High Maintenance, the wonderfully weird and poignant web series that follows a weed delivery guy around New York, is moving from Vimeo to HBO. It’s a huge move for the series and its creators, but can it tell us anything about the future of cable?
If you hadn’t noticed, video entertainment produced by nontraditional television companies is having what we’d call a moment. Some of the best television isn’t on television, and that has played a huge role in the decision to cancel cable service in favor of buying a-la-carte streaming services by as many as 3.8 million American households, according to numbers released at the National Association of Broadcasters conference in Las Vegas.
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High Maintenance – Trailer from Janky Clown Productions on Vimeo.
So, does it matter when some of the best internet content ends up becoming TV content once again? If every good independent show just gets snapped up by traditional media, does this fractured ecosystem threaten to become ruled by some of the same conglomerates that cable cutters want to be free of? Part of the movement is spurred by people not wanting to pay for shows and channels they don’t watch that come in a standard cable package. If just a few cable networks buy all the content, what happens?
It’s hard to say right now, based on just a couple instances of web series becoming TV shows.
High Maintenance is probably the most high profile, but Marc Maron’s WTF podcast led to the comedian scoring an IFC show, Live From Daryl’s House is now a series on Palladia (an MTV-affiliated, Viacom-owned network), and the Men In Blazers soccer podcast is now airing specials on NBC Sports.
Meanwhile, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt was written and filmed to be aired on NBC, but then sold to Netflix to be streamed online. Neither of those are small companies, and the show was developed by Tina Fey, but it’s at least one instance of a show going the other way.
HBO’s deal is great for creators Katja Blichfeld and Ben Sinclair (who also plays the unnamed weed dealer in the show), but it’s arguably less good for Vimeo, which was airing the show. So far, the company seems nothing less than thrilled that High Maintenance was picked up (we don’t know what the terms of the deal were). Is that going to continue if its shows continue to be snapped up?
“A series can move from the Web, build an audience and be distributed on the most premium television outlet,” Kerry Trainor, Vimeo’s CEO, told Bloomberg Business. “We unconditionally support Ben and Katja’s decision because it’s a great leap for their career.”
Experts in the industry say High Maintenance‘s move should be great news for content creators and big conglomerates alike. HBO gets a show with a built-in fan base, High Maintenance gets a huge distribution channel and HBO’s resources.
“Non-traditional content creators and sources (think: podcasts, YouTube videos, bloggers, etc.) who can publish their offerings relatively friction-free to large audiences without traditional distribution/windowing bottlenecks—and attract sizable audiences and subscribers serve as a risk-free proof point for potential viability as a show [on a network],” Tim Hanlon, a consultant with the Vertere Group who works with cable companies, content creators, and advertisers told me in an email. “In other words, this is the ultimate program development machine for TV types.”
Whether its good for consumers and smaller video platforms like Vimeo is another matter, and we simply don’t know what’s going to happen.
