Your New 'Telly'

The image of a family watching TV together on the living room couch has slowly faded, changing into the image of each family member busy with their own PCs at their own rooms. Internet is trying to provide almost everything to approach different audiences. From buying stuffs through online shopping to maintaining your social networks through social networking sites, it has become our ‘daily food’. Internet is now offering us with its latest innovation called ‘webisodes’, a TV show produced specifically for online or mobile phone consumptions (ABC, 2007).

Even children are now computer savvy

(Source : www.ec.gc.ca)

Its first hit is the Lonelygirl15 show in 2007, a show broadcasted via YouTube about the life of a depressed girl who in the end turned into drugs and chose suicide to end her life. The show was first thought as a real-life story but in the end it was discovered to be a company production. However, the hit series could not maintain its viewers as its viewers dropped drastically on the last episodes. The spread of webisodes started in times when Writers Guild of America stopped producing for TV and shifted their focus to internet, where they created several titles of webisodes. The intention was to attract wider audience and obviously, gain profit from the low budget production. However, due to the uncertain format (e.g. 30 minutes opera soap in TV) and questionable quality, the attempts flopped.

But it is about time that more people will get to know this new genre of entertainment. Once it finds its ‘true identity’ which is the stable format and consistency, chances are high that they could attract wide range of audience. With media giants such as NBC and Warner Brothers showing their supports by producing their own webisodes, there could possibly be a bright future for webisodes if there are different kind of productions for different audience, considering the fact that genre is a dynamic thing that could blend with each other. For example, the TV phenomena, ‘televisual flow’ (Williams in Schirato & Yell, 1996) which provides us with different kind of genre from advertisements and cartoons to drama and news.