JetBlue and American Express Team for Reality-TV Special

Mobile entertainment usually refers to snippets of video on cell phones. Jet Blue and American Express just upped the ante with Share the Love, a reality TV special that will be aired on Jet Blue’s in-cabin television station.
Overseen by American Express, Evolution Film & Tape, a Burbank, CA-based production company, will create the planned 30-minute special. The company has extensive reality TV and documentary chops, with credits including 10 Years Younger for TLC, Gay Weddings for Bravo, and 70 episodes of Big Brother in 2000.
The TV special is intended to promote the co-branding of the newly launched JetBlue Card from American Express. Share the Love is set to be a real-life competition between two families to find creative ways to earn enough TrueBlue credit-card points to earn a return flight home.
Evolution Film & Tape is putting together two camera teams, each of which will follow one of the chosen families. Using the Sony 570 camera, each team will be comprised of two camera operators, an audio engineer, two assistant camera operators, a field producer (director), a segment producer and a production assistant. The camera crew will shoot almost entirely run-and-gun style, with the exception of a few formal interviews in a studio setting. After offlining on the Avid, the team intends to assemble, color-correct and title the special on the Avid Symphony.
Loosely inspired by perennial reality-TV favorite The Amazing Race, Share the Love is, however, not a time competition – the family that earns its return tickets first won’t necessarily win. Instead, in an interactive-TV twist, JetBlue audiences will vote on the family they deem to have been most creative and fun-loving in their adventures building up TrueBlue points. Each family will confront challenges – a staple of reality races – to earn their points, helped along the way at crucial points by real JetBlue crew members. The family with the most votes will win a year’s travel on JetBlue.
Featured segments of the show will also be posted online at www.jetbluecard.com.
“After they’re aired, we’re not sure what direction we’ll go,” says JetBlue spokeswoman Jenny Dervin. “We’ll see. We’re going to see the scalability of the programming. It may become more than a one-time event.”