Jeffrey Katzenberg’s Scheme to Get You to Pay for Six Minutes of TV

Jeffrey Katzenberg, the CEO of DreamWorks Animation, told an audience of TV execs at the Mipcom mart in Cannes that six weeks ago he offered to commission three extra episodes — totaling 180 minutes — of “Breaking Bad.” He offered to pay $25 million per episode, he said.

The episodes would continue from where the show ended.

“I had this crazy idea. I was nuts for the show. I had no idea where this season was going,” he said during the keynote session at Mipcom.

Jeffrey Katzenberg loved Breaking Bad so much that he wanted to pay $75 million for three more episodes (this was before he knew what the ending of the show would be) — but of course, he also wanted to make some money by doing it. His plan: Break up the episodes into six-minute segments (or 30 segments total) and then charge people 50–99 cents each to watch them, which meant that it would cost as much as $10 to watch a full episode.

This idea sounds … terrible. Also genius in an evil way, but mostly terrible because it sounds like a bad way to pay for and consume television. Pretend that what Katzenberg is talking about is a show you like that’s no longer on the air. Would you be into it?


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