Excuse the crappy photo quality. Despite the lack of Instagram filtering or other color, this is actually the future calling.
What you see here is my laptop, connected to my TV, running a full-screen video. Nothing big there. The image on screen is a big deal, however.
YouTube fans will recognize the face on screen as Harley Morenstein, aka the Sauce Boss, looking stern like usual. He's acting now in a YouTube-based video series, Video Game High School. (As the shot implies, he's the principal.)
He's also one of a zillion Internet celebrities now appearing in what's called a "feature-length web series" with Hollywood-level production values. In 3 episodes, I've spotted one of the 5 Second Films guys, two members of Wong Fu Productions, the aforementioned Sauce Boss - and that's just the ones I know.
The series also takes video game culture for granted. It's hard to get what's going on unless you're a veteran gamer - lingo is tossed around more easily than technobabble was in The Social Network's hacking scene:
It's better still if you ever played pro: it takes a special kind of nerd to appreciate the sentimentality of throwing away your first, oldest, hardiest, clankiest gaming keyboard. VGHS's details are fantastic, down to the college-esque posters in the backgrounds. One special event is scheduled for "Miyamoto Hall," if you look closely.
To sum all that up, high-quality stuff that speaks to me is now being made by experienced creators. Freddie Wong, the director of the VGHS operation, is just ahead of a curve that will inspire others to follow in his footsteps. There will be more good stuff for me (and you!) to watch, in this format, in the future.
It was with that in mind that BlakeyTV was created. The Internet generation, the Me Generation, the Millenials, whatever you want to call us - we're nearly 30 and we're watching stuff in new ways. I want my videos, played endlessly, with no other intrusions.*
Compare that to attempts by the entertainment establishment to "connect" to nerds, whether a GameStop-sponsored gaming show on Spike, or anything on G4, or even The Big Bang Theory. Wong, a USC film student who paid attention in school, and made a lot of videos, is killing it. He's making undisclosed sums of money on YouTube, meaning that he really will have followers in his footsteps.
Even if I do love what Hollywood makes from time to time, I don't want to pay a cable company $100 a month just for The Colbert Report and Game of Thrones.
When Hollywood decides to converse with the tech world, all words seem to go in one ear and out the other. Ari Emanuel, the feisty Hollywood super-agent who inspired the Entourage character Ari Gold, showed up at the tech-oriented D10 conference and proceeded to fill the room with hubris.
Emanuel asked Josh Topolsky, in ignorance of tech blogs' existence, who he was with. He responded, in ignorance of Sean Parker's stance on converting pirates, with "Nope" to the idea that cord-cutters could just pay $5 an episode for Game of Thrones without getting cable or HBO. He insisted, in ignorance of Google's new YouTube copyright-violator scanning technology, that Google adapt its child porn-detecting tech to also pick up copyrighted content. He pitched the debate in terms of Northern California vs Southern California - the nerds (who, he intimated, steal content) versus the content creators. After noticing that his appearance wasn't well-received online, his olive branch still laid claim to the digital distribution of whatever Hollywood makes.
If Emanuel were ever to read something I've written I'd make it this direct suggestion to him:
You're a middleman. The talent may go through you in Southern California to get things done, but that's not how things get done in Northern California. The Hollywood-caliber talent, in my generation, is using Northern California to make their living in a new economy. You're a famously strong man. Adapt or die.
Postscript
I actually enjoyed my own site this weekend - I came straight home from work, plugged in, clicked and laid down on my bed and started watching until bedtime. It's a huge motivator to work on the site some more, such as allowing people to make their own channels, but I can't decide whether to code it myself as the learning exercise it started as (at the cost of LOTS of time, which I don't have as a Japanese employee), or to use TaskRabbit to farm out the work for a couple hundred bucks and call it an investment. I'd love to hear what you think.