JG: How do we negotiate the tension? It's not as if the mass model that broadcast media sustains has gone away. We do have technologies to target small groups, but the mass model remains.

KM: How we deal with it - one of the only TV shows that does - is that we have convergence going on. The Ghost Whisperer website is in the top 10 HitWise websites & there are only 3 dramas on that list! That's huge for CBS because they're trying to reach a younger demo. We also were show 22 of all TV shows, book coming out, digital platform - created an engagement experience for our audience. We've used the internet to roll out all these unique experiences for the audience where you can create your own bridge experience each week. Thus ratings, traffic, merchandising are actually growing.

KS: What's your relationship with the network in that production?

KM: All of those things we do ourselves because the networks are so huge and they move so slowly! He who gets to the internet first wins so we said to CBS "we're just going to do this" and we did a lot of it under the radar at first. They used to believe that simultaneous internet-tv publication would take viewers away from TV; of course now they know that's not true. We were also trying to convince them that the audience shouldn't come to the network, we have to go out to the audience - the network got on board slowly.

KS: We work with lots of networks, MTV, A&E, Discovery, CBS - the struggle is in the shape of an org chart. So you have mobile, online, etc divisions with each of their own targets and there's no motivation for the ad sales person in the mobile division to do anything that won't benefit the mobile ad sales! So the ideas of convergence are not necessarily the way media companies are set up to think of themselves. It's rare that anyone can understand the opportunity ("We may lose 100k on WE TV but we'll make it back on our online auctions...")

KM: And I'll bet you that most people at the network don't know that the people in the publishing side are working with the merchandising side [on Ghost Whisperer]. We're the ones who reach out to everyone, we put everyone in contact with each other. Another show will say "do for us what you did for yourselves," but when we give them the concept they run away because they're afraid, but I don't know what they're afraid of?

KS: It's just a lack of motivation - it's not that people are afraid of change, but it's easy to keep doing the same thing.

KM: But they're losing their audiences!

JG: Well, you're dealing with different bits of the industry when you do this... but are you dealing with different bits of the audience? People in one part of the industry may understand the audience for their bit, but not the audiences elsewhere.

KM: I think it's the same audience - people like one thing and they want it on any platform they can get it.

GDK: I think that "any platform" is the key. I consume TV on a server model, not a broadcast model. Somewhere there's content, and you have 5 screens: office computer, home TV, phone, home computer, laptop. So we'll watch things on all those screens. We'll acquire it at one time and watch it at another, and maybe watch it 18 times, and maybe pass it to our friends. The audiences are the same people as always but how they consume is so different.

KM: We have one obstacle in addressing this and our show and Criminal Minds are the only 2 shows in all of CBS that you can't get online, so however active we are, they have to come to the network and watch it on Fridays at 8 cause we're owned by another studio that won't come to a business deal allowing it to be shown online.

VN: With the content I deal with the audience is the same but the problem is there's limited availability and always has been. Anime is the most pirated thing online. BitTorrent is 30-40% driven by anime. There's time, place, and language barriers - ex: fansubs. These problems are frustrating because fans don't understand why things haven't made it to digital yet. A lot of companies also just don't think that making things available digitally is worth the risk.

KS: The phenomenon of watching TV & using your laptop at the same time is 40% of 30 year olds. That suggests it's not about people consuming things on PC vs. TV, there's a continuum, and that's what's interesting. These are not different audiences. But, there are different types of engagement and those are different audiences. On Numb3rs we worked with the writers and created a character who was a game designer gone bad who releases a game; then we created the actual game and released it into the wild. That game went and lives online. If you are a big Numb3rs fan you play it and you're continuing the show's fundamental narrative. But there are also folks who just like games who play it & come into the world of Numb3rs that way.

KM: When you were doing that did it effect the ratings?

KS: That's what's weird about doing something for an episode, not a series. That will always make it an experience.

KM: As a show runner when I put J.Lo.Hew on the Tyra show I get a bump in a younger audience, when I put her on Ellen a different demographic bumps. I know that will happen. So we did a thing with CBS where we said "We want the audience to participate, do a user generated thing." CBS was white knuckled over it and it took 2 mos to get through all the bureaucracy. All we did was shoot 4 stars saying 1 sentence and then they announced that fans should join the "scariest story ever told" and shoot themselves and send along a video saying one sentence to a story. Then they took all the footage and cut it together to tell a story that everyone participated in, using our own music. It was stylistically in our brand. And then we put it on YouTube and at the end of the TV show J.Lo.Hew told everyone to go view it - #1 most responded YOUTUBE video of the week, #24 most responded YOUTUBE video of all time - and our ratings went up in Men 18-34, and we've been mostly a female audience driven show generally speaking! That was big!

KS: Typically yeah, this kind of thing does effect rating. Episodes of the Hills with backchannel applied to it DO have increased ratings. But what's interesting is that that's so important. That all this puts television still at the center. It says "all this is still designed to push television," in a support role, when the love and attention that's going on outside of TV is way greater but the financial value is always understood to accrue back to TV through ratings.

KM: Because TV makes money through commercials, which are sold based on ratings.

KS: But the money it brings in is negligible.

KM: I don't know if everybody in the business understands the experience that we're giving the audience, but they do understand that dramas have been in a freefall since the strike, but our ratings have climbed every week. We're up 22% from last year while most shows are just hanging on. So now people are asking to explain what we're doing and now we're going to where you, KS, are right now.

JG: Let's look at online stuff, not just TV.

VN: A lot of online videos are having a hard time monetizing despite the eyeballs are there. But companies have to go out on a limb to buy stuff online because television is easy to understand the rationale behind the ad buys. But shows that don't even make it onto network TV are gonna go online. Anime producers pay to get their show on Cartoon Network with the goal of driving DVD sales; that's the best way to monetize right now. But we're working on it. You can aggregate an audience for niche content online.

GDK: In addition to micropayments there are BitTorrent file hosting services now that are subscription based - $10-$100 a month... Piracy, like broadcast TV, is thought of as free, but people who download for free are not immune to paying for content. It's not the freeness of the content that drives it, it's the convenience: untethering from broadcast schedule, having files in your hard drive, no physical dvds that break etc...

JG: From an industry perspective what's the relative value of watching online/downloading vs. broadcast? It seems like the broadcast is what drives all revenue - is there any possibility for online to become a revenue generator?

KM: Well, CBS.com has become a friendlier place for young people now, but way earlier we were embedding secret messages into the show so only fans knew that we were doing this extensive online work. Sometimes someone would find out and we'd get our wrists slapped.

GDK: KM, you operate your television show the way that fans operate! Just plain old trying to avoid getting a cease & desist letter from the networks.

KS: The question we always get is "how do we get more people to watch television?" and there's a certain part of that that is like looking at the development of the highway system and saying 'you know what's great about highways is that it makes it easier to get to your train." That's the model that's happening!

KM: The network and studio are at least starting to get on board, not looking at these as separate platorms... show runners are a little guilty because we all think that the shows are so great and of course that's why you come. Adding value to the show adds value to the studio and also all of the other platforms. We have no budget for any of this stuff - our graphic novel etc - we do it for free because we think that it adds to the show. A fan did a the graphic novel provided at Comicon for free. And it was so successful that CBS said "let's make a comic book." We had two production assistants who wanted to get into comics and they went to a comic book company, got an unknown artist, now we've got a whole line of this kind of thing. That all came out of one comic book we did for free in one year. The comics were so well reviewed they've even made it into real bookstores, not just comic stores. The network didn't understand that till it happened.

VN: People say "oh sitcoms are dead," but I've noticed in the past few years is that shows have gone to cliffhangers so that you have to watch it when it's on TV so you have to watch it immediately or you get spoiled. Which is why you get fansubs in anime - in anime they do cliffhangers, so they can't subtitle things quickly enough, so fans do it for free within 14 hours of its air time in Japan.

KM: We have cliffhangers too!

GDK: There's a whole other level with fansubs too! There's this social aspect. We've seen that fan labor is what creates the interest that gets you installment-installment or season-season or even just week-week. Without fandom Star Trek would have been a 3 year failed show on NBC that nobody remembered, and the fans of that era kept that interest alive until Star Wars came out and everyone realized the franchise could be revived. I cried over the trailer to the new Star Trek movie because of all the love that went into getting it there. Collective intelligence is more than deducing already authored info, or whatever - if you want to have more content produced, fans know that you have to use collective intelligence: get enough people motivated to create stuff for a product to generate.

KM: There's a kid we found online who was doing claymation and we reached out to him and asked him if he'd do something with claymation with us to get his talent out on a bigger platform. So he shot himself "behind the scenes" and shot the claymation and we put it out to the Ghost Whisperer fans. And now he did the claymation for the newest Coldplay video based on the interest generated!

Or, a guy who did speed painting we found online who didn't even speak English. We hooked him up with a band, etc, it went up on YouTube, it won 27 YouTube awards, and they turned it into a national commercial! The whole thing happened in 30 days.

GDK: The idea of singular talent! We've been talking about fandom as social communities, where the gift culture works because people want friendships. But there's also the question of art and not just craft. Digital media facilitates new art forms. Some fans are motivated by sociality, and some are motivated by using new, now cheaper tools to make stuff in new ways. So we can't just say fans are in it to hang out with each other. That's not why ALL fans make this stuff.

KS: If CBS had called and said "have you seen the claymation thing" and you hadn't initiated it what would you have said?

KM: We'd have reached out to them; they were building the brand.

KS: Why is it different for you than for 99% of people? Why would you reach out?

KM: Every time we went into a meeting network execs would say "where are the 18-34 men?" We knew they had gone online. So we went to the internet to try and understand why the audience there wasn't going to television. 9 years ago we had "Profiler" on the air. We created the serial killer's lair as a virtual experience - it was pretty clumsy because it was so long ago - but we had people standing by and they'd respond to IMs as people came to the site. We let the audience know that they could get in touch with Jack based on TV. Audiences genuinely believed that they were talking to the serial killer! It crashed the server of course, we could never have imagined that it would be that kind of response. 2 weeks later NBC said "we can't have this site of a serial kililer be more successful than any other site on NBC" and took it down.

VN: Intially, Star Wars' gut reaction to fan works was to say "stop." Now, they allow it, but they put rules around it. There's a lot of fear around fan works. The worry is "how far can it go?" what if they start hurting the brand?

KM: And you have to be careful - no one wants to hurt the stars' image, but fortunately the fans love J.Lo.Hew and so they're nice.

KS: Were there likenesses of the stars in the claymation?

KM: Yes on the speed painting, no on the claymation. We're really careful that whenever we - not the fans - produce transmedia work we always make it right because it's about keeping our brand coherent and pure.

VN: It's interesting: Comicon isn't about comics, it's about fandom now - "The Office" is there.

KM: 4 years ago when we asked if we could go to Comicon people went "huh?" cause no one knew what it was.

GDK: Some practices of viewing/consuming have become less marginalized. Now, fan viewing is the dominant way of viewing; you know about the stars at least a little, know some of the longer term plots, etc. This has happened just recently. Now, fansubbing is a huge practice, for instance! Fan protocols have been taught to larger internet society. A fan mentality informed youth interest in Obama's election process!

KM: Obama went after the very disenfranchised and the very franchised both of which are on the internet.

VN: There's a lot of folks especially in fandom who are willing to do things for free. If you paid them, they'd do a worse job.

KM: You can't put a dollar sign on passion!

GDK: There's room in the future, I think, for fan labor to be recompensed in some way. There should always be amateur culture but there are lots of economic levels in every level of cultural production and why should that not be true for fan production also?

KM: I didn't mean that - what I meant is that whatever you're getting paid, if you're passionate, the product will be better. But I do believe that fans should be compensated whenever, however it's possible. But the artists we used? They made a nice sum of money. They always get some value from it.

KS: Let's talk about the flip side of all the love. We have a bucket of emails in the office that say things like "I've been playing your game for 4 mos and it sucks." Fascinating! It sucks because we've run out of stuff to give them or the server went down or whatever. Recent email: "It seems pointless playing when you guys are cheating us, I'm deleting this, not that you cared." We're providing something for free!! It's so interesting what happens when that engagement goes wrong, it cuts both ways. I don't really care if this person deletes the app, but it points to a set of expectations being built around media and that they're escalating. What will happen to properties that can't support this endless demand? Can fans produce enough for themselves? What happens when people are disappointed?

KM: Well... We started Ghost Whisperer with J.Lo.Hew's wedding, and 2 weeks ago we killed the husband and this week he comes back and you'll have to watch the show to find out how he comes back and why but there's SUCH a democratic voice now, we're getting lots of responses - even death threats. We study the buzz to find out what the voices online are and why which is very different from network testing; this is just out there and passionate and strong.

VN: I feel like we can't always give the fans what they want! How I Met Your Mother is one of my favorite shows out there, but if they told you who the mother was, it becomes way less interesting! Re: demanding consumers, it's because they feel entitled with thing. The new generation doesn't know music costs money. They don't think about how the money is made. There's so much choice and I never know what to watch, with the sense "there must be something better." If people don't like something they can switch; they're very demanding because there are so many options.

KS: Parking Wars on facebook supports a show on A&E. There hasn't been any new content on the game for like 6 months, nor has there been a new episode of the show. There was a player uprising where they all wrote directly to the CEO of A&E over there not being more content for the game! The question at the network was "maybe we should take this down because these users are really demanding."

KM: TV users can't be heard, so they're less demanding.

KS: Yes! What's changed is that we can now actually gain meaningful insight into how what we do is received.

JG: Questions time! Ivan Askwith asks: "Making the audience "matter" to advertisers is different than making them matter to content owners or producers. How do you prioritize what you want from the audience? (e.g. Attention? Affinity? Intent to purchase for sponsors)" This connects up to Parking Wars...

KS: It's interesting to have someone who's producing on this panel (KM) rather than someone who's distributing because the idea is so different. So... Area/Code did this thing, backchannel, for the Hills. I was reviewing it with a producer who said "we can't use this, the pageviews doesn't help us, it just helps the network," - the product is worth more to the network but not to the producer. Something's deeply broken: all the things that surround the TV show don't accrue back to the producer.

KM: Those folks need to be educated, because when we did The Other Side which is a web series from the POV of the ghosts. When we went to try and make it happen - it's 7 webisodes online for 3 years - started with GM sponsoring it, won the TVGuide.com award for best drama online - now GM sponsors the TV show and the show gets more money. And that started online, so the producers need to be educated about this possibility.

KS: We did this thing for the Sopranos when it was rebroadcast - A&E paid an unprecedented amount for each episode and they were afraid that nobody would want to watch a 7 year old episode censored for 8 minutes and ads put in there. "Who will really watch that?" So we built a game to play while watching The Sopranos. Dual screen entertainment!! So what happens when the ad comes on? ...the answer was "don't put anything on the screen then we have to make sure that they watch the ADS!" from A&E. The response from me was "I thought they were watching the show!" But the ads are what holds the whole thing up.

KM: They're broadcasting commercials wrapped in the shows.

KS: And everything we're doing is only relevant for the 8 minutes of ads where attention "must" be deeply focused. But it isn't insurmountable. MTV backchannel runs through the commercials. So now people are doing this kind of thing competitively while the ads are going on, and guess what they're talking about? The ads! Attention is what matters to advertisers.

VN: Brand engagement.

Q: Gail, you had commented that fandom is the dominant mode of being a media consumer. I doubt that! Can Kim Moses speak to how many Ghost Whisperer viewers are actually involved online, etc? Any sense in terms of numbers, % of audience engaging beyond TV?

KM: We get 11.8 million TV viewers Fridays at 8. We look at ourselves online as the Mickey Mouse Club for Ghost Whisperer fans. We take our content to them, we don't have a sense of how many people are on. But with the HitWise news this morning - top 3 dramas with traffic to the website. So our audience must be crossing over significantly.

JG: Is there significant crossover between Parking Wars game and TV show?

KS: We have no idea who's watching the show. We know exactly who's playing the game, but we have no idea who's watching the show. Advertisers don't want to sponsor Facebook apps because they can't get Nielsen ratings from it, but on Facebook you can measure everything! That's like saying "I don't want to do it because I can't be as efficient as an airline!" But it's because it takes work to get Facebook info right now, there's no one easy person to call. We know it has to be some of the same people because we got a ratings boost. But it's so easy to tell who's doing what in digital media and so tough outside of it.

Ivan Askwith: The infinity loop suggests the scope of GW's cross-platform efforts... but (to play devil's advocate), what is the strategy behind it, aside from throwing everything at a wall to see what sticks? How do you decide what to develop?

KM: We don't throw things against the wall. We planned claymation, speed painting, "Scariest Story Ever Told" very carefully. We wanted to build up to Halloween, the week before sweeps, which is conveniently something that we can totally own. Our spikes in buzz were peaking before we went on the air due to that buildup. That's very rare! We've been strategically bilding towards certain things and times of the year. When the husband comes back on Ghost Whisperer he's lost his memory so people can Twitter to help him remember and fall back in love with his wife again -

JG: So is there a feedback loop? Does this stuff influence the production?

KM: Yes! We take all the buzz and analyze it and we don't always do exactly what the fans want because of all the different points of view, but we can get a sense of whether things are working or not.

KS: Realtime participation on top of static mdeia increasingly is going to effect how static media is produced. Realtime feedback is convincing!

KM: Audience feedback brought life to a ghost, Laughing Man, who never spoke. For some reason the audience really responded to this character and started talking about the mystery of who he was and what he meant. He was an extra but by the end of the show he had a speaking part and was in almost every episode! We also wove him through the online experience. But none of that was planned.

Q: It seems like the new media/old media difference is the on demand concept... [I missed the rest of this Q]

GDK: Timeshifting doesn't shift too much! Liveness - less than 24 hours old. Even an on demand concept is tied to the water cooler talk, the broadcast schedule. Live chat has happened in fan comms for 15 years.

KS: We've fallen back in love with the broadcast schedule! What TV was always good at till time shifting was getting 5-10 million people to all do one thing and think about it at the same time. It just could never connect them. It's one of the only large shared activities we have - which is why the debates, Olympics are so amazing. Things that are forced upon us live are a reminder of the power of that common fire.

KM: Networks have pushed away from serialization due to people only watching 1 in 4 shows, but the internet supports serialization. That form of storytelling is being re-embraced.

VN: We can see that our site traffic goes down in very few events - debates, Super Bowl, etc. People's patterns are very reliable, but not during certain events. When your site goes down it doesn't effect it either! It just has a gap and goes back on.

JG: Flourish asks: "The infinity loop suggests the scope of GW's cross-platform efforts... but (to play devil's advocate), what is the strategy behind it, aside from throwing everything at a wall to see what sticks? How do you decide what to develop?" HULU puts up a box that says 'due to rights issues we have to delay this," "due to rights issues we can't show you this." Which maybe is about preventing blowbacks about the promise the Internet makes.

KM: We don't announce these things because it's not a big issue so far, although we do tell fans if they ask us specifically.

VN: We can't show some things in some territories, and we get comments like "you guys are racist" if something says "this is unavailable in your country!" Usually obviously from very young people.

Q: Can you talk about the infrastructure you have in place to service the Ghost Whisperer transmedia content?

KM: Our staff is tiny and we all do double duty. I have a digital media team of 4 kids! Our crew is 200 people who make the TV show who we run from day to day. This is a little tiny machine. And then we have the fans - superfans who work with us to get the word out etc. Not a lot of shows do what we do, so the press really does make good use of our stuff and puts it out there, but we also go out and share the material on many sites because the personal, intimate relationship with our fans is important.

The networks and studios are all members of WGA and SAG and we operate in all the ways the networks, studios mandate. They're very careful because these relationships are important.

JG: Would you, GDK, support a fan guild?

GDK: It would fall apart in 5 seconds! "This sucks and it still sucks and it sucks more the more I watch it!" I'm in favor of exploring possibilities for fan labor along the lines of licensing, more than fair use. There have been 0 court cases, for instance, from George Lucas to fans, but there's lots of language in fandom about fear of suing. But fair use is important if you're making things for free. That's fair use! And that court case will happen soon. But licensing is the way to go for fan labor. In the USSR you had to pay a creator/copyright owner if you were going to appropriate it, but you didn't have to ask permission. Here we only have that with cover songs. You pay differently depending on how many records you imprint. Small number, not a lot of money. It's not prohibitive. But big bands have to pay more. "Fair pay" - licensing fees of scale. That's a fight years and years out.

KM: I think that evolution will come; it's in its infancy now. Everything we use on our sites we have to have a release from the creator.

GDK: This brings up the issue of "ruining the brand." Copyright was supposed to protect your ownership within your lifetime. Initially it was 25 years! Within your lifetime your project would become public domain. They wanted to inspire people building on other people's ideas. Now it's much longer. But - maybe licensing isn't instantaneous. Maybe it shouldn't be 95 years of total control for a creator, although there should be some period of total control. Just not forever. 10 years? That would have given Star Trek fans until 1979 for them till they could start selling Star Trek stuff for real. That might have been a terrific universe with a lot of fan productions, if it had happened.

VN: What we're trying to do - it's not well known to consumers, but creating a fansub and distributing it is illegal. We've had some success getting rights from creators to let fans subtitle their work. We don't pay them, but we transfer the rights back to the original creators. So fansubs are made and then they're given back to the creators, with only attribution for the fans. This works really well for small shows, new shows, shows without a budget for subbing yet. That empowers the fans a little more.

JG: Having much success with content creators?

VN: Some, but there's the problem of brand consistency. People are worried that the character naems aren't right, that they don't actually represent the creator's ideas.

JG: Some official subtitles are pretty shockingly bad!

KM: Well, fans want to do it, but for instance - LOST did a series of books that fans pushed back on hard because they weren't created or vetted by the original creators. So with our publications we're really involved with them because we want to make sure that when people read it they don't push back.

GDK: In Lost's defense, writers re-incorporated that novel stuff back in in response to the fan backlash.

Q: I want to go back to the "haters." There's the danger in monetizing an audience - what about people who don't want to be a part of the audience? If you get 11.8 million viewers, there are a lot of people who aren't watching it. What is there for you to find out about the people who aren't watching it? And what about non-fans, casual viewers? Ghost Whisperer, or say procedurals, you can watch more casually than say "Heroes" or "Lost." Do we sometimes focus on fans too much compared to casual viewers who probably make a big part of the viewership? Does it not let us ask questions about why people aren't watching and what new shows could do to address disaffected audiences?

KM: If you look at Law & Order or procedurals, it's an older demographic, people like my parents who have always watched the show and are dedicated to a traditional schedule.

KS: One thing to look at is World of Warcraft where everyone who's part of it pays $10 a month, versus Asian games where they're mostly free but premium items cost money. In that model the goal is not to get everyone who's playing to pay money, the reason that 10% is in the superfan relationship and can pay is that the other 90% is there. The 90% forms a passive audience for the 10%. And it's more interesting for the 90% because the 10% exists. So it's a complex interdependent relationship and I don't think the goal is to get "total fandom," the goal is to have fans catalyze a larger process.

KM: And loyalty, to keep coming back and going into different places.

JG: From the board, from Mike Arauz: "It seems like the competing interests of professional content producers, creators, owners, and distributors make it hard for audiences to get content on their preferred terms. How can these obstacles be overcome?"

KM: Education and communication: Letting everyone understand the value as opposed to thinking "how do I benefit from it." If you can look at the big picture, you can be more proactive in favor of this. And we have to communicate - all these companies have isolated columns in their org charts. If they understood the value of what they had to offer the build would be tremendous.

GDK: "Good Copy, Bad Copy" about Pirate Bay is a great documentary. "Home Cooking: Killing the Restaurant Business Everywhere" is what one T-shirt says. That's how viewers percieve the broadcast industry! Viewers don't understand why technology gets better but media companies don't figure out how to distribute. The average viewer shouldn't internalize the desires of the media industries. The consumer is always right! It's rational to want to use technology to the maximum for your pleasure. I think that Kim needs to talk to fans and the industry!

KM: The first pioneer usually gets shot! So we have to be very careful. I don't believe that networks and studios are tyrants, I have faces on those faceless suited men. There's a much bigger picture. We had the Writer's Strike because when someone mashes up footage, it's not just something that affects the studio, it's the actors and the voice people and so on who would usually get residuals. And so the unions effect it too.

VN: If the dollars are there, the studios will follow. If you want more shows on HULU, watch HULU. It might be slow, but it'll happen. But consumers will consume more variety of free things; if you're paying you'd better get something good!