Conan O'Brien on Xbox Live was too big a 'leap of faith,' says show's producer

During the "Hollywood Creative Masters" session at CES last month, the executive producer of Conan O'Brien's show, Jeff Ross, spoke on last April's short-lived rumor of talks to relaunch the show on a proposed Xbox Live channel (before the deal was made to bring Conan to TBS), reports Gamasutra contributor Chris Morris (who moderated the CES session). While Ross said it was "interesting to sit and look at it," Microsoft's proposal lacked a clear vision, and he recalled that "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," Ross said, later reiterating that "we had some eventual television offers and we basically shied away from the [Xbox thing]."

Last November, Reuters reported that Microsoft's plans for an Xbox Live "television channel" had taken a more conventional shape, with the company looking to license existing TV programming to stream though an Xbox Dashboard application, with a potential for interactive elements.

"I think it's coming and it's big," Ross said of a TV-type feature on Xbox Live, before concluding, "It's just that we weren't in a position at that point to figure out what it was."

[Photo credit: Team Coco]