Open Television Studio

Aymar Jean "AJ" Christian is an associate professor of communication studies at Northwestern University and author of Open TV: Innovation Beyond Hollywood and the Rise of Web Television (NYU Press, 2018). His work has been published in numerous academic journals, including the International Journal of Communication, Television & New Media, Social Media & Society, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, among many others. He has juried for the Peabody Awards, Gotham Awards, and Tribeca Film Festival, among others. He co-founded OTV | Open Television, a platform for indie television. OTV has received recognition from HBO, the Emmy Awards, Webby Awards, Streamy Awards, and Gotham Awards. His blog, Televisual, contains over 500 posts chronicling the rise of  web TV (2008-2014). He has written on TV and new media for Indiewire and The Wall Street Journal, among others. He received PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.

OTV Studio closes the gap between demand for culturally specific stories and systemic under-investment in artists who can tell those stories. Investing in short-form digital projects to build a pathway to long-form "mainstream" development, OTV Studio offers financial, professional, and creative support to emerging artists, launching new storytellers and stories in a sustainable, cost effective way. OTV Studio builds on the success of the Emmy- and Webby-nominated non-profit distribution platform OTV | Open Television (http://weareo.tv). As OTV's artists rise in the industry – gaining representation, selling feature films, staffing major TV shows – they are eager to keep working with OTV but require more resources to thrive. OTV Studio leverages our artist success to reinvest in new new talent, slingshotting the film and television industry into a sustainable, vibrant future where historically marginalized artists can thrive, especially people of color, immigrants, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities.

Americans have not fully reckoned with the consequences of the fact that more than 80% of series creators and executive producers remain white, straight, cis, upper middle class men, reflecting who gets to be seen as valuable in America. We will not be able to build solidarity across cultural divides until we lift up stories that for decades have been marginalized. The problem lies not in individual talent or success but rather in the system from which television shows emerge: the development process. As I argue in my book Open TV (NYU Press 2018), the process has been largely unchanged since the 20th century, when TV was analog, channels were few, and bigotry was more acceptable. Shows continue to be developed in Los Angeles, requiring millions of dollars in development costs before audiences ever see a series, an archaic holdover in a digital world where projects can be any length and distributed globally. As seen with Issa Rae, Lena Waithe, and Ilana Glazer, among many others, short-form storytelling attracts audiences more cheaply with less risk for investors, opening up historical barriers to entry while also making the development process more efficient.

OTV Studio is a for-profit spin-off of OTV | Open Television. After celebrating OTV’s Emmy nomination and the hiring of OTV alumni at HBO, Netflix, Showtime, and NBC, among others, OTV Studio seeks to bring investment to emerging creators and cultivate critical relationships with agencies, studios and networks. For the past 5 years, OTV has invested in artists who Hollywood inconsistently recognizes as valuable, and now it’s time to formalize the process of not only developing OTV creator work but also developing the artists themselves and preparing them for careers in Hollywood, complete with introductions to industry insiders. OTV Studio takes an intellectual property share of 10 - 20 short-form series, pilots, films, and concepts annually and leverages online/mobile/festival exhibition to catalyze sales of higher-budget, higher-impact long-form series and films, from which it takes a percentage of seven-figure production budgets. OTV Studio has done the careful work of forming the right relationships across the industry to usher our artists through a process by which they can reach new levels in their careers. We empower those whose voices have been ignored and stifled in order to give them space, resources, time, and support in order to unleash their narrative power.

Our solution serves three primary stakeholders. First, our ecosystem of creators need OTV Studio to not only invest in the projects and professional development, but to broker connections to the larger studios,networks, production companies, and representatives that OTV Studio execs have already developed relationships with. Getting in front of decision-makers who will provide opportunities for advancement is difficult, especially if one lives outside of the production epicenter (i.e. Los Angeles). Secondarily, studios, networks, production companies, and representatives need OTV Studio, because the industry hasn’t yet established a successful pathway for historically underrepresented artists, whose stories overperform in periods of technological or industrial transition (e.g. black sitcoms amid the rise of cable in the 90s, or the rise of queer representation amid streaming). OTV Studio assists the film industry by finding and developing artists into professionals who are capable of leading viable, marketable projects. And lastly, though just as importantly, creating this pathway to successful Hollywood careers for intersectional creators ultimately benefits the audiences who remain bereft of entertainment in which they get to see the full expanse of identity, culture, and perspective. This is a tall order, with many moving parts, and OTV Studio is up to the challenge.

Our project is focused on cultural change and building a sustainable economy. As an artist and intellectual property incubator leveraging the web to value our stories and communities, OTV Studio's goal is to develop artists as owners/executive producers of their stories, reinvesting profits to develop an ecosystem of emerging artists. Research shows diverse EPs hire more diverse writers and crews. Many "diverse" Hollywood projects are actually owned by people who don't come from the communities represented. Transforming who creates and owns stories is essential to transforming the labor supply chain and our society into a more empathic one.

OTV Studio arose from my need to better serve talented artists who came through my non-profit, OTV | Open Television. The OTV non-profit grew out of now 10 years of research into how the internet transformed the field of television, allowing for more innovation and diversity. I noticed how the closed development process and infrastructure in Hollywood pushed creators to the web to develop their stories for online audiences and with other artists. Those who are multiply marginalized -- e.g. Black women, queer disabled people, etc. -- had fewer buyers. Efforts to organize indie content online also struggled, as indie channels couldn't compete with rising tech behemoths like Netflix, Amazon, etc. I partnered with Chicago-based writer-creators and a young marketing team to build OTV into a platform. The head of the OTV Studio, Stephanie Jeter, was OTV's head of production, and Julie Keck, our chief business development officer, one of our most prolific producers and an expert on finding audiences and securing indie financing. Our partners are executives in Hollywood who started reaching out to me in 2017 interested in OTV's content because of the Emmy-nominated Brown Girls but unable to do business with a non-profit distributor.

OTV is deeply personal for me. I grew up in an abusive household as one of few Black kids in a mostly white suburb outside of New York City. Television was how I escaped my home and connected to the outside world, to my Blackness and queerness. As I entered my PhD program, I noticed how white TV had become (which many studies have verified) but also how the internet was creating an alternative, inspiring young people to tell their stories. When I became a professor living in Chicago, I was profoundly moved by Chicago's arts underground and its interdisciplinarity. What I wasn't seeing on TV I saw in clubs, in theatres, artist-run galleries and eventually in indie TV projects. OTV fuels my intellectual and emotional journey. It has deepened my understanding of the power of media, my engagement with my local community, and my sense of efficacy in leveraging scholarly knowledge to effect to real world change.

If you look at my CV on my website, I have developed well-rounded expertise in my fields. Beyond my book and academic journal articles, the basis of my tenure case as the first Black person tenured in my department's 140+ year history, I have developed my knowledge and social networks in television, art, film, academia, and journalism. I have juried film and television for organizations like the Peabody Awards and American Film Institute. I have curated video art for the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, among others. I have consulted with festivals like the Tribeca Film Festival, Frameline, Outfest, among others. I have been interviewed about media by NPR, the New York Times, Adweek, and many others. I've given talks at many universities, the Sundance Film Festival and Labs, Microsoft Research, MacArthur Foundation, among many others. I've secured hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants from foundations and my university. OTV itself is a Webby and Emmy nominee, three-time honoree on NewCity top 50 Chicago media organizations, and a four-time Streamy Awards nominee (two-time winner). Our shows have shown at most major and small festivals that show indie episodic work. Finally, I have also directed and produced multiple indie projects of my own, so I intimately understand the possibilities and constraints of this work.

This is a difficult question because building an organization includes constant adversity, and I am building two. I am a Black queer man who simultaneously started an fully funded, one-of-a-kind non-profit, wrote a book and earned tenure while teaching a full course load at one the nation's top universities, all in five years. Every day was a challenge. My biggest challenge was transitioning funding and leadership, which was necessary to give me the space to start the OTV Studio. A critical point was halfway through tenure in 2016, when my chair told me that OTV was slowing my publication speed, which meant I wouldn't get tenure. It lit a fire under me. Within a year, I got my book under contract, Brown Girls premiered and started pitching to Hollywood, and, fearing for my career, I secured an offer at NYU. This led to a bidding war between the two universities, which got me two more years of funding for OTV, enough time to build relationships with foundations. By 2019, I'd not only secured tenure but also several hundred thousand dollars to hire an executive director at OTV, giving me time and space to build the OTV Studio with Stephanie Jeter.

I believe I was recognized in the first cohort of the Field & MacArthur Foundations' Leaders for a New Chicago because building OTV has involved a lot of community organizing and leadership. Through OTV, I shared my knowledge with dozens of artists, sharing how indie series are made, connecting them to local resources and social networks, and offering advice on career trajectory. Five years later, many of those artists are now staffed in Los Angeles, writing and directing for networks like NBC, Netflix and Showtime. As a testament to my leadership, I've maintained these relationships. OTV alums still participate in our programming and mentor emerging artists, because they recognize the work I put in to building a community and helping their careers. I've introduced artists to their first agents or managers, or executives at distributors and production companies. I've funded their first projects. Many end up collaborating with each other because they met through an OTV project. This is more challenging than it sounds. Building solidarity among historically marginalized artists is the hardest thing, because capitalism socializes us to compete with each other for scarce resources. I've developed a structure that incentivizes mutual support and solidarity across cultural differences.

My project is innovative because it conceives of cultural storytelling as shared intellectual property. OTV Studio bundles different TV/film projects together to increase the probability that one will sell to a larger distributor and shared with the world. Proceeds from this sale not only generate revenue to develop more stories to sell, it will also potentially go to the non-profit to help develop more emerging artists who can get training and exposure to audiences, helping them get to the Studio level. This project builds the "pipeline" that so many people in Hollywood have struggled to developed. But we conceive of this as an ecosystem, where artists and communities mutually support each other through digital technologies to help tell the nation's stories. We also believe that our focus on intersectionality -- on the "most marginalized" communities -- is innovative. Historically, these stories are the hardest to get made. Recent history is upending this assumption (e.g. Ryan Murphy's Pose and Hollywood). We believe intersectionality is critical to create an equitable world. Only when those with the least power can thrive can we all thrive.

OTV Studio diversifies the nation's -- and increasingly the world's -- storytellers to  expand our collective understanding of how identities are differently experienced, oppressed and valuable. For example, as a recent report by Color of Change found, the vast majority of television shows with cops have police officers in a lead role, rarely facing repercussions for excessive force, in series largely written and created by white men. It is no wonder, then, that police budgets have swelled over the past few decades as social services have been cut. Television has tremendous power. Our theory of change insists that the identities of series creators and executive producers matter, as they hire writing teams more representative of the country; here, we build on another study by San Diego State University that shows how women directors and producers hire more women.

There is a misconception in Hollywood that historically marginalized storytellers only write for their specific communities and cannot reach broad audiences. In fact, as this study and this study show, diverse shows have bigger audiences and identities considered "niche," like black movies and TV shows, have global appeal.

With OTV  | Open Television we seek to prove a theory that, even when audiences for specific shows are small or niche, this also has transformative power. For example, many attribute Will & Grace to growing acceptance of gay marriage in America. In fact, it could be said that straight viewers watching Will & Grace were already queer accepting, but the show empowered closeted LGBTQ+ people to come out to their families, thus facilitating change. This supports decades-old research in communication studies that argues the role of media is to educate and empower critical nodes/leaders in information networks to  communicate to others on an interpersonal level, where trust is higher.

We currently have two dozen projects on our slate and about as many artists. Next year we hope to add another dozen. In five years we hope that number to approach 50 artists and projects. However, our reach is best calculated by the number of potential audience members who will engage with our stories. That number can easily jump into the millions once at least one series is sold into long-form development, and this could also happen relatively quickly with the release of short-form projects online.

Our goal is to become the go-to studio for emerging, historically untapped storytellers in television and film. In the next year, our plan is to secure one development deal for a new long-form show and produce 3-5 short-form projects to release online and build an audience around to catalyze further long-form sales. Seed funding is critical for this, and it goes without saying that Black entrepreneurs struggle to find investor connections. There has already been one show on our slate that has pitched to a major broadcast network that we missed out on because of a lack of seed funding.

Once we get OTV artists and shows in the Hollywood ecosystem, we can reach millions of people, and each success will allow us to develop and then sell more shows. In television today, one show employs three to a dozen writers, potentially more, who each may have a show of their own to sell. Diverse TV shows tend to do well in ratings or streams.

By year five, our goal is to have co-production or executive producer credits on 3-5 long-form series with at least 10-12 short-form projects produced, ensuring long-term sustainable growth.

There are very few funding opportunities for creative media start-ups,
even as creative media is what trends online and creates cultural
shifts.. Venture capital firms operate on short-term results and
returns, and tend to fund scalable tech as opposed to scalable culture.
We do have connections to non-profits, some of whom have impact
investing arms, and we are in those conversations. But Hollywood moves
quickly, and we are eager to leverage our industry connections before
the pandemic and resulting economic crisis shifts the terrain. Finally,
as a company owned by two Black people, we lack the social networks
necessary to find private investment. OTV has a better track record of
launching proven talent and receiving competitive wins and nominations
from festivals, awards and guilds than most other media start-ups. One
of our founders is a nationally recognized expert in web-based
television. Yet the predominance of racism in the investor class means
our blackness overshadows our significant accomplishments.

To gain solid advice and strategic connections, we are currently
onboarding our first board members, including art collector & OTV
(non-profit) advisory board member Jane Saks, who has connections to
wealthy investors and large production companies and a track record of
developing nationally recognized artists like Pulitzer Prize-winning
playwright Lynn Nottage. In order to secure the seed funding needed to
go full force, we have already applied to the New Media Ventures fund,
having gained introductions to the NMV team through our connections to
the MacArthur Foundation and Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC. Towards
our efforts to continually expand our network of high-profile industry
insiders, the dean of the School of Communication at Northwestern
University, among others, has offered additional connections to
prestigious alumni, many of whom are high-level executives in Hollywood.
Finally, in order to formalize our processes, we have compiled a
database of dozens of executives who've reached out to OTV over the past
five years whom we are currently  nurturing, including notable industry
players we’ve connected with through our partnership with the Sundance
Institute. OTV Studio co-founder Dr. Christian is a fellow of Sundance’s
new Impact Guild, which is introducing us to media executives in the
social impact field. As the OTV platform launches a new app, we are
securing multi-year funding to ensure the regular release of new
programs, thus maintaining our brand recognition in the industry.
Lastly, the OTV non-profit board is aware of this for-profit spin-off
and continually making new beneficial connections.

We are mostly closely partnered with the OTV | Open Television non-profit, which provides a consistent pipeline of promising, diverse talent from Chicago and, increasingly, across the country. We are in regular conversations and meetings with production companies, studios, networks, and agents in Los Angeles about developing new content. While some of these partnerships may solidify without much seed funding, funding will help us catalyze deals by allowing us to fund and release short-form concepts of our intellectual property online, as well as allowing our current team to dedicate more effort and expertise to this endeavor full-time.

The core of our model is revenue from sales and licensing of intellectual property (series and films). The buyers for the IP include production companies, studios, and networks, primarily. We solve a critical problem in Hollywood where there is genuine appetite for diversity but not a deep well of talent because of decades of exclusion (see NYT). We have IP: scripts, pitch decks, and produced short-form projects. We work with writers to edit and shape these ideas to be attractive to partners, with whom we're in regular conversation. Production companies, studios, or senior writers (executive producers) can take our ideas and shop them to distributors, or we could deal directly with distributors, which would make finding studio partners easier. We have found that the best way to speed up the sales process is to  fund the production of a shorter, cheaper version of the story (episodes in the 10-15 minute range as opposed to the 30-60 minute industry standard) and release it directly to audiences online. Because our audiences are under-served and there is a growing infrastructure for valuing short-form (including leading festivals like Sundance, Tribeca and SXSW), these stories can generate value outside of Hollywood, providing data that the IP has marketing potential. Secondarily, we will represent our slate artists in order to facilitate hiring by networks and studios for writer’s rooms and directing opportunities. When a slate artist we represent is hired, OTV Studio takes a standard fee that goes back into the development of emerging artists.

Revenue in television is generated through a return on shares of
intellectual property across the development, production, and
distribution of a series. Producers and IP holders are paid in several
ways: 1) for the development deal, which initiates the process of a
studio or network working on shaping the script to their needs before
entering production (range: $10,000-$100,000 split between us and the
artist); 2) as a percentage (5-10%) of writing fees per episode
(averaging $50,000); 3) as a percentage (average 1-10%) of production
costs once an idea gets a "green light" ($1-5 million per episode for a
minimum of six episodes), and 4) a percentage (average 1-5%) of
residuals based licensing the series to different distributors/channels
in different global territories across different time periods
("windows"), though this business is slowly drying up because of global
streamers like Netflix (producers for legacy broadcasters like CBS still
make millions through this business).

We are still seeking seed funding for the OTV Studio. During the pandemic, our team has been able to work full-time on business development.. We are in urgent need of funds to be ready when production begins.

OTV| Open Television  (non-profit) has secured at least $300,000 for general operating expenses for 2021, with the hope of raising more for production and syndication, and verbal promises of funding for 2022 and beyond from our foundation partners.

OTV Studio (for profit)  has a seed funding budget for between $250,000 to $750,000 to execute the first year of work, ideally in the form of grants and equity. The difference between the lower and higher ends of the budget indicates the difference between being able to develop artists and make connections vs. having the ability to also produce short-form content with which to strengthen their chances of getting long-form deals. We hope to have seed funding in hand by December 2020 in order to pay for at least two full-time staff, contractors to executive administration, legal, and accounting, with some funds for producing innovative but inexpensive podcasts or short-form videos. We view the company as fully funded with an annual operating budget of $1 million to $3 million (again, the difference between low and high is the number of projects we can get into production.).

The minimum we would like to spend in 2020 is $250,000, though we will
be able to continue our work in development with a little less than
that.

We need to diversify our social networks to get connections to investors, board members, and advisors.

We also believe the exposure for receiving this award will allow us
to communicate our value more concretely to our partners. We want the
world to know we have a innovative solution to the lack of
representation in media and that we have been vetted for having an idea
that is thoroughly thought through. Hollywood runs on buzz. There are
many examples of creative media companies in film & television that
securing partnerships and investment simply off of good press and
attention.

We have a firm grasp of how money is made in Hollywood, but we would
love connections to mentors who can help us better communicate the
potential for returns to investors. We are still in the process of
building our board and could use a respected board member to encourage
others to steward the project. As mentioned before, we think winning
this prize will assist in our efforts to show the world how we are
innovating in the development process in Hollywood using new media as a
tool.

We could foresee partnerships in current Solvers in finding original
stories of covering the many struggles that face our world.