On Web Content

I read this lengthy Wired article on web video content, and the possible evolutionary path for the format. There’s some interesting stuff in there, particularly the association of current day web conditions with film in the 1900s, when the accepted formats weren’t really set. Why are movie 90-120 minutes? How did that format come about, and how has it become so omnipresent?

Back in the 1900s, there were no features, there were only shorts, 5-15 minutes. That’s kind of like where the web’s at now, only most content is even shorter, just a few minutes per episode. With The Third Age, we’re hitting about 8 minutes an episode, which feels like a good amount of content. There’s plenty of material in each episode, but it won’t really tax the attention span.

I think there’s two essential philosophies when it comes to web content. One, the one present in the article, is the notion of corporate controlled shorts that exist primarily as commercials for something else, a TV show, movie or product. The Heroes or Battlestar webisodes exist to promote another show, and though they may have content in and of themselves, those two minute projects are inevitably going to pale next to the longer parent show.

I’m not sure if it’s just what the article chooses to focus on, but there seem to be almost no emphasis on the art of making web videos. There’s a lot of discussion of product placement and the business end, but very little discussion of the sort of artistic possibilities offered by web content. For me, the web offers an opportunity to do the kind of serialized narrative that just wasn’t possible for indie filmmakers in the past. Our first motivation behind doing this series was to tell a story, and that story happened to fit well into little eight minute chunks.

I find it kind of depressing that there’s so much focus on the economics of web video, and on classifying it with words like ‘content’ that obscure the art and make it into just another market to be exploited. There’s always going to be an emphasis on money, but why can’t we also focus on art? I think that’s going to be the next big jump. If people will watch Lost on their computer, who’s to say the right original show wouldn’t hook them as well?