Tuesday, November 13, 2007

The TV Biz

Rob Long crunches the numbers of the TV biz. An excerpt:

It’s fun to watch the color drain from the faces of these smart, entrepreneurial, risk-taking people when I tell them how much it costs to fail – and I mean fail, as in total loss – in the TV business. It’s fun to tell these guys that a broadcast network pays about $250,000 for a half-hour pilot script – and buys a couple or three dozen of them per year – and then makes about 14 of them. At $2 million per, roughly.

And then orders somewhere around 4 of those pilots to an initial series order of 12 episodes – the studio fronting the cost of making each episode (somewhere around $1 million plus, depending on the type of show, the cast, the writer/producer/creator’s quote) minus the license fee paid by the network, which is always always less than the budget of a scripted show.

And that’s for half-hour shows. For hour-long shows, everything is double.


[HT: Instapundit ]

No comments: