Lonelygirl15, if you'll recall, was the headline-grabbing video diary of a pretty teenager, later exposed by net detectives as a brilliant, CAA-backed fiction. The lonely girl was by no means alone -- she had a team of writers and producers behind her, and though the door was closed on lonelygirl15, the frontier of "webisodic" video was wide open.
The situation with open frontiers is that the people seeking to colonize them, to borrow a quote from Ms. South Carolina, simply "don't have maps." Which is why, almost two years after lonelygirl15, no Web series has established a viable, let alone profitable homestead. However, more wagons are now arriving. Sony Pictures Television just launched C-Spot:
From Crackle:
an online comedy channel featuring six sharply produced programs with enough short episodes to fill a 13-week season.
And Jessica Rose is planning a comeback too. The almost-21-year-old actress from New Zealand will soon return to the online world as the star of Blood Cell, a new horror-thriller from Web TV studio 60Frames Entertainment, directed by Eduardo Rodriguez. The show, whose trailer is now up on deadcelldeadfriend.com, follows Rose's character, Julia, as she contends with an unseen murderer who will talk to her only via her fancy photo- and video-enabled cellphone. Which hopefully gets good reception because, as the name of the website suggests, if Julia's signal goes dead, a blond somewhere gets dispatched for good. To build their online audience, C-Spot and 60Frames will "syndicate" their shows on Sony's Crackle (see this and my other previous posts), Hulu, and AOL Video; while 60Frames can be seen on Bebo, Blip.tv, iTunes, MySpace and others. And everyone's on YouTube.
Revenue-sharing deals allow the creators to get a piece of the advertising pie no matter where their shows get watched. 60Frames and Sony Pictures hope to find the answer to the overriding question posed by Web-only tv: In an entertainment world dominated by multi-hour, multi-night programs like American Idol, how do you win repeat viewers with three minute webisode.
Even though more of the big name studios are tempted onto the web, the question still hangs in the air: what will it take for large numbers of us (14-year-olds included) to feel like the computer screen with its blinking and ringing distractions is a good place to watch TV?
Cybercast credit: Crackle
No comments:
Post a Comment