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March 26th is the 22rd anniversary of the final WCW Monday Nitro. To mark this occasion, WCWNitroBook.com presents the first of a series of excerpts from the book NITRO: The Incredible Riseand Inevitable Collapse of Ted Turner’s WCW:
Below is the first excerpt, taken from Chapter 39 (‘A Brave New World’).
FOR A FIGURE so often seen as a visionary, Ted Turner owed much of his empire to the dustbins of history. Since the 1980s, the Turner strategy of aggregating content that may have otherwise been seen as old - the MGM film library and the Warner Bros. cartoon library to cite two examples - had consistently availed itself to be an inexpensive (and effective) means of creating branded television networks. Turner’s mastery of broadcast media coincided with an environment whereby viewers consumed programming via a linear delivery system; in other words, a direct-flow stream of communication with no tangible means of audience participation.
By the mid ‘90s, the promise of a future in which viewers could control the flow of information (and, potentially, engage with linear media in a responsive manner) threatened to challenge traditional notions of interactivity and narrative. Rather than simply watch an episode of Seinfeld, for example, and share reactions with those within the immediate physical space, the scope could exist, it was theorized, for a complementary viewing experience involving real-time digital interactions.
Throughout a 16-year career at Turner Broadcasting, Blake Lewin developed many of these ideas. For Lewin, a former Hollywood music licensor whose career trajectory shifted after reading an article about CD-ROMs, the concept of nonlinear engagement seemed positively disruptive for the time. “It seems obvious now, but back then it was revolutionary,” he says. “My whole career at Turner was trying to explore how this interactivity could function in a TV/digital space.”
Simultaneously, TBS Inc. was examining how to bring their traditional properties to the next frontier - the World Wide Web. In the summer of 1996, the company formed a small group of web developers - Turner Online Technologies - in a rudimentary effort to expose its subsidiaries’ content online. The Internet itself was still a decidedly novel innovation; only 20 million Americans had access, and skeptics remained unconvinced of its mass potential. “We are going to see a slowdown in the rate of on-line penetration,” predicted one expert quoted in the Wall Street Journal. “On-line users are going to become a stable, identifiable group.” Aside from the issue of access, statistics regarding Internet usage reinforced perceptions of its limited appeal, with ‘light’ users - individuals spending less than four hours per month connected - accounting for 80% of all customers.
Meanwhile, a curious Lewin acted to familiarize himself with the new medium. In a casual conversation with Bill Cunningham - one of the web developers hired to exploit the content of Turner’s ‘old media’ divisions - he learned of some unusual activity occurring on a company-run chat server. “[Bill said], ‘Man, the chat room just went crazy last night’. I was like, ‘what do you mean it went crazy?’ He said, ‘whenever WCW goes on the air, the chat room gets really, really busy!’”
“We started to look at this correlation,” continues Lewin, “between what was happening on air, and what was happening in the chat room. Sure enough, it was a one-to-one correlation - people were engaging with each other, talking about [Nitro]. The light bulb went off for me. While people are watching television, they want to interact with each other. They want to be part of a bigger audience.
“Today, people refer to this as a ‘second screen’ [experience], people are ‘tweeting’ [while watching]...but in my mind, it all goes back to WCW and the chat rooms. It’s where we firt began to understand that digital communication during linear programming was happening.”
The preceding excerpt was taken from the book NITRO: The Incredible Rise and Inevitable Collapse of Ted Turner’s WCW by Guy Evans and reprinted with permission.
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