Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and a swarm of other bands on MySpace that grasped the audience-building merits of zero. The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try massively multiplayer online games. Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG-411.
The rise of "freeconomics" is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web. Just as Moore's law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero.
Gladwell covers Dear Frankie, the Death of Diana, The Interpreter, and nobody knowing what constitutes the sublime.
And a great summary here from The Krieger Group:-
Several years ago, Malcolm Gladwell gave an interesting talk for The New Yorker Festival in which he reported on a group of researchers who had developed algorithms to predict whether a script could be developed into a hit movie. The researchers used a technique called neural networks to predict, based upon elements of the script, if the movie would be a box office smash. In fact, the researchers were able to predict the profitability of a movie accurately 6 out of 9 times, even before the director or cast was chosen. In several cases they were within several million dollars. Now 6 out of 9 may not seem great, but Hollywood’s record is poor; successfully predicting gross revenues on only 1/3 of their movies (after all, if they did not think it was going to be profitable they would make the film, unless its Woody Allen).
This one isn't a webseries - it was a one-off web event - which, in itself is an interesting take on how to use online release to create a buzz and possibly a community around your project?
Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is a 43-minute musical film, initially produced exclusively for Internet distribution. It tells the story of Dr. Horrible, the aspiring supervillain alter ego of Billy; Captain Hammer, his nemesis; and Penny, their mutual love interest.
The movie was written by writer/director Joss Whedon, his brothers Zack Whedon (a television writer) and Jed Whedon (a composer), and Jed's fiancée, actress Maurissa Tancharoen. The writing team penned the musical during the WGA writers' strike. The idea was to create something small and inexpensive, yet professionally done, in a way that would circumvent the issues that were being protested during the strike. On October 31, 2008, Time Magazine named it #15 in Time's Top 50 Inventions of 2008.
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, Joss Whedon’s web series, is a bold experiment in online distribution — the series will be available for free for just one week before becoming available on DVD and possibly download — but it’s also damn entertaining.
The tale of an aspiring supervillain told mostly in song, this WGA strike-spurred project treads an odd line between the professional and the amateur, making full use of Whedon’s considerable resources while still carrying a whiff of we-don’t-need-no-stinking-permits filmmaking. The end result is kinetic and inspired, while still bearing the trademark wit and pathos of a Whedon project.
After the fictional status of the show was revealed in September 2006, the show gradually evolved into a multi-character show including both character videoblogs and action sequences, with a complex story universe involving "trait positive girls" who are sought by an evil organization called "The Order".
Lonelygirl15 first came to international attention ostensibly as a "real" video blogger who achieved massive popularity on YouTube. The show was eventually proved as a hoax by suspicious viewers as featuring a fictitious character played by American-New Zealand actress Jessica Rose.
The three creators of Lonelygirl15, first revealed by the The New York Times, were Ramesh Flinders, a screenwriter and filmmaker from Marin County, California, Miles Beckett, a surgical residency dropout turned filmmaker, and Greg Goodfried, a former attorney with Mitchell, Silberberg and Knupp, LLP.
The series began on June 16, 2006, and was slated to run through August 1, 2008. New videos appeared, at a clip of four to five a week, first on YouTube and lg15.com, also on MySpace. As of July 2008, the series has had more than 110 million combined views."
Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried - creators of Lonelygirl15 and Kate Modern and founders of new media company EQAL - talk with Josh Cohen of Tilzy.TV about LG15: The Resistance, why the series is different, and how the LG15 world comes to life.
"We call the shows that we produce 'social shows,' and they're very different from a TV show or a film,"
"The way that you actually construct the narrative, the way that the plot points flow over the course of the week, the way the site interplays with the video, the way the community works together and talks to the videos and talks to the characters, is all different,"
Came across this great piece of radio - a documentary that covers pretty much the complete history of social media by Rory Cellan Jones - and it's available for download as a podcast here:
A decade ago, the UK was a net importer of television programmes. Now we're one of the most powerful players on the international television stage, exporting more than half the world's TV "formats".
Consumers are changing the way in which they watch television
But a transformation in the way viewers consume television is turning the industry's business model on its head and threatening the long-term future of this, one of the UK's most significant creative industries.
'Profound' changes
All the UK's major broadcasters have set up websites to allow viewers to watch their programmes via the computer, while social networking sites such as Bebo are carrying television content and even originating their own shows.
As the lines between television, the internet and social networking sites blur, this presents exciting but controversial new opportunities to bring advertising revenue into programmes.
Experts predict a future in which broadcasters gather substantial amounts of information about viewers and sell this data to advertisers who target their messages much more precisely than at present.
"lonelygirl15 was an interactive web-based video series which began in June 2006, and ended on August 1, 2008.
The show focuses on the life of a fictional teenage girl named Bree, whose YouTube username is the eponymous "lonelygirl15", but the show does not reveal its fictional nature to its audience.
After the fictional status of the show was revealed in September 2006, the show gradually evolved into a multi-character show including both character videoblogs and action sequences, with a complex story universe involving "trait positive girls" who are sought by an evil organization called "The Order".
Lonelygirl15 first came to international attention ostensibly as a "real" video blogger who achieved massive popularity on YouTube. The show was eventually proved as a hoax by suspicious viewers as featuring a fictitious character played by American-New Zealand actress Jessica Rose.
The three creators of Lonelygirl15, first revealed by the The New York Times, were Ramesh Flinders, a screenwriter and filmmaker from Marin County, California, Miles Beckett, a surgical residency dropout turned filmmaker, and Greg Goodfried, a former attorney with Mitchell, Silberberg and Knupp, LLP.
The series began on June 16, 2006, and was slated to run through August 1, 2008. New videos appeared, at a clip of four to five a week, first on YouTube and lg15.com, also on MySpace. As of July 2008, the series has had more than 110 million combined views."
Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried - creators of Lonelygirl15 and Kate Modern and founders of new media company EQAL - talk with Josh Cohen of Tilzy.TV about LG15: The Resistance, why the series is different, and how the LG15 world comes to life.
"We call the shows that we produce 'social shows,' and they're very different from a TV show or a film,"
"The way that you actually construct the narrative, the way that the plot points flow over the course of the week, the way the site interplays with the video, the way the community works together and talks to the videos and talks to the characters, is all different,"
Restructuring at AOL last year hit its social networking site, Bebo, with staff being lost and its Bebo Originals initiative axed. So what's next for original online youth content?
Bebo pioneered the model for online youth drama with ground-breaking content such as KateModern, Sofia's Diary, The Secret World of Sam King and The Gap Year. The demise of its web production arm, Bebo Originals, in November will make it tougher for indies in this sector to survive, according to Nuno Bernardo (left), the man behind Sofia's Diary.
"It makes what was already hard even harder. Bebo was one of the few outlets that commissioned content," says Bernardo, adding that apart from the BBC and new Virgin Media channel Liv, few other UK portals offer scope for online content commissions.
Zad Rogers, formerly creative director at RDF Digital and founder of Atomized Entertainment... worked with Bebo on series including the site's community review show B-Box... "Bebo Originals was absolutely a catalyst for a whole new way of creating content. What they created in a short period of time, from KateModern (above) to B-Box, was really impressive and it falls to some of the broadcasters to pick up that mantle and start working with brands to commission original content," he says.
"- editing is a type of creation as well as filter - the division of labour was clear: professionals managed the creation and filtering of media, both selecting and improving it; amateurs consumed and discussed it.
That era, when media were shaped by the scarcity of production and by the judgment of professionals, has ended.
The problem the web has introduced into intellectual life is also one of abundance, but an abundance of producers, not merely production. The speed and scale of this increase, occasioned by the internet and mobile phones and moving from under a million participants to more than a billion in less than a generation, make the change unprecedented, even considered against the background of previous revolutions, and the resulting amateurisation of media creation is still accelerating."
Media companies have previously been anointers of the talented, by virtue of the production bottleneck. In a world of abundant producers, talent will continue to be scarce, but the talented will not lack for ways to display their work. This makes the market for talent a more ad hoc affair, less about artificial scarcity and more about mutual opportunity.
Even more dramatically, users who have one good thing in them - one recipe, one video, one political rant - can now produce that one thing and be heard by millions, without needing a contract and without securing any long-term audience. The 15th-century rationale came, at base, from the economic risk of spending time and effort producing bad material. Those economic limitations are gone; the question every amateur creator asks themselves every day isn't "Why publish this?" but "Why not?"
With legacy media - the only thing preventing bad material is "economic risk".
On the web, we decide what 'good material' is - at the moment through recommendation, forwarding, embedding, rate of growth of a community around the material etc...
I can't help thinking that attempts by legacy media to block or charge for content before consumption might in the future be seen as a way of maintaining a system for creating bad material.
Am I too utopian in thinking that 'good material' (as decided by the audience) will always find an audience, and therefore money?
That the only content which should fear a world where content is available 'for free', is bad content?
However, (the clips) from web series Kate Modern, show how online video content is also working to recapture the ephemeral moment of broadcasting. Hosted by the social networking site Bebo, the series presents a form of entertainment that simultaneously utilises the ‘anti-ephemeral’ archive capacity of the internet whilst promoting a ‘hyper-ephemeral’ mode of engagement. The former is clear in the total length of the series (almost 14 hours over the two seasons) and the permanent access to the series offered through its website (www.bebo.com/katemodern). The latter is evident through techniques such as marathons, where viewers were invited to remain at their computers for 12 hours as new videos were released hourly, and quizzes that formed part of the narrative and viewers had to solve before the next episode.
Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and a swarm of other bands on MySpace that grasped the audience-building merits of zero. The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try massively multiplayer online games. Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG-411.
The rise of "freeconomics" is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web. Just as Moore's law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero.
This is a work-in-progress. It might never be finished. But when I post on a topic around lessons learned from web series which are hits... I'll write them under this heading, and add to the post here.
It'll be messy.
But hopefully it will grow.
1. "Make sure your series can be seen everywhere".
There seem to be two schools of thought on how to put your show out on the Net.
One is to put the show in one place. On one site. And to make this the only outlet for your show, forcing the audience to come to your outlet on a regular basis to get more of your show.
The other approach is to get it out in as many places as possible.
To still have a single primary 'home' for the show -- the official place new content will appear. But to upload the show and present it in a way to be seen wherever, by whomever, on as many sites as possible.
I have yet to see a true Internet hit which...
- is geo-blocked
- does not provide or allow embedding
- needs special software to be downloaded to see the show.
If I'm wrong, feel free to put me right on comments below.
The evidence seems to be that if the show is as freely available, and 'pass-on-able' in many places, you're more likely to raise the profile of the 'home site' - the primary content stream.
If this were the 1930's and you made a radio show that you want to be heard by as many people as possible - the equivalent of broadcasting on a low powered transmitter would surely work against the ubiquity which would increase your audience, which in turn might earn you more money?
The broadcasting analogy is poor though -- See chapter: "It should provide a two-way transaction with the audience".
---------
Here's an addendum to the original post which is now a work-in-progress.
(okay... I just wanted to say the word addendum).
2. Your (hit) show is just one big beta test.
Or "it's not about getting it brilliant first time, that's why it's brilliant".
When I was doing rounds of meetings with legacy media companies immediately after writing on Season 2 of KateModern, I found it very difficult to explain that the best online shows are not perfect when they start out. That's why they're perfect.
And I'd be met with blank stares -- "Why would you want to put out a show any less than perfect?" or, put a different way - "Why would you want your show to admit publicly that your show is flawed?"
But that's not how it works.
And Internet Hits are open and honest about the fact that they are looking for ways to be better.
If the audience can freely comment on the show (see "Comments should be unmoderated(ish)"), two things happen:
Fans feel they have invested a tiny bit of work in the show, so they are more likely to come back; and secondly... the show gets better as a result of that constant feedback.
"But why would you allow your audience to be able to tell you that your show sucks?"
Legacy media organisations are used to their content being as "perfect as it can be at time of release". Radio, Film, Television, Print - it's all about getting it 'right' before it goes out.
Even live tv and radio generally has a format or running order or slot to run within.
Online, good online, doesn't work that way.
So I found myself once again stumbling to explain that - "starting a show, it doesn't have to be good, but it does have to allow an audience to comment freely on it" - this time in a meeting with Dave Castell at Tough Cookie.
And for the first time, wasn't met with a blank stare.
He really got into the idea, but because of his web background managed to explain it with a phrase I now use for the process:-
DAVE: "Yeah, - you mean you're beta testing the show.
ME: Huh?
DAVE: It's something software developers do, isn't it. Because noone releases software in a finished state, do they. They beta test it - they release it as a beta, and say to the users 'we think this is good, but have a try and say if we can make it any better'.
They evolve around the discussions in the community around the show. But the community also keeps coming back, because there is a place to discuss the show.
All comments are good comments.
As a writer... this is... What's the word. Terrifying.
The same people who can comment "I LOVED it when Charlie said 'xxxxxxx'", are also free to say something less kind.
But it really helps with the sense of shared journey.
We were convinced the 'fans' would hate the new character, Toe. It was based on a laugh with Sam Donovan, the actor who played Lee. There's no way we thought we could even shoot Sam playing his twin brother in episodes which rely on being played out in one shot, let alone anyone enjoying his arrival. But we gave it a try, and the fan reaction meant we even sent him off for the Paris episodes.
(The Family Phillips, written by Lawrence Tallis - storyline by Lawrence Tallis, Luke Hyams & Neil Mossey)
This leads to a couple more suggestions for Internet Hits - which should be new chapters:
- Make sure your show is unmoderated.
Generally on KateModern, anyone could say anything under the videos. The only comment moderation that took place was generally for legal, or 'taste and decency' reasons. This meant that whole new discussions would take place amongst the fans - the show then has life beyond the content we have produced.
- It's not about how many hits or views you get on release.
Again, difficult to explain to legacy media companies, used to judginig hits on overnight ratings, RAJAR figures, Saturday's circulation, or opening weekend box office receipts.
There's only one direction your hit counter will go, and that is up.
The only thing you can do as Producer, is work out how you can make that hit count go up more quickly over time, rather than measuring a show on what it's doing this week.
Sorry for the lack of pictures... will have to hunt some down to jazz this up.
It's a response to an excellent article written by Bill Thompson on bbc.co.uk about online regulation.
There are often moments during the widespread adoption of transformative technologies where an old way of thinking or doing business is so threatened by the new possibilities that its adherents call on those with political power to "Do Something!"
It never works.
If the music industry had spent more time thinking of ways to deliver great music to its customers over the internet and less lobbying politicians and suing potential customers it would probably be thriving by now.
Book publishers, less certain of their own importance, are taking notice of the exciting experiments at Faber & Faber and Penguin instead of looking for protectionist legislation to keep the new media world at bay.
And these are extracts from an email I sent.
### Since December last year, I was on the writing team for an online drama called katemodern.
You may have heard of it -- it was, apparently, the first online drama made in the UK, and one of the first in the world (certainly in the UK) to embed itself on a social networking website (bebo) www.bebo.com/katemodern and was the UK spinoff of the American online phenomenon lonelygirl15.
katemodern got 61 million video hits, and 6 million profile views on bebo.
The show ended this summer as scheduled - sorry, bear with me, there is a point to this email! - and I now give talks to and consult for [large and small] media organisations.
It feels as if I was hurled on an exponential learning curve, and am now try to bring others up to speed on what I glimpsed writing 70 odd episodes, (storylining 140 odd episodes), as to the potential of interactive drama - while you're making it along with your audience interacting with and commenting on it.
The way I try to explain it is that it feels like working in television drama in 1950.
"Everyone is trying to think of it, and critique it, and work in it, as if they are radio drama producers.
But it's not radio, it's television. But we dont know what the medium can yet fully achieve! We just know it's not radio, theatre, or cinema."
Note About Removal of Video
Due to it's use of nudity and adult themes, a video was removed from the blog by myself after a lengthy discussion with community members and a consensus that this was the proper action to take. The author of the post has been contacted and informed of the removal and why it occurred. Anyone wishing to discuss the matter further can contact me at xxxxxxxx@xxxxxx or can PM me in IRC.
Thank you!
-- I read some of the comments, and apparently, the post didn't have a harmful intention behind it. That's not what's interesting.
What's interesting, for me, is the *the community* decided it wasn't right for lg15today.
lg15today's *audience* decided it wasn't appropriate.
Not the makers of lonelygirl15,
Not the authors of lg15today.blogspot.com
Not the company that hosts the blog,
Nor even the ISP.
*The Audience*, *The Community* decided it would be best to take it down.
For the first time, we have a medium which allows *the audience* to moderate content.
To flag up and vote down the inappropriate.
To decide amongst ourselves (as an audience) what is safe and appropriate and what we would like to be associated with.
As an audience, we're not quite ready for what exactly that means.
But we're all learning. And becoming more 'literate' and experienced audiences.
It's a fascinating time out there, as content adapts to the technology.
And even more fascinating as we, the audience, adapt the content to fit what we as a society feel is best.
---------
4. The phrase "WEB TV" sucks.
Here's a thought - just putting it out there.
(DEEP BREATH)
There seems to be no general consensus on an accepted term for the genre of content that's being described as online show, web show, web series, online series, online drama, online comedy, online (insert genre here), digi novel or diginovel, webisodes, social shows, Internet narratives, social media series and many many more...
- you can probably suggest some more terms floating out there in COMMENTS below.
But there's one term that is really bugging me. And I find it very difficult to use it on this site.
WEB TV.
Web TV.
webtv.
The problem is, - it does actually instantly convey what a show is.
It's the most understandable of all the terms, and yet there's something about it that doesn't feel right.
In the 1950's, we didn't instantly backdate the new medium of television by calling it VisionRadio. Though that is pretty much what TV is, technically.
But the content, - the CONTENT - of TV managed to develop beyond "recording a radio series in a television studio". Genres evolved in ways that can only exist on television.
So what to do with WEB TV.
There are shows which properly describe themselves as Web TV.
They are TV shows "broadcast" on the web.
Or short films, broken up and uploaded to the web.
But if you have a stream of content (even if it is mostly video, and episodic), and are trying to build a community, and a 2-way relationship with the audience...
...Do you really want to hobble your show with the phrase "Web TV"?
Aren't you attempting to create something beyond TV?
-------------
5. What choices do you make when creating an online series?
Attended a forum held at BAFTA organised by NyAC in October 2009, where Producer Phil Parker chaired with a very simple question...
With which key issues do you struggle when creating online interactive narratives?
It's a good question for any web show creators.
Here's my response -- feel free to add your own in COMMENTS below!
DYNAMIC UNIVERSES - the choices made when writing an Online Show?
TALE OF TWO NARRATIVES
- HOLDING THE FAN'S HAND?
Linear roll-out of story/narrative developments, in easily understandable guided sequences
or
- JOY OF DISCOVERY (MYSTERY, BROKEN NARRATIVE)?
Do you put content out there, for fan to engage by pieceing together aspects of story from what they find -- fans help each other out in comments, forums, wikis etc. alongside the creator's stream of content?
TIME, SPACE & DIMENSION
- single closed, completed narrative - using the internet as a TV transmission mast
(e.g. Clark & Michael, We Tell Stories)
or
- "live show" = open,ongoing narrative played out in real time
(e.g. lonelygirl15, katemodern)
or
- Mini closed narratives, with "live" ongoing communities around the writer, or performers
(e.g. The Guild, Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog)
FANS AS AUDIENCE,
or EVERYONE AS FANS?
Technology allows Everyone to comment on Everything.
Is that conversation encouraged by 'the show', or even acknowledged by the characters?
COMMUNITIES
- Controlled mothership ("Protect the brand!", geoblocking),
or
free-for-all?
i.e. 'Do you try to drive everyone to your home site, or do you put everything everywhere'
'HONESTY'
The two extremes:
- Having a backstage area which isn't on view to the public
or
- Putting *everything* out there - storyboards on youtube, works in progress scripts, behind the scenes blogs
= Hugh McLeod wrote his book 'How To Be Creative' on his blog, and it has been freely available for years. It hasn't had a negative impact on sales, if anything, is acting as years and years of pre-publicity.
FUNDING AFFECTING THE CREATOR'S CONTENT
- Sense of Community - paypal tip jar to pay for the next series
- or Micropayments, Advertising/Sponsorship,
- or selling 'containers' - DVD's, Live shows, Live screenings, Music tracks, Books
- or all these options
Nobody's Watching is a television program that was never aired. It originated with and was written by Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence, as well as Neil Goldman and Garrett Donovan, writers for Scrubs and Family Guy.
The pilot was developed for the WB Television Network, but network executives passed on the show for the 2005 schedule after test audiences seemed to be confused by its premise. However, in June 2006, the pilot was leaked onto YouTube, and quickly attracted attention from viewers around the world. On July 3, a report in the New York Times suggested that the show could yet make it to a full series, thanks to the positive response from YouTube viewers. During the Friday, July 21, 2006 airing of Last Call with Carson Daly, guests Neil Goldman, Taran Killam, and Paul Campbell called NBC president Kevin Reilly on air, who seemed to confirm a pickup for the series. He later recanted, but a deal was struck to produce webisodes. Webisodes of varying length were released consistently until January 12, 2007.
*****STORYGAS INTERACTIVE RATING***** NOBODY'S WATCHING Can you embed? YES from youtube Can you comment? YES on youtube Also on youtube? YES Forums? not found Blog? not found ************************************
What do you think? Sum it up in 3 words or score out of 10? COMMENTS below...
Storytelling used to be a closed loop. As Aristotle said: “A story needs to have a beginning, a middle and an end.” Social storytelling flies in the face of that. It is open-ended. The objective is to tell a story in a way that leaves room for the consumers to fill in the blanks, to add their own tendrils to the main storyline.
Bastholm is primarily talking about branded stories in advertising, but I think this open-loop storytelling particularly applies to the types of storytelling we’re seeing in social media and lifestreaming in which we see ongoing snippets that tell people’s stories. Those stories remain open as long as the folks behind them are alive and telling their stories publicly.
One of the inspirations for starting StoryGas - and still one of the best places to track web series, and follow how communities form around content is lg15today.blogspot.com
It is just a little under two years since LG15 Today launched and a few minutes ago the blogspot passed the 500,000 visit landmark with over 797,000 page views.
A long long time ago the 436 had taken away the official chat on the lonelygirl15 web site so a few fans got together to create the LG15 Addicts Userplane chat site. While chilling there the concept of the collaborative valentines card was hatched. It was a huge hit and it became quite apparent that given the opportunity this community had a huge capacity to collaborate creatively using the tools provided by the Internet. It was out of that spirit and the open free philosophy of lonelygirl15 comments that LG15 Today was born as a collaborative blog with the goal of keeping the community up to day with what was going on in the Breeniverse. Whether it be lonelygirl15 news, community videos, a snow ball fight on comments, lonelypirates15, the latest ARG puzzle or any of the other antics that were taking place in the community we wanted to find a way of keeping the community up to date on what was going on.
They link to great nuggets like this too - Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried of EQAL talking about the history and issues surrounding the writing and production lonelygirl15 and KateModern, and how they would describe them as "Social Shows". (Here below I think talking at the launch of the Polish lonelygirl15 spinoff, n1ckola).
Quarterlife is an American web series, also briefly an NBC television series, created by Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, the creators of Thirtysomething and Once and Again, and producers of My So-Called Life. The show is about a group of twenty-something artists, who are coming of age in the digital generation.
The first season was released online in 36 parts, each approximately eight minutes, from November 2007 to March 2008. These were combined into six hour-long episodes for television.
Each part of the series premiered nearly simultaneously on MySpace and the official Quarterlife site. It garnered the third-highest views of any scripted series in Myspace history. In five months, total online views for the series -- on Myspace, quarterlife, and YouTube -- were over 9 million. After the series was picked up by NBC, some of the hour-long episodes were made available on the NBC and Hulu websites. During this time, Herskowitz claimed the show accrued an average of 300k views per episode.
quarterlife.com is home to the hit internet series quarterlife, as well as a social network for artists, thinkers, & doers. And we're looking to our users for our next TV series. Come to quarterlife.com, become a member, upload your scripts, videos, and ideas. If your work is chosen, you could be working with award winning filmmakers Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick on your very own series!
QUARTERLIFE - ALL 36 EPISODES HERE:-
QUARTERLIFE BEHIND THE SCENES VIDEOS HERE:-
*****STORYGAS INTERACTIVE RATING***** QUARTERLIFE Can you embed? YES from MySpace and youtube Can you comment? YES on MySpace, youtube and home site Also on youtube? YES Forums? YES on MySpace Blog? YES on MySpace *************************************
The International Academy of Web Television (IAWTV) is an independent non-profit organization whose membership is comprised of leaders in the field of web television, web video and the digital entertainment industry. The principle mandate for the organization is to oversee the selection of the annual Streamy Awards™ which recognize outstanding achievement in episodic shows produced originally for broadband distribution.
For more information go to the Academy's website at http://iawtv.org/
The Academy is looking to finalize their membership and are taking nominations. If you know of people who would be an asset to the Academy membership, you can send your nominations to info@iawtv.org.
Gladwell covers Dear Frankie, the Death of Diana, The Interpreter, and nobody knowing what constitutes the sublime.
And a great summary here from The Krieger Group:-
Several years ago, Malcolm Gladwell gave an interesting talk for The New Yorker Festival in which he reported on a group of researchers who had developed algorithms to predict whether a script could be developed into a hit movie. The researchers used a technique called neural networks to predict, based upon elements of the script, if the movie would be a box office smash. In fact, the researchers were able to predict the profitability of a movie accurately 6 out of 9 times, even before the director or cast was chosen. In several cases they were within several million dollars. Now 6 out of 9 may not seem great, but Hollywood’s record is poor; successfully predicting gross revenues on only 1/3 of their movies (after all, if they did not think it was going to be profitable they would make the film, unless its Woody Allen).
It started with a girl named Bree. At least that's what she said her name was. She was 16, American and girlishly pretty. In June 2006, under the name LonelyGirl15, she posted her first video online. It lasted a minute and a half, was shot in her bedroom and showed her talking direct to camera. She namedropped a couple of other video bloggers (vloggers) and pulled a few funny faces. 'What you need to know about my town,' she said, 'is that it's really boring. That's probably why I spend so much time on my computer, I'm a dork.' That was it. Typical of the confessional teenage vlogs circulating the web at the time.
A few days later, the next video appeared, showing Bree goofing around with a puppet monkey. In the third, she talked about being home-schooled and imparted some trivia about Antarctica. Pretty mundane stuff. It wasn't until the sixth vlog, entitled My Parents Suck ..., that the tone shifted: in it she complained that her parents had forbidden her from going out with her friend Daniel on account of her 'religion'. It wasn't clear what religion this was. Within hours the video had notched up 50,000 hits. (The previous postings had counted 50,000 to 100,000 hits in the course of a week.) Two days later the tally was up to half a million. Suddenly LonelyGirl15 was a phenomenon. With each new video, as parental tensions heightened and suggestions of the occult crept in, the buzz grew ever greater.
It's a great article, but... there's just one TINY fragment of a sentence with which I really can't agree:
"Scoring a web series hit, however, is still no cinch. Even shows whose view count passes 100,000 in the first week (a fair index of success) can find it hard to sustain."
100,000 in the first week = a fair index of success?
That sounds a bit like "sunset media" industry talk.
Surely one of the strengths - opportunities - of the web is the ability to build a following from scratch. To whatever number of hits... over whatever length of time.
Unless I've misunderstood the article, applying a criteria of "TV Overnights" to the 'first week of uploading' feels incredibly bogus. There may be a time for shows to reach the stage of gaining 100,000 hits per week. But to judge the success of a show by numbers "in the first week" feels hugely misleading.
How about the size of the community around a show?
How busy the message boards or forums?
How many unofficial fansites linking to the home site?
How many members or fans signed up on the home site, or bebo, or MySpace, or Facebook?
Surely these are better indicators of the health of a show. The quantum shift for all of us is stepping away from the methodology of measuring TV shows or film "on release", towards tracking communities of fans over time.
We haven't developed ways of measuring, recording and sharing these 'other' indicators. Not to an 'industry standard'. And it doesn't fit the way sponsors or networks currently operate, so I think we'll continue to see sentiments such as
"shows whose view count passes 100,000 in the first week (a fair index of success)"
in the industry for some time to come.
...web drama, online comedy, online narrative, interactive drama, internet television series, multi-platform storytelling, webseries, web series, web tv, webisodes, transmedia, multiplatform or interactive narrative... whatever you call it, we're watching.
The links below help sort what you're looking for.
HAVE A LOOK THROUGH THE COMPLETE LISTS OF WEB SERIES BELOW!
Leave us a comment... send us a question... or link... or show... or anything else! (Easiest way is to click on "COMMENTS" under each post - Feel free to say hi!)
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