the highest-paid talents in TV after this year signing a deal reported to have been worth at least $100 million with 20th Century Fox TV, a unit of News Corp.
While the internet has many players producing content exclusively for the web, it has few creators with the production budget and pay scale MacFarlane is accustomed to.
Major entertainment companies have increasingly tried to expand into the web in recent years.
In 2005, News Corp bought US social networking site MySpace for $580 million, and it has since rolled out different versions in other countries.
Last year, NBC Universal, which is operated by General Electric, teamed up with News Corp to found Hulu.com, a site that relies on advertising to bring users free episodes of their favourite shows on the internet.
While relying on advertising to underwrite the cost of programming has worked on TV since its inception, the approach is still meeting with mixed results online.
In another high-profile initiative, Sony Pictures Entertainment, a unit of Sony Corp, this week announced plans to make the Will Smith action film Hancock available online to owners of the web-connected Sony Bravia TV before the movie goes out on DVD.
In doing so, the studio will change, albeit slightly, the traditional distribution chain of motion pictures.
After their initial run in cinemas, movies are typically released on pay-per-view television services, then via DVD, internet downloads or streams, and finally on free broadcast TV.
The new initiatives highlight how old media is using the internet as a critical tool for reaching customers.
Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy will launch in September.
Comments
I love Seth MacFarlane, did you know that we could of lost him on 9/11, what would this world be like without family guy?
Posted by: Hil | July 10, 2008 11:42 AM