Online Media Cultist

TV is heading online, even if most people aren’t fully aware of it.

Let’s do the math while dispensing with the numbers (it’s Friday, you know?): People, and especially young people, are online. Broadband penetration is high. People watch video online. Many people spend more time online than they do in front of a television screen.

The marketplace is wide open for high quality video series to originate online. All that’s needed is for a few early experimenters to figure out the model in terms of structure and distribution and deals and advertising revenue, and the floodgates, they shall be opening quick-like.

Quarterlife, a new Internet series by My So-Called Life and Thirtysomething creative team Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick that premieres in November (full disclosure here: I’m involved on the webby end of this project), has as good a chance as any to lock down the model and signal a bevy of well funded and produced online video shows to follow in its wake.

In the end, it’s not about how much money goes into making shows, it’s about story and characters and developing a following. Herskovitz and Zwick are experts at doing just this, so if they can produce a high quality show that is easily accessible and viewable on a computer monitor (and it helps that Quarterlife will roll out its first season in 36 eight-minute episodes), it makes sense that people will tune in.

YouTube helped to ring in an era of highly popular user generated online video. If you think about it, millions of people liked watching cats fall off a table or men of all ages getting their nethers slammed by some blunt object on television via America’s Funniest Home Videos, and YouTube was a conduit to fulfilling that need, so to speak, online.

Lonelygirl15 and Prom Queen are more recent examples of online video series to earn a following, the significant difference being that these are examples of fictional episodic video content that just happen to be broadcast over the Internet.

Quarterlife, the story of a young woman who videoblogs about her friends and her life, represents the natural next step in this evolution. And if it does gain a large scale following, the way that the public thinks about and watches “television” will significantly change. Quarterlife also will offer a social networking community and invite its audience to participate and become fully immersed in the show.

Check out the trailer:

Quarterlife Trailer

Add to My Profile | More Videos

Prom Queen was a nifty little experiment. It’s a show (regular humans would call it a TV show or web show, geeks might call it original episodic online video content) about high school kids, a soapy trendy mystery thriller for the Generation Y set. Each episode is a briskly paced 90 seconds, and new ones were rolled out one a day for its inaugural season. There were about 90 episodes in all published over a 12-week schedule earlier this year.

The popularity of the show – more than 15 million streams according to NewTeeVee – has led to increased interest in creating video content that premieres online.

TechCrunch reports that MySpace and the Producers Guild of America are collaborating on “The Storyteller Challenge,” a contest that will feature short (5-7 minutes) pilot episodes created by the public, or a fancy dressed up way to say that they’re looking for good (and cheap) user generated content that might be able to sail as the next Prom Queen. It sounds like The Storyteller Challenge will be similar in some ways to Fox TV’s On the Lot, a reality show that features aspiring directors competing against one another. In fact, Storyteller winners will be awarded $25,000 and given a shot at signing a deal with Fox television, on top of getting their stuff featured on MySpace Video.

The Fox/MySpace team may be trying to compile a “user generated” funnel to grab talented directors and shows, premiere them online, and then take the best ones and put them on television.

NewTeeVee sums up the story very well:

The truth is, MySpace (and any other popular social network) is a great medium for building audiences for shows, especially online shows where maintaining character profiles and such comes naturally. And while the web is growing saturated with online video contests, this one still offers enough exposure, moolah, and chance for a deal to turn a few heads. However, bringing a show out of its web pilot and onto TV is a shaky proposition.

In the meantime, it has been announced that Prom Queen has been picked up for a second season.

Lost Remote reports that popular gossip site TMZ.com will branch out into a half hour syndicated television show starting on September 10.

TMZ’s bluster aside – “We’ve become like The Associated Press in the world we cover,” says founder Harvey Levin – this is yet another sign that the online world is competing with television head on as a source to debut entertainment and informational content.

It makes perfect sense that popular websites and online shows will move onto other media distribution systems. Producing content online is far cheaper than for television. So why not use the Internet as a proving ground for moving the most popular stuff onto broadcast TV?

Things will get even more interesting when popular online content won’t be transferred over to television because it won’t have to. In other words, they will get all the audience, attention, and advertising revenue they need from online distribution. Taking things even further – and this isn’t all that far off – the experience for the broad public in watching shows on television versus the Internet will be very close to the same thing.

The online soap epic Prom Queen, doled out in 90 second episode increments – has proven successful enough that more professionally produced episodic video content programs will be sure to follow. As for Prom Queen, it’s headed for a Season Two of sorts this summer as Prom Queen: Summer Heat.

“Television programs” more than ever before are coming to mean “episodic video content” rather than “entertainment and informational programming that comes out of a blue glow-emitting box.”

Consider that almost half of European broadband users now watch television programs on a computer, according to BBC News. And when you consider the massive popularity of YouTube – which has “trained” people to enjoy online video content programming that is often low budget and low quality in nature – it only stands to reason that traditional television products will be increasingly integrated into the online experience.

But what I find really fascinating is the prospect of shows premiering online, with the potential to then be broadcast on traditional TV. That’s what Comedy Central is doing with Web Shows, where “webisodes” that originated online will then make their small screen debut in July. Another example of an online-traditional TV experiment is Jack Black’s Acceptable.tv, which ties to a show on VH1.

Meanwhile, many are keeping their eyes on Prom Queen, original 90-second soap opera-style stories that are available on places such as MySpace, Veoh, YouTube, and PromQueen.tv. The early and as yet modest success of this venture may open up the floodgates for a new generation of online-first episodic video programming.

As an episodic story cultist of all kinds, I’m liking it.