All Things Digital

The thudding failure of the online-born “quarterlife” original series on network television Tuesday night, garnering some of the worst ratings in NBC’s history (after experiencing a declining Internet audience too), was loudly touted yesterday as a possible impediment to online-to-offline dreams of original-content creation that Hollywood has been nurturing.

Well, it’s not. One show, which just did not work, is in no way representative of a trend, any more than the box-office failure of the movie “Snakes on a Plane” meant online marketing and hype was finished.

The Wall Street Journal’s excellent Jessica Vascellaro wrote a great piece today on the subject of online content creation, focusing on social-networking efforts, such as Bebo’s “KateModern,” an original online show from the creators of “lonelygirl15,” as well as stuff being made by MySpace and others.

The goal is to keep users more engaged. More importantly, it is to fight the continued audience attraction to user-generated videos on YouTube, which is owned by Google (GOOG). It dominates the online video market, as you can see from this chart below (click on it to make it larger).

BoomTown has written about the Bebo hit several times (including a video visit to Bebo’s HQ in London last summer and an interview with a “KateModern” producer in November, both seen below), as it represented the right way to start to develop original online content.

And that would not include pulling some failed television pilot out of a drawer, making it on the cheap, cutting it up into shorter segments and slapping it online.

Instead, true success–besides the material actually being good, which should be a given–requires the content to be interactive, pioneer new filming techniques and be made specifically for the medium, using its tools, rather than being shoehorned into it.

“KateModern,” for example, has been changeable by the second by its audience and the creators have moved the action along with startling speed.

But it still has someone professionally producing it. Set in East London, it follows a “troubled young art student named Kate and her three closest friends: an Australian wild-child named Charlie, a young entrepreneur named Tariq and a mischievous computer whiz-kid named Gavin.”

As The Journal’s Vascellaro correctly writes: “Past efforts by Web companies to turn themselves into online versions of television networks have been hampered by the difficulty in changing ingrained consumer habits–while people are happy to watch short video clips from time to time, few until recently saw the Web as a forum to follow regular episodes of series. For online-only shows, weak advertiser interest, subpar production quality and lack of promotional muscle were added hurdles.”

Indeed. But that will change quickly.

Here is our too-long video of the visit to Bebo and the interview with “KateModern” producer Pete Gibbons:

I have seen the future of online entertainment and–no surprise–it’s not being created by Hollywood.

That’s because people there are too busy fighting over nothing these days.

Still, Hollywood’s writers and studios come back to the bargaining table again today, resuming their discussions to settle the strike that has been going on for three weeks now.

The Writers Guild of America is adamant about getting its writers a fair share for work that gets distributed over the Web.

And studios are just as stubbornly resisting, saying shares are not forthcoming anyway right now, given how paltry the revenues from Internet content are at this point in time.

While the wrangling has gotten lots of attention–no late night shows, the horror!–what’s really more appalling is exactly how slow all of Hollywood has been actually trying to change that equation.

Good thing, then, for producers like Pete Gibbons, the series producer of “KateModern,” an interactive online-only series being made in London and now appearing regularly on the Bebo social network. Each episode–not including all the other side videos and posts that hang all around each one–garners around 300,000 page views.

So far, of course, it is a fledgling effort, but a step in the right direction, even as Hollywood fiddles and its business burns.

Here’s an interview I did with Gibbons when I was in London:

(I am still having problems with my Brightcove player, so I uploaded it to YouTube.)

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So when, if ever, will there be a truly bona fide Internet hit?

And please, pretty please, it just can’t be “lonelygirl15″ (pictured below) and some clever music videos.

The lack of lasting and profitable professional content online is once again in sharp relief with the writers’ strike now taking place in Hollywood.

In a Wall Street Journal piece yesterday on the struggle between the Writers Guild of America and entertainment studios, Ken Hertz, a Los Angeles lawyer who has worked on digital music issues, made an interesting observation:

If anything, the strike could create an opportunity for the online world to step up and prove its value to the guild. A strike could in a strange way damage the studios by creating online competitors who come forward to offer the union writers a new model that no one would have otherwise had the time or effort to conceive of.”

If only.

Because, while the main point of contention between the two sides is how to split future revenues from digital distribution, I am not sure exactly when it will become more than the middling revenue (and not much income) online content generates today, which is more like splitting up a tip jar at Starbucks than raking in big bags of dough from some Hollywood blockbuster.

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One of the more interesting things about my interview yesterday with Mike Volpi of Joost–Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here–was our discussion about what kind of original and high-quality material will be created on the Web and how popular it will be.

It’s certainly been a hit-or-miss proposition, since the Internet was popularized–mostly misses, actually. Beyond viral phenoms from the Dancing Baby to Mentos and Coke, there really is little there that has taken off in a big and lasting way online.

Many, big and small, have tried, but none have truly succeeded. Most recently, Yahoo pulled the plug on Hollywood player Lloyd Braun, for example, who was brought in to make Web hits.

But that has not stopped him–Braun’s got a new deal with Pepsi to create original online content. Over at AOL, which has a lot of history in this arena, there is much stuff in the works.

And sites like Funny Or Die–which uses more celebrities, like a recent one with Bill Murray–pop up daily.

One interesting effort is social network Bebo with its recent series called “KateModern,” an honest version of “LonelyGirl15″, both of which are series focused on attractive self-consciously self-conscious twentysomething women and their attractive friends.

And today, in a project with great similarity to these efforts, MySpace unveiled an exclusive partnership with well-known television producers Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, creators of such iconic shows as “My So-Called Life” and “thirtysomething,” for an original Web series called “quarterlife.”

The 36-episode series–there will also be a social-network component, natch–is about a group of attractive twentysomethings, with what appears to be, yep, another self-consciously self-conscious central female character who video blogs about them.

Sort of like hit BoomTown’s reality series–well, a hit with my Mom!–that is also posted below. We could use some self-consciousness, for sure, plus we’re much lumpier.

Here are some videos for you to peruse:

FCU With Bill Murray

KateModern

Lonelygirl15

Quarterlife

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