The One Big Reason Why BuzzFeed Needs to Break Into TV

In a room at the BuzzFeed Inc. offices in Los Angeles, past a keg of cold-brew coffee, a popcorn maker, and a cardboard cutout of a grinning Joe Biden, Jonah Peretti, the chief executive officer and founder, is riffing on the future of entertainment. There’s a convergence under way, he’s saying, between Hollywood spectacles and the low-budget micro-attractions that internet companies such as his crank out. Already, people binge-watch prestigious television series on their mobile phones and stream low-resolution web ephemera onto their living room TVs. BuzzFeed, he says, is positioned to prosper on the further blurring of these distinctions. “We think of TV as an opportunity,” he says. “Let’s create what we think TV will be in two or three years, and let’s partner with people who know how to make it.”

He avoids using the word “synergy.” In the future-of-media-conference-hopping, keynote-speech-dropping circles in which Peretti, 43, is a fixture, the S word was long ago retired, a discarded buzzword of the early days of the internet, forever tainted by the spectacular failure of Time Warner Inc.’s allegedly synergistic merger with AOL Inc. Yet the underlying idea—that traditional and new media companies could team up to mesmerize audiences, making boatloads of money along the way—is resurgent.