TV's future stars will come from the web (original) (raw)

I have been watching a trailer for Chelsey OMG, a TV series for 16- to 25-year-olds to be shown next month on the social network Bebo, which has more than 80 million users. It is full-length for its genre - three minutes an episode. This is so as not to strain the attention-span of today's teenies and it allows episodes to be viewed secretly at work without reducing the nation's productivity.

Chelsey, a young American, has landed in planet London trying to navigate her way among dysfunctional people, helped by suggestions from the audience. It is full of interactivity, including intrusions into real lives with the option for viewers to become "friends" of the stars. If it takes off after a few episodes, the production company Channel X will know the numbers watching - including what sort of people they are - so they can try to finance the rest of it through a sponsor. The dream is that it will run and run, becoming a web hit then a film and then a book as the fairy tale is completed.

I have no idea whether it will succeed. It is the latest of a growing number of Generation Web soaps - cue in MySpace's Quarterlife and Endemol's The Gap Year, for a start - as the net becomes a medium for television. If kids won't go to the television set then television must come to them wherever they are - probably networking on Facebook, MySpace or Bebo. There may be a lesson for newspapers here.

These programmes are not made with Hollywood budgets. They are created increasingly by people who honed their skills at home in the polytechnic of YouTube and cut their teeth on very low budgets and self-taught skills. The next David Puttnam will probably come from one of these serials or from the exploding number of web television channels. The trend to routing television through the internet covers so many activities that it is difficult to put a single label on it. One of the leading trendsetters is the BBC, partly through using Bebo and other channels but overwhelmingly through the astonishing success of its iPlayer - 21m requests in August - enabling anyone in the UK to replay radio or TV programmes from the previous seven days in an impressively user-friendly way. Web TV also covers watching television using a Nintendo Wii console, where the programme is routed through the internet before it appears on a regular TV set. For a list of numerous TV channels that you can see on the web go to viewmy.tv.

But the really interesting things are happening where users are creating their own programmes and then either uploading them to YouTube and vodpod (the easy option) or choosing one of an exploding number of sites that provide you with your own global channel (usually for free) on mobile, PC or both. These include sites such as Kyte, hulu.com (fast-rising but only available in the US), wi-fitv.com (enabling you to buy a social station), magnify.net, mogulus.com and the UK's worldtv.com which, when linked to the mobile channel qik, enables you to put live footage from the video camera on a smartphone directly on to your own global tv channel.

None of these are certain to succeed. Often the more amazing the technology, the less likely it is to triumph. It is almost preposterous that so many sites are offering us a free global television channel. Even a few years ago, that would have cost millions. But as digital cameras and cameraphones get better and cheaper, the scope for a whole new genre of creativity is enormous. At the moment progress is held back partly by the newness of it all (hence some of the dross on YouTube), the lack of a route to hook into all the advertising revenue that is migrating to the web (though that is starting to be solved) and, despite YouTube, the lack of a suitable aggregator to enable your channel to be known to potential users. The big breakthrough may come with mobile phones, as three-minute films are ideal for them. There is a fortune to be made there by someone.