Video (Web/Mobile/Transmedia)

Premiering in 2011, Husbands has earned praise for its stars, writers and crew from numerous sources, including The New Yorker, TIME, and Out magazine, along with awards from the IAWTV, Streamys and Webbys. Co-creators Jane Espenson and Brad Bell are currently on tour promoting Husbands, a comic published by Dark Horse. Last week CW Digital acquired distribution [...]

Jason Klorfein is the producer of the web series F TO 7Th, a web series by Ingrid Jungermann, who co-created The Slope with Desiree Akhavan. The complete first season will screen on Tuesday, April 2, 7pm (tonight) at Anthology Film Archives in New York as part of the Friars Club Comedy Film Festival. This essay is [...]

2013 will be a banner year for original web production. Amazon has been ordering pilots, multichannel networks have been raising money, YouTube series are scaling up, and Netflix’s slate of programs is the envy of every channel, save HBO. With House of Cards behind it, and Hemlock Grove coming up (along with series from the likes of [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Published at Hacktivision. Below you’ll see a map of the digital video ecosystem, as created in a keynote conversation at the New York Television Festival, assembled by Paul Kontonis, head of the IAWTV. I’ve found there’s a lot of demand for maps of what’s going on online. And it’s easy to see why: it’s complicated! The graph above [...]

Fans of The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl were greeted with a surprise today when Pharrell Williams’ premium YouTube channel, iamOTHER, premiered the trailer for the popular web series’ anticipated second season, for which fans raised tens of thousands of dollars last year. In it (below), Issa Rae’s J does her rap thing, recapping last season’s events [...]