Made-for-Web shows look like they may well soon start to flourish, if a number of new corporate-sponsored shows in the US are anything to go by.
For those Brits that can remember as far back as the early noughties, when Peter Serafinowicz and Peter Baynam's 'The Junkies' looked like a promising way forward for innovative and cutting-edge TV sit-coms, it seems a long way on, a decade later, to be talking about the possibilities of web-based TV.
Ikea-sponsored web TV
However, the broadcast entertainment industry is a slow-moving beast, so when a new show starring independent movie actress Illeana Douglas arrives, sponsored by Swedish flat-pack-furniture giant Ikea, then the US TV industry starts to pay a little more attention to the commercial appeal of this new business model.
Douglas' new web video show, Easy to Assemble sees her play an Ikea employee and has drawn over 1.5 million views every month from October 2009 to February 2010.
"The brand [Ikea] is a co-worker in the story line," Douglas said, speaking at a recent awards ceremony.
Web-original progs
Next New Networks Chief Executive, Lance Podell – whose shows include the popular The Key of Awesome and Indy Mogul said:
"We realised we were putting a burden on web-original programming by trying to make it like TV."
ComScore says that 86 per cent of internet users in the US watch at least one online video a month.
"There's an inevitability to web video that makes it exciting," says Rob Barnett, Chief Exec of My Damn Channel.
"I often think of my daily business life as a guy running a cable network in the early 1980s," Mr. Barnett said.
"There is, no matter how you slice it, a timeline for any new industry to grow."
