TV

I couldn’t think of a more perfect time to announce a new blog about the future of video and television! Within the last month, YouTube’s re-launch has changed the video landscape, Hulu and Netflix announced more original content, and the web series community has been experimenting with award shows. Hacktivision is the brainchild of Josh Braun, a Quinnipiac [...]

Previewing the new (hit) Showtime series House of Lies, New York‘s Kera Bolonik offered a brief but pithy aside: Is anyone on TV bad at their jobs these days? Not if it’s a high-status gig. But feel free to be a bad waitress, or a crappy paper salesman or receptionist, or an ennui-ridden local-government intern, or, [...]

If we’ve learned anything about over-the-top video, it has been its agnosticism. Web video distribution can be progressive or regressive, support diversity or concentrate eyeballs at the top. Whether a company loves it or hates it depends very much on how much it has and how much it has to lose. Last week saw a [...]

Thanks to Chuck Tryon for linking! A redesign can make or break a website — remember Facebook before the News Feed? — or it can mean nothing at all. The consequences of YouTube’s latest redesign are unknown, but I view it with some ambivalence. I’m excited, but I have my reservations. Clearly I’m in the minority. As [...]

Thanks to Chuck Tryon for linking! As some of you know I’ve spent the fall writing my dissertation/book and interviewing for academic jobs (professorships and postdocs). Both are going well. But I haven’t blogged much in the last few months, and keeping up with news has been nearly impossible. My last web video news roundup of August was [...]

The final version of this post has been published at Sparksheet. Comment there! From Sherlock Holmes to Gossip Girl, television has always loved books as source material. But recently it seems like every new series announced comes from the hottest novel or work of pulp fiction. Of course, there are deep historical connections between serialization [...]

UPDATE: Nielsen has rolled out a more mature version of its Web/TV ratings. Philip Napoli has some thoughts. Believe it or not, ever since 1994 media executives have been claiming the web will become television. It’s a theme I will explore extensively in the second chapter of my dissertation. It’s been a consistent refrain from [...]

Originally posted at Splice Today! Thanks to Racialicious for linking! There was a moment in last week’s penultimate episode of the BBC series The Fades when the lead character, Paul, realizes he might not be a good guy. The series is a noir tale of angels and demons, or ghosts rather, and Paul is the geek-boy [...]

Am I alone in my love for episode recaps and teasers? I feel strange admitting one of my favorite components of TV episodes occur at the beginnings and ends of each show: the one-minute recaps of last week’s episode and 30-sec teasers for the following one. [...]

UPDATE: Hulu is premiering its own scripted show, Battleground, along with some other new programs. ORIGINAL: We’ve always had ambitious programming on the web. But new announcements and series premieres suggest a change in the air, that the combination of low production costs, the maturation of web video networks and growing advertiser comfort with new [...]