1 WHAT IS A WEBISODE?

      Simply put, a webisode is an episode of a television series designed for distribution over the Internet. It can be comedy like Boys Will Be Girls or its companion series, Girls Will Be Boys, or compelling drama like The Bannen Way. It can be live action or animated (see John Woo’s Seven Brothers), fiction or reality-based (see Start Something, a social media documentary series presented by the Big Brothers Big Sisters organization). It can be a high-budget, intricately filmed sci-fi extravaganza with dazzling special effects like Sanctuary, which cost $4.3 million or approximately $32,000 per minute, one of the most ambitious projects to date designed for direct release over the Internet (which later became a cable TV series on the Syfy channel). Or it can be as low-tech as a static webcam shot in front of a convenient and free background like your own bedroom. It can be made purely for entertainment purposes, or it can be branded entertainment or “advertainment,” like dozens of web series now produced by Fortune 500 companies including Kraft, Toyota, and Anheuser-Busch who hope that a little entertainment will go a long way toward getting you to buy their cream cheese, Camrys, and Bud. And the length can be whatever you choose, from a quick joke (check out the incredibly clever 5-second films on YouTube) to however long you can hold the audience’s attention.

      The key word is series. A webisode (or web episode) is an individual installment of an ongoing premise with recurring characters. A single, stand-alone short video — say of the hilarious things your cat did after she lapped up your Jack Daniels on the rocks — is NOT a webisode. Neither is that brilliant spoof of Sex and the City you shot at your grandmother’s retirement home — unless you shot a series of short Sex and the City spoofs with grandma and her horny pals, in which case we should take the Jack Daniels away from you and your grandma and give it back to your cat.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SHORT EPISODIC VIDEO ON THE WEB

      In the Mel Brooks movie History of the World Part I, Moses (played by Brooks) descends from a mountaintop lugging three stone tablets chiseled with 15 commandments from God — until Moses trips and drops one of the holy tablets, shattering it beyond recognition. Having promised 15 commandments, he covers by swiftly declaring, “I bring you ten, ten commandments.” Five sacred commandments smashed into a pile of rubble just like that. Who knows what wisdom was lost? Maybe the missing commandments said things like “Thou shalt not wear spandex after age 40” or “Covet not thy neighbor’s iPad2, for he is a tech dunce and uses it only to play Spider Solitaire.” Your guess is as good as mine. But whatever moral pearls turned to dust in that moment, I’m pretty sure one of the lost commandments was not “Thou shalt make TV shows only in increments of 30 or 60 minutes.”

      Since the dawn of the television age in the 1940s, broadcasters have been prisoners of the clock, confined to airing shows on the hour and half hour so viewers would know when and where to find them. But the digital revolution and the Internet have changed all that. More and more, television and visual entertainment in general are part of an on-demand world rather than an on-the-hour one. Audiences can now watch what they want when they want, which, in turn, means that shows no longer have to be packaged in 30- or 60-minute installments.

      It’s a revolution that has fed on itself. Free from the tyranny of the 30/60 paradigm, short-form video content in all shapes and sizes has exploded on the Web. Maybe a show is 2 minutes and 37 seconds long one time, maybe it runs 6 minutes and 41 seconds the next. Each episode can be however long it deserves to be.

      Audiences, in turn, have responded by changing their viewing habits. Where you used to need at least half an hour to watch your favorite comedy, now you might be able to catch two or three episodes of it in less than 10 minutes. Office workers now schedule video breaks rather than coffee breaks, boosting their energy and outlook by guzzling down a few short comedy videos for free instead of a double espresso caramel latte for 5 bucks. Or maybe you choose to watch a few webisodes on the bus or the train on your smartphone or tablet.

      Never before have viewers had so many choices. And never before have creators had so much latitude on the length and type of content they can make.

      In truth, short-form episodic film series have been around since well before the days of television, some even coming during the silent movie era. Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton all created one-reelers, popular early predecessors to today’s web series shot on film and exhibited in theaters across the country right alongside the newsreel and the feature presentation. In the animated realm, the Looney Tunes shorts come to mind. But the equipment and processing necessary to make even a 2-minute film back then were so expensive that only professionals could afford to make these shorts. And even if an amateur had the funds and imagination to produce a clever short film, distribution was controlled by the major Hollywood studios, which also owned the theaters and had no intention of allowing the competition to cut into their lucrative monopoly.

      The advent of lightweight and affordable video cameras by the early 1980s made it possible for millions to shoot their own videos. But most of these home videos were unedited, handheld footage of family vacations or children’s birthday parties, usually narrated by your dad or Uncle Johnny: “Here we are at little Billy’s second birthday party. Here’s Billy eating cake. Here he is opening his presents. And here’s little Billy pulling down his pants and relieving himself in the garden.” As much as you (and, years later, big Billy) wish Dad had done a little judicious editing, that equipment was still bulky and prohibitively expensive during the first home video era. And distribution venues remained unavailable to those outside the media power elite.

      The digital and Internet revolution of the 1990s changed all this. Suddenly, you didn’t need a $100,000 flatbed machine to edit your video. Your average home computer could handle the task. Video cameras were cheaper than ever, required no more technical expertise than a flashlight, and were increasingly capable of producing a high-quality video image. Best of all, high-speed broad-band connections meant that inexpensive and easy distribution on the Web was just a mouse-click away for millions of amateur video enthusiasts.

      However, there was still one small problem for amateur video makers dying to show the world their wares: How would the audience know where to find your video on the Internet?

      Enter YouTube. Founded by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, three former employees of the Silicon Valley firm PayPal, the website had a simple but powerful concept: Users could post and view any type of video, professional or amateur, on this one-stop shopping site. It was like one giant short-video multiplex, and anyone in the world could hop from theater to theater for free, without ever leaving the comfort of their own laptop.

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