Web 2.0 Video Panel: Sweaters, Neutrogena & Jeff Scher

Written by R. Scott Raynovich - Light Reading

Wednesday, November 5. 2008 at 06:30 PM EST Post a comment

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SAN FRANCISCO -- Web 2.0 Summit -- Here were are. Another sunny day in San Francisco. Another Web video panel. Will this one be any different? We shall see.

First item up: Fashion review. As some of you already know, I like to review the sartorial tendencies of the panels that we cover. This panel is simply dreadful. The Web 2.0 era will be remembered for many things, but it won't be for the fashion sense. Aren't these people supposed to be making millions? Can't they hit something better than Ross Dress for Less?

Two people are wearing sweaters. Is this a new trend? I hope not. One has his sleeves rolled up. I won't name names, but sleeves-rolled-up-sweater is not a good look. I also see a V-neck sweater, over a T-shirt, under a dark sports jacket. I guess it's the "Web 2.0 pseudo" look. Clearly these folks aren't banking millions. One panelist Rocketboom producer Andrew Baron, has something funky going on with wrinkled collars that are awkwardly folded like the wings on a wounded seagull. It's not all bad. The moderator, Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing, is quite nicely attired in a peach-colored suit that looks quite striking. Though, on second glance, it may not be peach.  You see, they have the lights turned down in here so you can barely see what's in front of you.

OK, moving on. Onwards and upwards.

Xeni Jardin starts off with a political statement: "It's a great day, isn't it? I lost a little cynicism last night."

It's nice to remind us we are in the ever-PC San Francisco. Let's get on with the action, shall we? The panelists are:

• Xeni Jardin, Boing Boing TV (Moderator)
  
• Robin Sloan, Current TV
  
• David Prager, Revision3
  
• Andrew Baron, RocketBoom
  
• Miles Beckett, EQAL
  
• Greg Goodfried, EQAL
  
• Timothy Shey, Next New Networks

I'm not really sure exactly how the panel started... Our nattily dressed moderator mentioned something about the election, and then it just got rolling.

Robin Sloan: At Current TV we decided to interpret that online part [of video] as the conversation that's happening online. If you were watching Twitter [last night during the election] it was exploding... We show that on our Website. It was a social media election. We were producing it all in our office in San Francisco. If it points to anything, it's that video isn't just video. It doesn't have to be just video. It can be a lot. We had a bunch of Flash applications, simple stuff. They pulled in feeds; we did some simple moderations. We had this video stream that was alive. That's the kind of video you don't see much online today.

Timothy Shey: [Ed note: By the way, I just noticed how much Shey looks like James Spader. Maybe they should produce a video in which he plays the actor.]

We thought of video as a way to launch new media brands. Some of the things we are doing, like Obama Girl... Obama Girl lives on YouTube. There is that shared experience. What a lot of us talk about is there is a explosion and video is the thing that primes the pump. One of the things that gets people to do an online video is when you are re-injecting that conversation, and then they all respond and you get an explosion.

Jardin: Does Obama Girl have a full-time job?

Shey: She's been getting a lot of work. She hosted a party last night, she's in GQ this month, and she was on CNN this morning.

Greg Goodfried: When we launched LonelyGirl it was about seeing what was there. Most users have their own profile page. So it really was seeing the platform as a device for storytelling. There is a passive linear television show, but you take that next step to bring the characters to life.

[Ed note: I'm kind of in shock here. The EQAL guys, I'm sure, are capable and doing well. But I've been going to online video panels for three years, and we are still talking about LonelyGirl as the "big thing" in Web video. Something's wrong here.]

Jardin: One of the things I kept thinking is that people can talk about those structures as a notion for creative structure, but without really compelling central characters and story that doesn't matter.

Miles Beckett: (Clears throat, speaking with a scratchy voice.) Sorry, I don't really have a voice. We are in production on this CBS thing and I only had two hours of sleep. The fact that this character is talking to you is very different from TV. It was allowing for really deep exploration of character like you get in a novel, but it also allows for a deeper connection with the audience.

David Prager: Talking about all the online live interactive components, what it is, is that it opens up stories and the way you interact with the audience. It's about changing the rules of how you interact with media.

Andrew Baron: I think one of the things -- absolutely -- we are inspired by at Rocketboom is that notion of the democratization of media. Most of us grew up just watching a few stations -- ABC, NBC, CBS. Media is such a powerful instrument. Being able to take ahold of that... the thing we're really inspired by is a future of niche content. Now instead of the Gap to get all of our clothes, we have boutiques.

Jardin: What advice would you give to people who want to get something off the ground?

Baron: The two answers are: One, it's very important that we all understand the distinction. As soon as we say "here's the mainstream and here's the independents," we'll have a problem. Technology will keep those things separate. Hulu, which is picking up, doesn't allow indie content. That will be bad because it will divide things and create the same thing we've had for years. Four years ago I always said, "it's so cheap to do this." Our company has two computers and two cameras, and that's it. If you can treat this like any other small business, and I'm going to get a small loan and save some money and get the business up and running, now may be even a better time than ever to do that. This is an opportune time to get together a few strong minds to get out there and try to build an audience and wait a year.

Prager: Online video, not necessarily talking about people who want to create a hobby -- it's going to be a revolution in the consumption of media. If you look at the next generation of people between the ages of 10 and 35, it's not that they are not interested in what they are making. Ultimately, what's going to be happening is everybody is going to be watching everything they watch online, from Lost all the way to the [independent Web productions].

The financial models are going to have to shift to see how to pay for the content.

Jardin: Everybody pays the bill [in] different ways. We have ad-supported models, we get sponsorship money; Miles and Greg, you have been trying some out-of-the-box stuff. You had a Neutrogena character, a product placement. I would like to hear about that.

Goodfried: I'll tell you how we did Neutrogena. With LonelyGirl15, we had been doing it out of our life savings. We got to the place where we needed to start making money. We had a forum and we put out a poll [to the audience]. They voted 96 percent to say we could do anything [to keep the show going]. We worked with Neutrogena. [The story was] the LG15 universe is about this: the fountain of youth is real if you can take the blood from the girls and put it into your own body -- you can live for more years.

[Ed note: This becomes a long, hard-to-follow story about serums, mad scientists, MySpace, and Neutrogena. Apparently it ends with encouraging the community to find a missing scientist who can save the world. The punchline? The entire community ends up going to Neutrogena.com. Happy ending!]

We have 10,000 people emailing this character on Neutrogena. As long as you made it game-playing, it was engaging.

Jardin: Next New has also experimented.

Fey: Something new we are doing is an 18-episode, Nite Fite, a cartoon run sponsored by Starburst. On that particular show, we have two fictional hosts who argue about nothing. They argue like they are on Crossfire. We do a Howard Stern thing and stop in the middle and talk about Starbust. Mars is a big company -- the fact that they did this was unbelievable... Instead of having to place the product, Starburst, we had a break and it was all very obvious... and then the characters would argue about whether they were selling out.

Sloan: How do you get attention to [online video]?

Goodfried: You have to do it absolutely cheap. There is a lot of noise. Unless you are able to buy the YouTube home page, which is a good strategy if you have the money to do that, you definitely need a plan to give you enough runway to get enough content out there for a long time.

Baron: We were kind of a first adopter, and we were the only ones there. One thing that I have learned -- that is, enforce the content. Most of the stuff out there is content-challenged.

Jardin: Crap?

Baron: I don't want to say crap...

Jardin: I'll say it all day.

Baron: It's hard to put out a good story. Even if you don't have the best content, what the [audience] get[s] excited about is innovation. If you do something different, and you make somebody say, "did you see how they did that?" Even LonelyGirl by my standards is good content, but people would look at it and say, "I don't get it, it's a bad video blog." But it was innovative.

Jardin: You need to give a year to develop the content and the audience.

Prager: There's never going to be a formula. What we've done at Revision3 is build audiences around community. When you build around a community it creates a large and loyal audience. It helps it scale more. At the same time it makes it worthwhile to do creative things.

Beckett: (Inaudible, scratchy voice...)

Jardin: Greg, maybe you you translate for him.

[The biggest laugh of the panel... which isn't that big. The panel wanders on for a while, with many video keywords and buzzwords being repeated: interactivity... community... innovation... etc. Then, we moved onto some content demos. Let's see if they can walk the walk.

Sloan introduces a video called We Are the Strange created by an artist that he calls "M Dot Strange," who apparently made the video in his basement in Fresno. The video looks exactly like that... a strange creation out of a basement in Fresno.

Next up, something from a Japanese site called Nico Nico Douga. Think Ronald McDonald meets anime.

The key feature of this video is that the audience inputs text. The comments scroll over the comments. The screen gets completely taken over by comments.

Next up: Something from the Viral Video Film School. 

Right. OK. Is that all they got? That's the state of Web video?

He mentions one more item. Apparently NYTimes.com is running avant-garde art videos. Sloan says these videos by the artist Jeff Scher are some of the most popular videos on the site. I'm not sure whether that is a compliment to Jeff Scher or an insult to NYTimes.com.

Well, that's all for now. This panel has left me confused and distressed. I'm no longer sure what Web video is about or where it's going. Is it about Ronald McDonald in Japanese or Jeff Scher?

Time for more caffeine.