 Financing and ways of funding a project have always played a major part in how a final film, TV series or basically any media project looks like, production value and structure-wise. Firstly, financing directly influences the way the film or series feels and looks like due to being directly connected to the production value. I mean, everybody knows that, you know it too. Actors, designers, costumes, locations, studios, cameras and so on, can be employed, purchased or borrowed if there is more money there or any money there. However, secondly, even the TV format itself, its inherent structure, has long since been influenced by the way of funding the program. If we look at TV series for example, we can see the act-frags, the halts, the stops, between two acts of each episode, nearly always matching the commercial breaks. If you watch TV series like The Mentalist or Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Prison Break on DVD, that means an act ends when the screen turns black and a dramatic tension in the plot is at its high. A rather sheer sign that on TV this short black space would have been filled by a commercial break. Really look at these DVDs. The more commercial breaks an episode is interrupted by, the more acts and with it pre-break cliffhangers or moments of heightened tension you'll find. The cliffhangers before the break are written with the intention of keeping the audience in front of their TVs eagerly waiting for the next piece of information when the show returns after the break. This very well shows how commercial interests have co-shaped the TV series structures and narratives that we know today. As we learned in the last chapter, one hour TV series in US cable TV usually lasts about 45 minutes without commercial breaks. As commercial breaks rarely exist in pay TV programs like HBO, we can find time adjusted shows in these channels that tend to last rather 55 to 58 minutes, up to 15 minutes longer than the usual cable TV one hour show. Shows like HBO's Game of Thrones and Showtime's serial killer Saga Dexter make use of this additional time by allowing more information and many times more major characters to rule the scenery of the show. Although Hulu.com and other online video platforms operate with later induced short commercial breaks, many web formats today make use of a completely different commercial model. Product placement and branded entertainment. Product placement is a way of financing a film or series by visually including commercial products in the work, in exchange for payments by the brands. Although many movies feature product placement, German TV for example has strict rules limiting or banning it. Brand entertainment as another marketing strategy goes even further by including commercial brands directly into the story world. If we look at Ikea's web series Easy to Assemble for example, the show not only features the brand logo or only one product, but the whole series takes place in an Ikea market with all the protagonists being Ikea sales assistants. There's an emerging trend amongst brands to sort of get involved with TV series, classic TV series by sponsoring web spinoffs, which is a class cheaper way of doing product placement to be honest, because you can focus a lot more on the product, you're a lot freer and you don't have to pay the huge, humongous amounts you would have to pay if you do classic product placement, especially when you do product placement you are paid by the seconds that your product is on air and that if you compare it to what you see on the team move, the team move spinoffs or the psych spinoffs or I think covered affairs also had one where the product is on nearly all the time or at least you have like a big brand frame where it's all about that, you still have a possibility to sort of pay for something even if you don't want to spend that much money and still be a really prominent part of content. So it's become increasingly popular over the last few years and it has of course makes that TV spinoffs lose maybe a bit of their charm, however they're making payable which is really interesting and something that you strive for because that's what you want. You want to be able to tell more stories, you want to tell other stories, other stories that you couldn't tell on TV because you have limitations there and you don't really usually have those exact same limitations if you do it online because you can be a bit more edgy when you write stories. Rebecca talks about web spinoffs of TV series that work as branded entertainment. A spinoff is a narrative media format that is based on another already existing format. The spinoff most often revolves around one aspect of the original work, for example a character, location, event or theme. To give some examples, famously one of the protagonists of TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the vampire angel, entered his own TV series of the same name, Angel, which became a successful supernatural detective procedural or as was announced earlier in 2013, J.K. Rowling's book and film series Harry Potter will be followed by a spinoff called Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, which focuses on Newt's gammonous life, the fictional author of one of Harry Potter's school books. The US serial drama Teen Wolf from 2011 and running on MTV offers such a spinoff with Search for a Cure, a web original series that can also be defined as branded entertainment. The web series focuses on the TV series's protagonist Sidekick. It also includes the protagonist, but he's rather the Sidekick here. Stiles, played by Dylan O'Brien and his werewolf Scott McCall search for a cure to heal Scott of his werewolf fate is what this series is all about. Search for a Cure also shows what Rebecca Ein calls a rather crass product placement, a very dominating brand involvement. Not only is the title directly followed by the line presented by AT&T and therefore declared a production financed by the US mobile network provider, it also very prominently features a mobile gadget with the logo of sad brand in every episode. Although the writers included the branded items very skillfully into the story, the dominant display disrupts the emotional involvement in the story. When at times the show really feels more like an extended commercial, one reason for that being the length of just two to three minutes per episode. That really prevents any deeper immersion and lean in levels before the next episode has already to be started again. To name another critically very well received branded entertainment format, let's have a quick look at The Hire from 2001 and 2002. The Hire was financed by auto brand BMW and features eight 10 minute short films by famous directors like Guy Ritchie, Tony Scott and Eng Lee. All movies are connected by actor Clive Owen playing the driver in each of them, man hired to drive the vehicles used in all eight movies. The major difference to search for a cure, although equally produced for the internet first, is the high production value and cost and the cinematic level of storytelling, personal and visual language involved in this project. Rebecca Irons sums it up as follows. I think in many ways it's win-win situation however if it turns out to be sort of a long commercial then it obviously didn't work. However I see when speaking to brands and presenting topics to brands they're becoming also increasingly disinterested in having their brand prominently featured and being more about our brand is cool and we just want to associate ourselves with this great story or this series or whatever and that makes it much more easier for storytellers to sort of abide by these product placement laws and still be true to your story.