From AdAge today comes this great tidbit about the shifting influence of TV ratings (though I’m very curious to see the metrics by which these are measured).
When it comes to engagement, or a show’s ability to command attention from viewers, “Ted” (3.4 million viewers) trumps “Idol” (average viewership of 50 million across two shows each week). According to Nielsen IAG, the most “engaging” show on TV is ABC’s “Lost,” followed by “The Middle,” also on the Disney network. Tied for third this season, as of April 19, are ABC’s “Brothers & Sisters”; NBC’s “Chuck”; ABC’s “Desperate Housewives”; NBC’s “Heroes”; and CBS’s “Rules of Engagement” and “The Amazing Race.” Rounding out the list are Fox’s “24,” ABC’s “Ted,” NBC’s “Parenthood,” and CBS’s “Survivor” and “The Big Bang Theory.”
What do these shows all have in common?
Only TWO are unscripted (The Amazing Race, Survivor)
At least three have rabid, if small fan followings (Lost, Chuck, Heroes, 24). I’d argue you could add B&S, Desperate Housewives, and Parenthood to this list, if the fans are given a chance to show it (as Chuck fans did when their show was about to be canceled)
Only TWO are ending their first season (Parenthood, Rules of Engagement)
I want to see someone analyze the narrative elements of each of these shows, to see if there’s any overlap. For instance, Survivor and The Amazing Race are fairly similar in that they involve ordinary people in extraordinary situations, with interpersonal relationships stressed as a narrative device to keep the show engaging (think Survivor strategies and the way the producers paint a hero and a villain, and think of the dramatic pairings in Amazing Race). 24, Lost, Chuck, and Heroes all have a big online fanbase (Lost and Heroes in particular, of course), and their narratives have often been described as video-game-like (well, not Chuck, but there’s an argument there, especially in more recent seasons when he’s a legit spy). I think that narrative structure encourages engagement, as it asks the audience questions and then lets them sink in for months, even years before giving what might be considered an answer.
Of course my immediate follow up question is how engagement changes on each of these shows when watched online. While we’re at it, what are the most engaging original web shows or videos?
I still find it impressive how much the internet has changed the focus of our communication to real-time, current, relevant information, shrinking the news cycle and creating massive events around happenings that once might have only been a blip on our collective radar. Even if these new real-time events only last a few hours, they draw more people, in terms of viewership or attendance, than just about anything else. I’m talking about current news events, but also live cultural events, like live sports, concerts, or variety shows – say what you want about NBC, but Sunday Night Football is still the highest rated show on broadcast TV, every year (yes, even bigger than Idol), to say nothing of the Olympics. And, no shock, ratings for live broadcasts of awards shows like the Emmys and Oscars have gone up in recent years, as the networks have stopped time-shifting and started showing them at 5p Pacific time.
More impressive still is that the web, the birthplace of relevance in the 21st Century, has been so slow to catch on to this in a big way, with original programming. Time and again we’ve seen live events draw huge crowds online – from the NCAA Tournament on cbs.com every year, to CNN’s live streams of big speeches and events, to YouTube’s U2 live stream from the Rose Bowl, and most recently YouTube’s massive success (outside the US) in streaming IPL cricket matches. There are so few live offerings though, likely due to networks’ hesitance to make digital deals based on the widely accepted but completely unsupported notion that anything simulcast on the web will cannibalize regular TV audiences. After the IPL success, YouTube is doubling its efforts to find live programming, but who knows how long those deals will take.
I have a solution: let’s make some original live content, only on the web. There are a few shows trying this already, with varying success, like the Streamys, but we’ve yet to see a recurring show based around live broadcasts on the web. Even Diggnation, a show completely based on relevant links from Digg, isn’t live.
Stop begging for respect in the digital space and start making cool stuff.
At last year’s Streamy Awards, everything felt new and exciting, if a bit self-serving. The first annual awards were a chance for a burgeoning group of starry-eyed creators to gather in meatspace for the first time and acknowledge that yeah, we’re all doing this, and yeah, we’re onto something here. During the show, the in-jokes were plentiful and awards were rightly doled out to the independent pioneers of the space, shows that gave us aesthetic guidance and the beginnings of business models, and to the few members of mainstream Hollywood who we called our own. We patted each other on the back, packed into an after party, and the mainstream industry started to take notice. Year One: Mission Accomplished.
This year, I walked away from the awards feeling frustrated, and a little annoyed. In their sophomore year, the awards featured high production value content from major studios, shows that had better viewership than a lot of cable TV programs, and a whole lot more legit celebrities. Let’s be honest: from business models to aesthetics, web TV is beginning to tentatively find its stride. Many of this years’ Streamy nominees are making a decent living creating and maintaining interesting scripted and non-scripted content on the web. Big media companies and big brands are investing in this space more and more every day. We are beyond the self-deprecation and the simple short narratives, and we need to identify and reward the individuals who are making actual progress toward the new, sustainable business models and progressive aesthetics that interactive platforms allow. That’s what I thought the Streamys were supposed to do.
It’s frustrating that IAWTV Chairman Michael Wayne clearly agrees with me, given his remarks last night, but the votes and the general tone of the show didn’t reflect it. I think the IAWTV and the Streamys need to take a good look at their goals and focus themselves and their membership on achieving them. The fact the show exists is a huge, important step; we celebrated that in year one. But an awards show is supposed to recognize achievement in artistic endeavors in order to force content creators to take risks in their work and push the medium to new aesthetic heights and practical/business models. Right now, the Streamy Awards is still caught up in its mere existence, and that’s a reflection of all web TV in general. That was amazing last year. We need to get over it.
Rather than honor achievement, this years’ Streamys added an endless stream (pun!) of categories to make sure every YouTuber, vlogger, category, sub-category, genre, and sub-genre had a chance to be featured (Kevin Pollak: “in Hollywood, guest starring on a web series is the new jury duty.” So why do we give an award for it??). They gave top honors to non-narrative series Between Two Ferns. People continued to poke fun at themselves with jokes about not having money, not being able to find “real” work and thus turning to the web, and the small audiences they’re expecting. That sounds really disingenuous when it’s coming from Mark Gantt, whose much-honored series The Bannen Way was financed by Sony and featured recognizable faces. I don’t feel bad that you had to work hard and struggle to sell your show to a big media company. It takes hard work to sell a regular TV show too.
If the Streamy Awards is going to be the Oscars of Web TV, it needs to recognize true talent, true artistry, and true innovation in the web space. In conversations last night, I compared it to the Academy Awards: there may have been 10 nominees for Best Picture this year, but each of them had audiences and critics talking about them as inspirational artistic endeavors. There were amazing movies that were not nominated for an Academy Award this year – that doesn’t mean The Hangover wasn’t fantastic, but it should be honored at a different awards show (the Golden Globes perhaps). As much as I love Between Two Ferns, did it expertly weave a storyline around a brand in the way Easy to Assemble did? Did it refine the web romantic comedy the way Wainy Days might have? No. And I watch every episode of Auto Tune the News, but does it directly call into question the traditional media system in a way unique to the web, like The Tomorrow Show does?
With the onslaught of criticism this year’s show is receiving, even from within the community, I’m confident next year’s show will be better focused, better run, and more reflective of where the web TV space wants to be rather than where it is. I think IAWTV members (I am not one, yet) are waking up this morning and realizing “that was kind of my fault.” Maybe. Good news is, that means we can fix it.
If I tap here, we get to see a video of the bush burning and play the slapping game
With the hype dying down, TechCrunch recently published a great article detailing what could be an actual potential use for an iPad (a device that otherwise just seems like a great tablet computer without an operating system). It’s true – a device like this could be a new frontier for interactive storytelling, if only because there is finally an interface that will make it as easy to read/watch/experience an interactive multimedia story as it is to page through the morning paper or a good novel.
It’s often clunky and downright annoying to use a mouse to navigate through a longer interactive creative work, be it a story, script, graphic novel, or just a DVD. It takes about 45 minutes for a user to get all the way through my thesis, a fact I was not proud of when I tried to explain to my parents how easy it would be for them to read and understand it. This gets even worse when any of the media involved in the interactive story should be viewed with a 10-foot experience, on a television or other larger screen; how often do you want to throw your remote at the TV when it doesn’t scroll to the correct button?
That’s where a huge, responsive touchscreen, seamlessly integrated with a television, could come in handy. Imagine being able to combine the 10-foot experience with a more intimate storytelling experience. Viewer/users could watch a television show on TV and have an iPad automatically present context-relevant links, in real time. Want to dig deeper into a side character’s momentary appearance on camera? Wait until the commercial, then tap a link on your iPad and watch a short video, read a graphic novel or a short story, or play a casual game on the web that gives you even more narrative. The interface allows for an easy way to add an entire dimension to a visual narrative, a level of depth that previously only existed when users moved from TV to computer, or watched/experienced the entire narrative on a computer screen.
It’d be foolish not to touch on how beneficial this could be advertisers, with context-relevant links able to be presented to viewer/users as they watch a product integrated into a TV or web show. Interactive narratives using a well-designed interface could take a step out of the process from ad watching to product purchasing.
There’s more good news: the perfect software already exists to make this happen, and easily: it’s called Sophie. Sophie finishes a natural progression for its creator, Bob Stein, who was one of the first people to look at a video playing on the same page as text (at the MIT Architecture Machine Lab, the same people who brought us black text on white backgrounds on computers…that’s not a joke), and see the potential for a new form of communication. His first crack at the seamless integration of video with text became the Criterion Collection, which at its genesis essentially served as a model for DVDs and Blu-Rays today. Early Criterion titles included on their LaserDiscs scholarly essays with specific references to the films, and being able to play those clips as the reader went through the argument was a massive innovation in the early ’90s.
That was a mere drop in the hat compared to what Sophie intends to do. Stein now runs the Institute for the Future of the Book (among other things), and their Sophie project aims to make it relatively easy to create what are most easily described as interactive books; works that utilize multiple media and interactivity alongside text in order to get their point across.
My hope is that someone is already hard at work on a Sophie Reader for the iPad (you can get started making one now, Sophie is open source). I want to see the day when I can read a story on my iPad, then tap a link to start a context-relevant video playing on my TV; while I’m watching that, I can chat with other fans in the online community, then seamlessly go back to reference the text when something amazing happens on the TV. And after the TV episode is over, it can point me to more online videos and texts that can further immerse me in the narrative.
And as TechCrunch points out, that experience is something to pay for.
But, much to my dismay, there are actually a lot of (non-evil, non-monetary) benefits to a non-neutral web, especially to people who want to see robust interactive and video content served over these pipes (despite what Tubefilter might write). The hardware and software of the web runs into frustrating limitations when there’s a limited amount of bandwidth to be distributed equally to everyone. “Everyone” includes web video producers, who rightly need more bandwidth, and bloggers, who rightly need less. Mark Cuban put it well yesterday:
…in a net neutrality environment no bits get priority over any other bits. All bits are equal…When that happens, bits collide. When bits collide they slow down. Sometimes they dont reach their destination and need to be retransmitted. Often they dont make it at all. When video bits dont arrive to their destination in a timely manner, internet video consumers get an experience that is worse than what traditional tv distribution options.
We can’t have our cake and eat it too. We can’t argue that we want to web to be neutral to allow for innovation and cultural progress, but then desperately need more than our equally distributed share of the web in order for our art form to progress. But do we really have to surrender our rights for the good of artistic innovation? We did that once, and boy has that one come back to haunt us…
I’m just wondering if there isn’t a third path here, an alternative that makes it so we don’t allow huge corporations to unfairly and disproportionately benefit from a non-neutral web, but still allows us to take fuller advantage of limited technology. Should we make a third-party, unaffiliated entity that oversees connection throttling, the UN of the web? Or could someone design a program for the infrastructure of the network that will monitor broadband usage and adjust limits accordingly? Is that even possible?
With this week’s announcement of NBC falling under the same corporate umbrella as NBCU’s cable empire (Bravo, Syfy, Oxygen, MSNBC, CNBC, the list goes on…), broadcast television is dead. Where there has always been a dotted line between the profits of the NBCU cable empire and the losses of NBC Entertainment, there’s now also a dotted line between their content production divisions. How long will it be until Universal Cable Productions folds into Universal Media Studios? I’ll set the O/U at a year. Then, the only thing differentiating NBC from its cable counterparts will be its news division (which, by the way, is already branded as MSNBC…the name of the cable channel. Try going to http://www.nbcnews.com).
And yet, the broadcast model of ad-supported media is as strong as ever and is poised to become even stronger as it becomes fragmented and attached to content. It’s not news that advertisers have generally become more content-focused as they’ve invested in digital content, whether it’s Nestea’s investment in CTRL or Microsoft’s sponsorship of The Guild. It’s almost a throwback to the birth of TV: the Colgate Comedy Hour, Texaco Star Theatre.
The difference now is content comes with a distribution outlet attached to it (you know, the medium is the message and all that). Digital content is increasingly becoming aesthetically tied to the medium in which it’s being presented. Not every web show is meant to live on YouTube or Hulu; some are better viewed on iTunes or through Xbox Live, or even in their own complex interactive environments. On top of that, it’s become clear that for a show to be attractive to sponsors, producers are being held responsible for protecting the way brands are presented by ensuring the brand message isn’t diluted or otherwise changed by anything around it. In other words, if your show is sponsored by Kodak, you can’t put it on YouTube for fear their algorithm serves a Fuji ad right next to it. The solution? Create your own site to distribute your content, a site you can design to be Kodak-branded. This is still the broadcast model for media, it’s just fragmented. Today, creating a web show can be likened to starting your very own network. Which means you can sell your very own ad inventory.
On top of that, you’re free on the web to do something TV producers would only die for: you can take your existing content or create new content related to your main show/network and sell it to other people at the same time! Premium content centers like YouTube, Hulu, and blip.tv have huge user bases to tap into and distribution deals with platforms you might not have made agreements with. Think of these guys as the CBS/ABC/NBC/Fox of the digital world – places that don’t produce content themselves necessarily, but sell advertising around acquired content. They’ll increase the reach of your content and can drive traffic back to your main site for your advertisers. So you can sell or just post for free smaller pieces of your content to these major content centers, almost as marketing for your own network. If it’s a hit, the big guys make money, you as a producer make money, and your sponsoring brand makes money as traffic is driven back to your site.
So the broadcast model might be dead on television, but it’s essentially just gaining an extra dimension online with the ability for content creators to create and own their distribution channels. We’ll see the standard licensing model applied to the big guys, as it was to the four major broadcast networks. But the smaller networks focused on single shows will be able to take advantage of their control of their distribution and make another revenue stream out of it.
I had the pleasure of seeing We Live in Public the other night, Ondi TImoner’s well-done and well-received follow-up to DiG!. It follows the life of Josh Harris, a guy you’d think us web series enthusiasts would know more about, considering he founded the very first web TV station, Pseudo, using a lot of money from dot.com investors. He was obsessed with the idea of the then-burgeoning internet as the beginning of a surveillance culture, and used a lot of his money to experiment on artists like himself, seeing what would happen if subjected to an extended period inside a planned community where surveillance was law. The results were some cool, if at times inhuman, experiments that radically altered the lives of the people who took part in them (Harris included).
Where the film lost me is when it tried to link Harris’s prognostications about the future of the internet with where we are today, or where we’re headed. On the one hand, today’s level of connectedness definitely implies surveillance of sorts – I can almost tell you every time John Mayer farts, and I’ve never been happier than when I stopped listing myself as “single” on Facebook so I could stop being served ads for porn. It is anxiety-inducing how much people can find out about us on the web. But on the other hand, one thing I learned while studyingsocial media in school: it’s much more complicated than all that.
True, there are people out there who take this whole thing to a massive extreme, and resemble the WE LIVE IN PUBLIC experiment a little too much. But who is the average user? The average user learns over time to have much more of a two-way conversation with their virtual and actual selves. As big a rush as it may be to see that you have over 1,000 Facebook friends, or 200 Twitter followers who actually show interest in what you’re doing, or a WoW guild to whom you feel closer than your actual friends, actuality is still lurking behind you, waiting to come back and remind you that it’s not all that easy. That’s what happened to Harris.
But how does this affect the children, who are just discovering what actual reality is? There’s definitely more chance than ever for people growing up with social media to retreat into dark corners and live online, and more chance for people to really endanger themselves because of things we put online. And there is no doubt that kids today (and I include myself) are mediated, forming nostalgic memories about Gilligan’s Island before they can start pining for the good ol’ days when they could just wear a diaper. But I then ask: so what? Is all that really going to severely affect a person’s emotional development any more than, say, your first real fight with your best friend? The jury is still out on that one.
I’d argue that we now have a virtual social development runs in tandem with our reality-based one (and I doubt I’m the first to do so). Both are important parts of growing up in the 21st Century, and both shape the person we end up being. And determining a healthy interaction between the two is important as well.
Which leads me to my point. Avoiding any problems related to virtual social development and privacy protection is as simple as introducing good, thoughtful media education in schools. I’m talking elementary schools. You learn how to interpret text from age 7 or so – by that time most kids have been online and using interactive media for…7 years. And I don’t think I need to argue that it’s just as easy to manipulate through computer as though the pen, just as easy to create stories and experiences that need interpretation whether you’re writing AHWOSG or creating a MySpace profile.
Media education would benefit web TV producers too. Imagine having a huge audience that is trained to interpret what you do in the same way they are trained to interpret what I’m writing. It would completely change the game. We wouldn’t have to have these conversations anymore. This blog wouldn’t exist.
So go see We Live In Public, because it’s a great film that will get you talking about these issues with the people around you. They are issues that need to be discussed, and aren’t enough.
It’s not news that NBC’s ratings are in the toilet, and the vast majority of critics will argue that it’s a result of the network developing and airing shows that have narrow audience appeal. Shows like Kings, 30 Rock, and the recently-premiered The Listener might be hailedby critics and appreciated by TV nerds like myself, but they don’t appeal to an audience large enough for broadcast television standards.
That’s the traditional way of thinking. But a closer look at the numbers in the age of Hulu and the DVR suggests something a bit different. People don’t watch NBC when the shows air, but NBC shows like The Office are some of the most-viewed premium shows on the web, and they’re DVRd more than most other shows too. What that says is people are watching – in fact they’re watching very closely, making appointments to make sure they have the time to sit down and catch every little Liz Lemon quip and small piece of elaborate production design in the Kings kingdom.
I’m suggesting that higher ratings are not about how narrow or broad the narrative content is. It’s more about the way that content is presented. The overall look and feel of the content encourages audiences to engage with the content in a specific way; NBC’s shows encourage a more focused level of engagement, requiring viewers to seek out venues where they can devote more of their attention to the content.
Few would argue this is the case when comparing shows airing on cable to shows airing on broadcast TV. There’s a marked difference between a show like Breaking Bad (on AMC) and a show like Two and a Half Men (the highest-rated comedy on TV, on CBS). Bad has what you might call a “cinematic” feel to it; it’s single camera, follows a complex protagonist, and requires viewers to pay attention to and analyze what’s going on. In contrast, Men takes viewers by the hand a lot more, following a clearer, defined format that involves segmentation and repetition of key plot points so viewers don’t really need to pay attention to what’s going on in order to be involved. Men encourages a more casual viewer engagement. It’s the type of show you can put on in the background while you’re doing the dishes; Breaking Bad is not.
I think you can say the same thing when comparing a lot of NBC shows to higher-rated counterparts. My favorite joke in last season’s 30 Rock was a quip form Will Arnett, playing a GE executive. “We’re just called G now, I sold the E to Samsung. Now they’re called Same-sung.” Hilarious – but if you’re not paying attention, you might miss it or not understand it. 30 Rock requires the viewer to pay attention or else he or she risks missing a joke. Two and a Half Men has a laugh track.
Maybe casual viewing is the point and purpose for broadcast networks in the new media hierarchy. Really, I’m just defining two different kinds of flow; one is and always had been unique to broadcast, one has developed more with cable. I’d argue that the new television aesthetic emerging on cable and now extending to broadcast doesn’t really respect the traditional flow television. That’s why we want to skip commercials or watch online with limited interruptions; the same kind of segmentation and interruption that once defined broadcast TV doesn’t apply to 30 Rock or Breaking Bad.
So in the future, broadcast networks should stick to that original model, providing a televisual experience filled with programming meant to be watched casually, allowing viewers to channel surf and make popcorn while Seacrest throws to the boring pre-taped interviews on Idol. Cable can provide that more intense experience, giving us shows that encourage a more focused level of audience engagement like Breaking Bad, The Shield, and The Sopranos.
And then there’s the web. Viewing habits outlined above suggest that audiences are using the web like a secondary DVR, and I think that’s one purpose. I also think the casual aesthetic has proven it has very important place on the web. But in terms of original programming created for the web, I think we need to take this as a lesson and focus on the premium experience, having our content encourage a more focused level of engagement. Before you start citing data about short form content and the frenetic, frenzied nature of surfing the web, let’s take a moment to recognize that CBS doesn’t really stream its hit shows online (certainly compared to how much NBC and ABC focus on it). CBS’s biggest comedy only has short clips on its website. Why aren’t fans clamoring to see Two and Half Men online? Because that’s not the best way to view it, so no one cares.
So to really take off, web series need to be bigger. The interactive experience already encourages a more intimate relationship with media; why not take advantage of that by making narrative content for the web that does the same?
A test of this theory will come in the fall, when NBC premieres two promising new comedies. Community is a single-camera following a quirky character. It has a great cast, no laugh-track, and moves through jokes quickly.
In contrast, 100 Questions is a multi-camera sitcom with a laugh track (the first in a while from the network; it almost seems off brand for them to be airing a multicam!). The show is about as standard as you can get, with a cute female lead, attractive and charming ancillary characters, and a narrative that follows the standard sitcom format as closely as any show on TV.
Which will do better? You heard it here first: Community will have a strong, devoted fan following but will struggle in the ratings. It will be one of the highest streamed shows on Hulu and might even make an appearance in the iTunes top 10, like Kings did. 100 Questions won’t do amazingly well either (comedies always take a while to find their feet), but will steadily grow its audience as the season progresses and will, in general, be deemed by the media the more ‘promising’ show of the two.
the networks have simply relegated themselves to being content producers. …The value of NBC is not in a show like Heroes or Friends. The value of NBC is the more than 70 years that it has taken the network to create expectations for generations…. By joining Hulu, NBC is essentially saying there is no value to those three letters.
Kevin is being pretty short-sighted by making some key assumptions. On the one hand, he’s right. A brand like NBC doesn’t really actually exist until people are taught what the brand means, and it’s been shown time and again that younger, web-savvy kids don’t see the difference between network content and independent fare. But really, why shouldn’t it be the same? It’s been said for years now: on the web, content is king. The networks will still be able to differentiate themselves from the independent producers because they’ll have the bigger budgets and the larger reaches; eventually the brand will still be defined to the user, it might just take some more time.
Networks will also still have good ol’ television to set them apart from competitors. Kevin is committing one of the biggest sins of new media trend-watching: he’s being an absolutist, claiming that the new media will completely replace the old. My vinyl player begs to differ. So does my television. And so does Nielsen, whose first quarter Three Screen Report came out today, studying the usage habits of Americans on their TVs, computers and mobile devices. Just like previous editions of this study and other versions looking at other forms of media, the TSR showed as viewing on mobile devices and computers goes up, so does viewing on traditional TV. Cord-cutting, in other words, is a myth.
With that in mind, it seems pretty clear that the online video space is poised to watch its advertising inventory inflate in value pretty dramatically. I’d say that’s 3-5 years away, once measurements of audience engagement and view counts can gain a bit more traction with advertisers. And that’s the last thing Kevin got wrong: he’s assuming online video ad value is going to stay constant(ly low) forever. There will be a lot of money to be made for third-party content pipes to syndicate content. A structure similar to the current network affiliate system could well eventually develop, where networks show their content on their own sites and distribute them to third parties with whom they’ve made distribution deals.
All of that means the networks should have an easier time than anyone in making their brands and their content take over the digital space. Doesn’t that seem obvious? The huge corporations with nearly infinite financial, talent, promotional, and legal resources will have an easy time getting their content out there and controlling it. Also, the Pope is Catholic.
Now, it’s time to think bigger. Time to take these new aesthetics and styles and apply them to more ambitious projects with more complicated, robust narratives. I’m talking about graduating from linear, episodic narrative and going toward an interactive medium’s inevitable end point. We need to start building worlds, not just stories.
A world is bigger than just one story – it’s a collection of stories that all follow a defined set of rules and conventions and use consistent motifs and styles. Worlds are not confined to one story line or one medium. Star Wars is probably the most complete example – fanfic books and spinoff movies and TV series all take place within the “Star Wars universe,” even if they don’t directly add to the narrative saga of Anakin, Luke, Amidala, and Leia. But worlds exist elsewhere too – take a look at The Office, with its accompanying Dunder Mifflin Infinity and webisodes. Or SNL, which essentially lives on the web these days, and has found increased TV ratings as a result.
On the web, we have an opportunity that these mainstream shows don’t – rather than making a central story that’s a primary focus and adding secondary content that builds a world around it, we can build the world first and have users decide what the primary story is. We can conceive of projects that, from the beginning, use multiple media to tell a story. These projects will combine long form episodes that can be branded as premium content, shorter episodes that can be watched more casually, and an interactive experience that complements both of them, and they will not intrinsically privilege any one aspect over another. Having these multiple story outlets gives the creators the freedom to take their story whichever way the users decide they prefer it. That’s the perfection of the web series medium, when users have the power to decide what everything looks like.
A fantastic benefit of this is it makes it easier to make money off of web media. With all these different arms to a world, there are so many different opportunities for advertiser tie-ins, distribution deals, and regular old CPMs. Instead of selling an entire series to one sponsor (as The Guild and many others have), you can have multiple sponsors covering each part of the entire project, increasing their exposure and your profits. You could even have one part of your world be subscription-based – like running a cable network and a broadcast network all at the same time.
If this sounds a lot like video games, that’s because the web is an interactive experience….just like a video game. I don’t think people give nearly enough attention to that fact: the way we explore information on the internet owes a lot to the way we explore worlds and discover rules in Mario Galaxy. We learn what we can click (link!) and what we can’t click (no link!). We learn the rules of social interaction with other players/users. We learn the physics of the world – Mario can only jump so high, and we can only scroll so fast (and only when the text is active, not the embedded flash video. Ever notice that? Man, it’s annoying…).
Of course, there’s a problem here: the little indies who are undoubtedly making the absolute best content on the web right now don’t have the capital or the resources to make this kind of project happen. Or do they? That’s my challenge to the web today. Web producers should be proud of where the medium has come from and where it is today, because they’ve worked hard to get it here. But now it’s time to make like Doug, and think big. Let’s raise the bar, stop wishing the medium was legitimized and make it legit ourselves.
