By Chase Holtman
Nowadays, it has become clear that there are many advantages in taking the web-TV approach when attempting to get a new project off the ground. These include lower costs all around, flexible episode lengths, and opportunities for more effective exposure.
Mashable blogger Melissa Jun Rowley has written about the newly-popular action web series The Bannen Way, which exemplifies the ways in which some TV is being created differently. In her article entitled The Future of TV?: The Story Behind Crackle’s “The Bannen Way” Rowley writes: “Since its January 6 premiere, [the show] has raked in more than 13 million streams, making it the fastest growing property on Sony’s Crackle digital video network.” In an interview, executive producer and star Mark Gantt describes the origins of the project: “We decided to make webisodes, where potentially millions of people could see our work versus the 40 or so people who would see our work at a film festival.”
Some of the decision-makers at Sony have talked about developing the show into a traditional TV series. Gantt has talked about some of his ideas for supplementing the series, saying, “If it’s up to us, we’ll have a web presence to accompany the TV show. We want to do this new kind of trans media and cross storytelling with the web, iPhone apps, the whole nine yards.”
In other news, ABC and CBS have both announced plans to offer streaming versions of some of their TV shows on the Apple iPad. In a post titled ABC and CBS to Stream Shows on iPad for Free, Mashable blogger Samuel Axon has pointed out one of the technical road blocks which seemed to stand in the way at first: “Critics initially argued that the iPad would not be ideal for watching video online because most video websites use Adobe’s Flash technology, which the iPad doesn’t play nice with.” In spite of this, many video-streaming sites have already developed versions of their services which use iPad-compatible HTML5 technology. Hulu and Netflix are among those reported to be working on iPad-friendly video-streaming solutions.
All of this seems to illustrate the fact that television as we know it is being turned on its head – and suffice to say that the changes taking place are long-overdue and largely for the better.
