Anthony Zuiker During Filming

“I really knew upheaval in the entertainment businesses was underway,” recalls Anthony E. Zuiker, creator and executive producer of the “CSI” television franchise, “when I walked up to the Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles and saw it boarded up shut.”

Zuiker, who will present the keynote during today’s Super Session “Multiplatform: Taking Content to the Next Level,” assessed the changing marketplace and quickly took advantage of his position within the “CSI” universe to experiment with alternative content and expanded platforms. The producer wanted to see for himself which approaches would and would not gain traction with consumers.

“I’ve been very active in cross-platform entertainment since that point,” he says. “In my NAB Show presentation, I intend to explain in detail the things I have done in that time — to pull the curtain back and lay out for the audience exactly what worked, what didn’t and why.”

Zuiker’s recent foray into “new” or “expanded” media came last December in the form of his “digital novel,” “Level 26.” The end product combines traditional fiction with short films, available on a variety of platforms, and interactive storylines that come together to create a multilevel experience — and a business structure that defies traditional models of publishing, broadcasting or online content.

The project has been successful so far, Zuiker notes, admitting that he’s actually found the greatest degree of acceptance of his digital novel and its unique business model outside of the United States.

In the fall of 2006, Zuiker’s “CSI: New York” aired an episode surrounding a group of online women called the Suicide Girls. Shrouded in mystery, this bizarre association comes to the attention of the show’s investigators after a grizzly murder. A “Second Life” site devoted to these mysterious Suicide Girls, which had been built by Zuiker’s team prior to the show’s airing, provided the producer with some interesting data.

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“The level of Web traffic to the site was enormous for hours,” Zuiker says. “That told us that a very large number of people are watching TV and are online at the same time. That was a shocker back then. We had 30,000 log-ins that night and then approximately 4,000 users per day for a year joining the site. The tail was that long. More and more people were creating avatars and becoming part of Suicide Girls world.”

The site itself had no method of generating revenue, but it did yield information about the way people select entertainment and the type of cross-platform content that can help keep people interested in a franchise. Zuiker will debrief his session audience about what he’s learned with that and similar cross-platform experiments.

“So far,” he says, “I’ve tried things with “CSI,” especially “CSI: New York,” that have been great successes as one-offs, but nothing has been as successful in the long term.” He will explore what he has learned from this and what it could mean for the industry.

Though networks are building out new media divisions and CBS was involved with Zuiker’s “CSI” experiments, the writer/ producer says networks need to be more serious about it.

“The networks are the ones that need to carry the brand daily, not just weekly,” he said. “They might complement their shows with interviews or a small online store or some extra content, but it’s not really derivative of the TV episode. For me, the thought that people watch an episode for one hour and then lose engagement with that world for six days is scary.”

This is not, he insists, a prediction about some massive shift that will happen in the future in the way the world gets its entertainment.

“The shift has already happened,” he declared. “What we in the business have to do now is catch up.”

Zuicker’s keynote will be followed by a discussion moderated by Steve Bradbury, vice president, GoTV Networks, about the opportunities and challenges of creating, managing and distributing content for print, video and audio consumption.

Panelists include Brian Levy, chief technology officer, Red Bee Media; Chris Wagner, executive vice president, NeuLion Inc.; James Moxey, co-director, CIRIC; and Josh Walker, CEO, CityVoter.