One of the most fascinating destinations for Conan O’Brien was the Xbox 360. How crazy would it have been if Conan skipped cable television for a direct-to-console show on Xbox Live? Conan executive producer Jeff Ross recently shared some details of the Microsoft negotiations with Gamasutra:
The Xbox thing — a lot of the conversations were ‘well, it’s a show, but it’s not a show and there are no breaks, but maybe there are breaks and it’s not 60 minutes, it’s this’ and nobody really knew what it was.
So it was really going to be a leap of faith to jump in with these guys and figure something out which we didn’t know. Plus there were 100 people who were out of jobs and that didn’t bode well for that.
It was interesting to sit and look at it and say, ‘it would be great to be involved in this,’ but at the end of the day, we had some eventual television offers and we basically shied away from the other.
Although it would have been nice if Microsoft launched an original show with O’Brien, I’m still hoping that the company’s rumored plans for television pan out. It still seems odd that Microsoft could be the one that ends up freeing America from the shackles of cable television and bring a la carte TV to the country. In my head Conan O’Brien would have been the perfect symbol of entertainment liberation…especially since Comcast-NBC is one of the primary oppressors. Ha!
