[LINK] "Not Even Community Could Save Yahoo’s TV Dreams"

[rfmcdonald]

Angela Watercutter's Wired article says awkward things for the future of online television.

We talk a lot about the Golden Age of Television. What we talk less about, however, are the casualties of the war for programming dominance. Amazon’s Transparent winning awards and Netflix’s House of Cards launching a binge-watching boom are huge victories in the struggle to validate streaming TV, but there have been losses as well—and now Yahoo has lost a huge battle.

Late yesterday, as the company relayed its third quarter earnings, Yahoo also announced that its slate—led by the reboot of Community, as well as Sin City Saints and Other Space—had resulted in a $42 million loss. As such, it would likely pull the plug on its original series.

“We thought long and hard about it, and what we concluded is (for) certain of our original video (series), we couldn’t see a way to make money over time,” company CFO Ken Goldman told investors. “We’re not saying we’re not going to do these at all in the future. But … it didn’t work the way we had hoped it to work, and we’ve decided to move on.”

What went wrong? Well, for one, Community was already a niche property when Yahoo decided to save it; it had generated paltry numbers for NBC for years before being cancelled, and had lost a good share of its audience after showrunner Dan Harmon was fired in 2012. (He returned to the show after a year away.) Putting it on a platform that’s a tiny blip on the streaming landscape didn’t help. Yes, most people know the name Yahoo, but they don’t all know that the company has a streaming service, let alone one with the high-profile, baked-into-your-new-flatscreen prominence of Netflix or Amazon Instant.