live TV

NBC Entertainment Chairman Bob Greenblatt had a hit last year with The Sound of Music Live and he’s hoping for a repeat with Thursday’s Peter Pan Live. Greenblatt talks about last year’s big gamble, why it ended up being so successful, his other plans for live TV and which musicals he is — and isn’t — considering putting on the air going forward.

The boy who won’t grow up flies back onto TV screens this week in NBC’s new holiday musical, Peter Pan Live! Can the classic about kids whisked away to Neverland bring the magic to make these live musicals a yearly event? Executive producer Neil Meron thinks so. After last year’s successful Sound of Music Live, he and partner Craig Zadan and the NBC team put a lot of thought into choosing just the right follow-up.

Rebecca Campbell, president and CEO of the Disney ABC Television Station group says her stations encourage user-generated content and sees its use to steadly increase. “I don’t think we’re old media. We’re pioneers again because we have new spaces to take our content and save lives and share happy moments in the community.”

Robert Greenblatt, chairman of NBC Entertainment, says he wants to produce a “live movie” based on Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men. “It’s no longer enough just to put on a good show that people want to watch,” he told the audience at the LiveTV:LA conference. “They have to be compelled to watch it. The best way to get people to feel compelled to come that night is to make it an event.”

Marc Weinstock, director of technical operations at NBC News’ Peacock Productions, says lessons learned from the production of Nik Wallenda’s tightrope walk across the Grand Canyon, particularly about the ability of fiber optic cable to stand up to the wind and elements, helped to shape production decisions about Discovery’s most recent live broadcast in Chicago.

It has become apparent that IP technology — whether as an acquisition and transport method or a supplemental distribution path — has become an essential component of many live productions. While currently not an outright replacement for traditional baseband video contribution, production and distribution gear, IP is reshaping how live video is acquired and transported, switched and routed and ultimately distributed and consumed.

Discovery is ready to feed a man to an anaconda for Eaten Alive. The network released two promos for the Dec. 7 live special, which will see wildlife expert Paul Rosolie go into the belly of the beast . But not to worry, he’ll be wearing a protective suit that will allow him to come out unharmed.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Minnie Driver is joining the cast of NBC’s “Peter Pan Live!” She will play the character Wendy Darling as an adult and narrate the musical, the […]

CHICAGO (AP) — Daredevil Nik Wallenda wowed Chicago and the world Sunday with two hair-raising skyscraper crossings on high wires without a safety net or a harness, and performing one […]

How do you deliver a glitch-free live second-screen viewing experience to millions of people around the world who live and breathe the World Cup? For Michelle Munson, co-founder, president and CEO of Aspera, it all started with quantifying the probability of a glitch based on several IT network givens and building in an appropriately long buffer to offset any hiccups.

ABC’s The Bachelor‘s latest cycle — premiering Monday, Jan. 5, and starring Bachelorette reject Chris Soules — will be three hours long. It’ll also be telecast live.

CBS’s awards show will be hosted by Queen Latifah and broadcast live from the Hollywood Palladium on Nov. 14. Scheduled to appear are Gerard Butler, Robert Duvall, Michael Keaton, Julianne Moore, Jack O’Connell, Chris Pratt, Channing Tatum, Jean-Marc Vallée, Reese Witherspoon and Shailene Woodley.

The news network is presenting two debates next week with the help of local TV stations and it’s been preparing for about a year. Now it’s a matter of daily editorial meetings, blocking, stage management and rehearsals as the clock ticks down.

The veteran Fox Sports broadcasting exec will talk about what it takes to broadcast major live sporting events like the FIFA World Cup and U.S. Open  golf tournament at the Nov. 7 conference in Hollywood. He will describe how Fox Sports will take advantage of all its linear network and digital resources.

NBC is sprinkling a little pixie dust around its coming broadcast of Peter Pan Live! in hopes of luring advertisers. The Peacock is talking up the show’s broad appeal among families, as well as the fact that viewers who tune into the Dec. 4 live broadcast won’t be able to skip past ads. In exchange, the network is seeking between $350,000 and $400,000 for a 30-second ad in the show — one of the highest prices on broadcast television this fall.

Tribune’s Los Angeles CW affiliate has been covering the parade live for almost 70 years. It distributes its two-hour broadcast to stations in the U.S. and more than 200 other countries. The production uses 17 cameras, including 11 along the parade route and one on a Goodyear blimp.

With MLB games going into the early morning and college football and the NFL providing seemingly countless upsets and comebacks, the past weekend’s sports schedule likely left even the casual fan more exhausted than well-rested come Monday morning. Weekends like this one are the perfect way to explain why TV networks are willing to part with billions of dollars for sports broadcast rights.

LiveTV:LA on Nov. 7  in Los Angeles has added a session on red-carpet and other pre-event live programming featuring innovators Ed Corey from the Tournament of Roses and Eddie Delbridge from E! Red Carpet. The day-long conference is being presented by TVNewsCheck and Sports Video Group (SVG), in association with Variety and Variety 411.

Discovery Channel is hoping the extensive production, logistics and safety preparations going into Nik Wallenda’s live walk between two buildings in Chicago next month will generate viewership similar to the tightrope walker’s two earlier televised events, including  last year’s stroll across a section of the Grand Canyon —  more than 10 million.

TV’s costliest shows this season are the ones that have a preponderance of live viewership. Football continues to dominate as the most expensive programming for advertisers, with NBC’s Sunday Night Football and CBS’s Thursday Night Football coming in No. 1 and No. 2 in broadcast, respectively, on Ad Age’s annual pricing survey.

If you perform it live, they will come. That’s what ABC’s Nashville hopes for its Season 3 premiere tonight at 10 — which in a first for the show, features cast members singing live within the broadcast.

“The show is immediate,” says Executive Producer David Perler. “She is talking about the same things we all are talking about that morning in the office. What makes our show so special is that Wendy can comment on something that happened that morning.”

In a nod to the early days of television when sitcoms were broadcast live, NBC has put in development Hospitality, a multi-camera comedy, which would air live every week, including live commercials during the breaks. The project hails from writer Chris Moynihan, Sean Hayes and Todd Milliner’s Hazy Mills Prods. and Universal TV.

The Nov. 7 conference in Hollywood is designed to enhance the experience, audience and production of live television programming. In addition to Greenblatt, it will feature speakers including David Neal of Fox Sports, David Hill from National Geographic Channels, Stacey Foster of Saturday Night Live and Freemantle’s Dan Goldberg.

A new survey shows live television viewing continues to decline as voters migrate to watching streamed content on tablets and smartphones. The reason for the switch? Viewers want to watch video content “on their own terms,” the researchers wrote. “There’s now little doubt that live TV is losing ground to new technologies.” The poll found that less than half of voters now say live TV is their primary way to watch video content — and some 30% say they haven’t watched live TV over the past week. 

Whether it’s storm coverage, major sporting events like the Super Bowl or March Madness, or high-profile entertainment like The Sound of Music, television is at its finest — and most audience-grabbing — when it’s live. In fact, broadcasting’s future may be tied to live TV. Let’s hope for more of it.

Ratings for The Sound of Music have encouraged NBC to consider making live musical productions a holiday tradition.

Overseas suppliers have indicated that features like live over-the-air digital TV and pico projectors are coming to smartphones in the near future, leading to speculation that they could end up in Apple’s next-generation iPhone.