New
player in the television industry
Media Rights
Capital (MRC) was founded in 2004 by two Harvard Business School classmates,
Mordecai Wiczyk and Asif Satchu, with a novel approach to funding Hollywood
projects: less upfront money for talent in exchange for more creative
control and an ownership stake in the final project. With a group of
investors that the New
York Times said includes AT&T,
the WPP Group and Goldman Sachs, MRC has the ability to invest $400
million a year, and had their first major success with the 2006 Oscar
nominee Babel. The last few months, however, they have begun
venturing into the television realm, and Variety
reported last Friday that the company had reached an agreement with
the CW to “take over” the struggling Network’s Sunday
night line-up by producing two comedies and two dramas for the three-hour
time period. While the CW will still handle advertising sales, they
will now be shared with MRC for the Sunday night block.
This is
actually MRC’s second venture outside the motion picture business.
In August, 2007, Variety
reported that MRC had signed a deal with Google to produce a series
of original web video content from Family Guy creator Seth
MacFarlane and Disney Channel star Raven-Symone. Under the terms of
the agreement, MRC is doing the financing, Google the distribution,
and both parties will share in the ad revenue generated. “We’re
looking at this as a business-model, not as a pilot,” MRC Digital
president Dan Goodman said at the time. He added that, “We can
produce great content but if we can’t deliver big audiences out
of the gate then it’s going to be a huge challenge,” thus
justifying the pact with Google.
It will
be interesting to see if MRC can have the same success with television
and the Internet that it has had with film, where there are more alternate
revenue sources for “failed” projects; whereas a flopped
motion picture can still generate income overseas and through the DVD
market, for instance, no such avenues currently exist for the other
two mediums. But if these new MRC ventures work, creating content and
then sharing revenue with the distributor could be a new component for
funding such projects in the future. Once again, the revolution continues…
—Anthony
Letizia (May 12, 2008)
