Microsoft Lacked Clear Vision
Posted: Wed Feb 09, 2011 10:55 pm
At this year's CES at the Hollywood Creative Masters session, Conan executive producer Jeff Ross discussed Microsoft's abortive attempts to bring the wayward Late Night and Tonight Show host to Xbox Live in the wake of his public departure from NBC in 2010. In an interview with Gamasutra's Chris Morris, Ross explained that discussions with Microsoft stumbled from a lack of clear vision at the platform holder regarding what to do with O'Brien.
"A lot of the conversations were 'well, it's a show, but it's not a show and there are no breaks, but maybe there are breaks and it's not 60 minutes, it's this' and nobody really knew what it was," Ross told Morris. "So it was really going to be a leap of faith to jump in with these guys and figure something out which we didn't know. Plus there were 100 people of jobs and that didn't bode well for that."
O'Brien instead signed a deal with cable station TBS.
Microsoft's outreach to O'Brien is believed to be part of an initiative within Microsoft to launch a pay-television service through Xbox Live. Microsoft is rumored to have spoken with several large media companies in the last year, though Microsoft head Steve Ballmer made no mention of larger media initiatives during his CES Keynote last month. The publisher did belatedly announce a loose release window of Spring this year for Hulu Plus for Xbox Live Gold subscribers.
source
I'm going to go with Conan on this one.
"A lot of the conversations were 'well, it's a show, but it's not a show and there are no breaks, but maybe there are breaks and it's not 60 minutes, it's this' and nobody really knew what it was," Ross told Morris. "So it was really going to be a leap of faith to jump in with these guys and figure something out which we didn't know. Plus there were 100 people of jobs and that didn't bode well for that."
O'Brien instead signed a deal with cable station TBS.
Microsoft's outreach to O'Brien is believed to be part of an initiative within Microsoft to launch a pay-television service through Xbox Live. Microsoft is rumored to have spoken with several large media companies in the last year, though Microsoft head Steve Ballmer made no mention of larger media initiatives during his CES Keynote last month. The publisher did belatedly announce a loose release window of Spring this year for Hulu Plus for Xbox Live Gold subscribers.
source
I'm going to go with Conan on this one.