Video

This post refers to a conversation on Henry Jenkins’ blog: part one, two, three, four. My visit to USC earlier this month for a work-in-progress talk on my manuscript sparked a couple of conversations. One with M2E head Christopher Smith about the state of web television, and another with Henry Jenkins on the broader implications [...]

With Netflix dropping $4 million for each episode of House of Cards, YouTube is suddenly seeing a lot of well-heeled competition for original programming. Of course, through its premium channel initiative, Google’s network has been investing as well. Machinima, its most premium channel, recently inked a deal to incubate films with the likes of Ridley Scott. But YouTube didn’t grow into [...]

It’s easier to understand TV. Most people know who’s responsible for their favorite shows: did you all watch Scandal last night on ABC?! Online, it’s a bit trickier. Sure, most everything is on YouTube. But just because it’s on YouTube doesn’t mean it’s Google’s show. Usually it’s not. Web video has layers and layers networks and [...]

I’ve been writing about web series for almost four years now, and I’ve seen a lot of them. Mostly I’ve seen a lot of bad ones. That’s because making a good web series is just as hard, if not harder, than making an independent film. Why harder? In addition to getting the basics of production [...]

Online video is comedy, and as the market grows, comedians and indie TV creators are getting more buyers for their shows and videos. Today comedy network My Damn Channel announced a big effort to buy up “hundreds” of comedy shows over the next year. The company’s effort may make it, if not the first, potentially the biggest [...]

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish for linking. We’ve waited almost a decade for more Arrested Development, the groundbreaking sitcom of the aughts. Now with a release date set, critics and fans are eager for Mitch Hurwitz’s franchise to break new ground on the web, via Netflix. Think Progress‘ Alyssa Rosenberg, one of television’s sharpest critical [...]

Award shows matter, sort of. Winning an Oscar rarely generates a box office bounce. The Emmys don’t make hit shows, they merely acknowledge them. Handing out trophies for online video seems silly to a lot of people. How do you get to a list of a few dozen shows, when users upload hours of video every [...]

The final version of this post is on Slate‘s Future Tense blog. The LAPD has assigned Bobby, a rookie, to a new squad—a ragtag group of young-ish people who have time-traveled from the ’80s and are undercover in the present day. In the first episode of Squad 85, Bobby meets the Chief, a white man who has been [...]

I normally don’t write about award shows. It’s been awhile since I had anything to say about the Academy Awards, whose voting membership is woefully unrepresentative of America, or the Emmys, whose last big winner, Homeland, is currently getting a dressing-down from Televisual‘s Adam Goldman amid broader critical skepticism. That said, award shows are important, and ever-more important as [...]

Ask anyone in the indie web video market about their biggest problem, and you’ll get a bunch of different answers: subpar production quality, too many shows, not enough viewers, etc. But the biggest issue facing web video is pretty simple: not enough buyers and not enough money. Sure, YouTube has pumped tens of millions into [...]