Comparing the digital media news out of Hollywood and Canada in recent weeks has been a matter of innovation in the case of the former and what looks to be a step back here at home.

From south of the border came the announcement of the Nov. 11 launch of quarterlife, a network-quality series made directly for the Internet and distribution on MySpaceTV. The 36 x 8 series is produced, owned, and controlled by Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, who let it be said, are no upstart geeks in the garage. These are the creative minds behind the brilliant thirtysomething series 20 years ago, and, more recently, the Oscar-nominated Leonardo DiCaprio feature Blood Diamond.

Quarterlife might as well be called twentysomething, following the careers, relationships and friendships of half a dozen young creative people. It isn’t a case of a show that couldn’t find a place on traditional TV and so is being dumped online. Rather, it is designed as an interactive experience that looks to both play to and maximize its digital platform. The series’ central character, Dylan, spills about her best friends in a video blog, as so many do on MySpace.

A MySpace profile page will spotlight character profiles, behind-the-scenes footage, and ‘storyline secrets.’ Viewers across the international MySpace community will be invited to create quarterlife content in their own language to share with fellow fans. A complementary social networking site, quarterlife.com, will seek fans’ input about the direction of the series via writing and video submissions.

It all sounds like a utopian ideal of TV in the Internet age, and perhaps might ultimately suffer from trying to be too many things – a release says the site will ‘provide resources in all the areas of life…that concern this age group’ – but you have to give its makers credit for going for the gusto. Also, said resources would presumably open up the sponsorship and ad opportunities needed to make this endeavor worthwhile.

Meanwhile, back on the home front, the private broadcasters are breaking records paying hundreds of millions of dollars for traditional U.S. drama series and sitcoms that offer them little foothold in the digital space. (The entry of Rogers Media as a player with its yet-to-be approved purchase of the Citytvs would likely only send prices soaring even further.) And they are creating little primetime programming they can call their own. It all sounds like a shaky business model in this day and age, especially with the likes of MySpaceTV and YouTube looking to offer a serious alternative.

And quarterlife brings with it the scenario that has long been threatened and should have the TV networks nervous – producers, including significant ones, can bypass them altogether to get their shows to international audiences – and MySpaceTV purports to have 110 million global active users in 20 territories.

There is actually a Canadian precedent to this, in the form of the B.C.-produced web-based sci-fi series Sanctuary, but, unfortunately, the most recent news around here is not so promising.

And that would involve the exodus of top digital media minds from major broadcasters, including CTV, CanWest MediaWorks, Alliance Atlantis, Corus Entertainment and CHUM (see Small Screen, p.5).

Only a few months ago at the Banff World Television Festival, digital media delegates were hailing AA – along with CBC – as one of the casters that was most ‘with it’ in the interactive space. Now, with the sale of the company to CanWest closed – yet still unapproved by the regulator – AA’s big social networking experiment, blogtv.ca, is being shuttered, and VP of content Norm Bolen and SVP of digital media Claude Galipeau shown the door. And it does not appear to be merely a result of consolidation, as CanWest MediaWorks’ own president of interactive and business integration, Arturo Duran, also recently departed.

In an internal memo, CanWest SVP programming and production Barb Williams explained to employees that blogtv.ca was being shut down because traffic, which initially surged, had since declined, and sales interest had not met expectation – CanWest’s expectation. The company is caught up in the spending war with CTV in the conventional TV space and saddled with huge debt, yet nonetheless pushed forward with the AA purchase, which it can only realize with the financial backing of an American bank – a prospect keeping the CRTC up at night.

With the overhead facing Canadian networks, they are focusing on month-to-month bottom lines, seemingly at the sacrifice of long-term plans. It will be interesting to see what they come up with next in terms of digital strategies, especially now that they’ve knocked off some digital media exec’s salaries. Maybe they are banking on the CRTC eventually stepping up to offer more protection against the net’s global reach.

The major casters could for now choose to ignore new takes on program production and delivery such as quarterlife, which could very well fall flat on its face. But the times are so uncertain that quarterlife may in fact represent a big part of the future. And if that proves to be the case, the networks, which aren’t even part of that equation – where exactly will they be?