distribution

It looks like the new television is here: a flexible, open industry more responsive to consumers and producers. Henry Jenkins’ textual poachers have become textual producers. Twenty years ago, audiences struggled to get power in production. Fans orchestrated large, coordinated campaigns to revive shows like Beauty and the Beast. Soon media companies started folding viewers into [...]

BLACK&SEXYTV is an independent video network on YouTube. An outgrowth of Dennis Dortch’s 2008 feature A Good Day to Be Black and Sexy, it has released five episodic series, including The Number, RoomieLoverFriends, That Guy, Hello Cupid, and The Couple, for which the network successfully crowdsourced a spin-off. It has been featured in Ebony, Clutch, Shadow and Act and Indiewire, [...]

tello films is a subscription video network offering original programming for the lesbian market. It recently merged with OneMoreLesbian, adding free and pay-per-view video options to its offerings. This essay is part of Televisual’s “Indie TV Innovation” series. As I write this I just finished shooting tello’s newest project called Roomies, starring Julie Goldman and Brandy Howard.  [...]

The following essay builds on Liz Shannon Miller’s earlier pieces on success in the web series market: “How Do You Define Web Series Success?” and “2013: The year of the web series second season?” This is part of Televisual’s “Indie TV Innovation” series. When I talk to web series creators, there is one constant: They [...]

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 [...]

Full post at USC. Earlier this month the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism presented a Research Seminar with Aymar Jean Christian, assistant professor of communication in the Media, Technology and Society program at Northwestern University. Christian discussed his tentatively titled manuscript, Off the Line: Independent Television and the Expansion of the Creative Economy, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]