"Deal or No Deal" TV producer Endemol is exporting its' reality-based freakshow sensibility to the web.
Testosterone-oriented video site Break.com today announced plans to host “Record Breakers” webisodes produced by "Big Brother" creator Endemol.
The new show debuts this summer with an anti -"Jackass" premise: DO try this at home.
In each three-to-five minute episode, a host will challenges two contestants to break some quirky record for a cash prize. At the end of each show, viewers are challenged to tape themselves trying to out-perform the winner and submit their own videos.
The professionally produced content is aimed at roping in more advertisers, according to Break.com CEO Keith Richman. "Working with a premiere partner such as Endemol enables us to combine the best of both worlds to create the best programming experience for our audience and the most effective advertising platform for our advertisers,” says Richman, a Stanford-educated Bay Area Internet start-up entrepreneur who moved to L.A. in 2002.
Break.com seems well suited to a partnership with the Dutch-based Endemol, which introduced primetime audiences to the joys of insect - o - phagia when it launched NBC's "Fear Factor" in 2001. One of Break.com's biggest hits to date featured a woman eating a live praying mantis. Total hits: 11 million.
Can amateur product fit comfortably with big - budget stuff? Richman thinks so, citing a vision of Internet entertainment where material "from the user-generated to the highest quality professional coexist.”
Break.com promises more big media shows in the pipeline. Among them: NBC Universal's digital division is producing a Break.com series devoted to "beautiful women finding creative ways to break different objects."
Wired.com
