Monday, September 06, 2010

TL;DR IndieTV

0th, The Fine Brothers. (Mostly about the flak YouTube earners got [due to jealousy], but also this:) How many people truly want to watch short form television style content inside the web? We’ll tell you how many. TONS. Hundreds of thousands, millions, but you know why they don’t watch your show? Because you have not built a connection to them, because you haven’t built a personal brand and experience for them to climb aboard and want to support, because you don’t have a real reason for the show to be distributed online beyond just “making something”, and surprisingly a lot of the time because you haven’t created a very good show not just for the web, but for any platform.

1st, Barrett Garese. Stop making short-TV or short-films and putting it online and calling it "online entertainment". It's derivative, and TV does it better already.

2nd, Barret's followup. We’re going to start having to think of the medium first, and the story second.

3rd, David Nett. Where Barrett is wrong, in my opinion, is in the underlying assumption in his tip: that we want to be pioneers in online entertainment. Rather than whipping ourselves into a frenzy over Barrett’s perfectly sound advice, I believe a creator should ask him or herself plainly, “what am I trying to make? Am I trying to make a TV show, and the web is the best current distribution option for my show?” If the answer is yes, then in my opinion Barrett’s advice simply doesn’t apply.

4th, Marc Hustvedt. There’s a flawed point of logic in the argument that web video should always be something different than what’s on TV or film.

Finally, New Mediacracy (via) which lead me to the others. Barrett Garese, Brett Register, Craig Frank, Jamie Blair, along with NM regulars Chris McCaleb, Zadi Diaz, and Steve Woolf get together. Conversation really needed David and Marc, but what do you want? Your money back?