Talk show Conan 0’Brien landed at cable network TBS after a brouhaha broke out on the Tonight Show. As previously posted, O’Brien could’ve inked a deal for Xbox Live, but didn’t. His producer now finally explains why.
“The Xbox thing – 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,” Conan’s producer Jeff Ross tells Gamasutra. “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 who were out of jobs and that didn’t bode well for that.”
According to Gamasutra, the talks between Conan’s people and Microsoft did address just how important the internet is. And while Ross did acknowledge that it would be great to be involved like something like the proposed show, the choice was eventually made to go to TBS. “But we knew we had to be involved in the technology side,” Ross added. “We knew we had to be involved in the internet no matter what we did.”
Conan, who was ungraciously dismissed from he Tonight Show, did experience the full effect of internet with viral support campaigns like “I’m with Coco”, created by I Am 8-Bit. What’s more, Conan was able to leverage Twitter-following, as opposed to being followed, into news. While Xbox Live didn’t pan out for Conan, the power of the internet sure did.
Behind The Scenes: Microsoft’s Attempt To Woo Conan O’Brien For Xbox Live [Gamasutra]
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