(download)

iTunes

Stitcher Radio

PREVIOUS EPISODES:
Holiday Gadget Gift Guide

War Tweets, Google TV and Nexus 4

Director Jay Duplass on low-fi movies through high-tech

Election Dissection, Ditching DSL and Dumping the iPad

Sandy’s Social, Infrastructure Impact and Forstall

Windows 8 Surfaces, and disruption eruption

iPad Mini, iMac gets skinny

Boxee Cloud DVR, Apple Rumors and Chromebook

Commutist interview: Joy of X author Steven Strogatz

Commutist podcast: Patent trolls, Costco ban and Passbook’s home run

Commutist, meet Nerdist, and interview with Chris Hardwick

T-Metro, Broadband Caps, Remembering Steve Jobs

Apple’s iO-Mess, Dirty Data Centers and Tesla

News from the Mobilize Conference

Paul Tough: How Children Succeed and what you can learn from them

The iPhone 5 Event

Come on, Kindle, Light My 4G Fire

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How consumer media will change in 2013
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
• Players and Strategies for Real-Time In-Stream Advertising

Yes, it’d be a major infrastructure demand, but the cameras are already set up, after all, and given the rate at which badges sell out, a paid live-stream offering would likely have no trouble finding an audience. Watching the action of SDCC unfold from the cheap seats this year, though, it seems the reason parent company Comic-Con International has held out is because live-streaming is unnecessary. Its attendees are doing the work for them.

In 2003, I began regularly attending the San Diego Comic-Con, and every year since I found it to be, essentially, pop culture Christmas. From watching Joss Whedon directly address questions about a Dr. Horrible sequel, to gawking at small children in adorable costumes, to finding that one collectable or comic that would be available nowhere else, attending was always worth the humidity, money and inconvenience.

However, this year and last year, I’ve stayed home. And while I miss the people I might meet there, the exclusive swag being passed out, even the enthusiastic crush of excited fans — I honestly don’t feel like I’m missing much.

That’s because observing Comic-Con from afar these days isn’t like listening to your friends talk about a great dinner party you weren’t invited to: Social media and smart phones have transformed Comic-Con from an exclusive, insular event to a big fandom party for everyone. YouTube currently hosts thousands of videos posted just within the past few days. Twitter is lush with quotes and photos. Professional journalists and devoted fans alike are united in sharing the experience online, as fast as humanly possible.

And this is formalized well beyond the bloggers recapping panels and screenings with super-human speed, bringing news about things like Dr. Horrible airing on the CW next year — the studios are in on the game, as well.

The Quicktime release of the Oz the Great and Powerful trailer was timed with its presentation in Hall H. The ABC series Once Upon A Time dropped its season two preview on YouTube as its panel ran. MTV hosted hours of live-streamed interviews on its site — non-geo-blocked, even.

And web originals are just as savvy as the studios, if not savvier. Break Media’s Nerd Machine, streaming live from the so-called Nerd HQ, managed to bring in a number of celebs for some memorable moments.

And at the Geek and Sundry panel on Saturday morning, producer Felicia Day launched the first episode of the channel’s newest series, Written By A Kid — simultaneously launching the trailer on YouTube.

The only content launching at Comic-Con definitely not making its way to the web are the screenings of pilots for shows like Revolution and 666 Park. But given current trends in experimenting with digital release, there’s a half-decent chance that they might be previewed online as well.

In 2003 (those dark pre-YouTube days), there was no handy way to distribute these clips online. The convention center barely had wi-fi. The sneak peeks that fans were getting at Van Helsing and Spider-Man 2 were truly exclusive to the convention; they were part of what made the then-$60 badge price worth it. And with attendance at 70,000 (as opposed to 2011′s 126,000+), it was much more possible to see everything.

Not so these days, when fans resort to camping out days in advance to make sure they see that one special thing. And those die-hards, the ones for whom the first-hand experience is the appeal, will always flock to San Diego. So will media professionals, who have transformed the conference’s after-hours into one of the year’s biggest networking events.

But for the average pop culture enthusiast — the Dexter viewer looking for a sneak peek at Season 7, the casual Community fan who just wants to know what was said during the show’s panel — it’s now enough to follow Twitter and keep up with Tumblr tags. How Comic-Con evolves with this shift is still to be seen. But in the meantime, even if Comic-Con isn’t live-streamed, it’s still possible to feel like you’re there.

Photo courtesy of Nerdpromnomnom, used with permission.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
• Where the next-generation console fits in today’s video game market
• How consumer media will change in 2013

Day is promising to visit as many Hangouts of her fans within a three-hour window as possible. She announced the house calls on Google+, where she explained:

I’ll answer questions about the show and we can even pose for a photo that you can screencap and post later! Cool? Cool.

The Dragon Age: Redemption house calls will kick off with a post on Day’s Google+ profile on Tuesday at 10 a.m. PST that will ask viewers to post links to their Hangouts in the comments. Day will then click through those links, visiting one Hangout after another.

Hangouts have become a kind of killer feature for Google+ in recent months, and Google has been capitalizing on the popularity of its group video chat service by adding a broadcast option that makes it possible for an unlimited number of viewers to follow a Hangout.

The company has promoted some of these Hangout broadcasts aggressively, going as far as linking to a will.i.am-hosted Hangout from its Google homepage. This weekend, Google facilitated another popular Hangouts broadcast, featuring the two Nobel Peace Prize winners Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama.

However, while popular, these broadcasts have been missing some of the interactivity and intimacy that makes Hangouts so special. Day’s house call experiment, on the other hand, plays with this intimate element, which could make for a much more interesting experience for its participants. And who knows? Maybe we’ll see political campaigns utilizing these kinds of house calls next.

Want to learn more about the growing importance of Hangouts and other aspects of the alive web? Then check out our Roadmap Conference, coming up on Nov. 10 in San Francisco.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Where the next-generation console fits in today’s video game market
• How consumer media will change in 2013
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1

Doing the “Sell Out” shorts put a comical spin on the concept of merchandising the show — but two years later, it’s become a reality, kind of. Beyond t-shirts manufactured by Jinx and a series of comics published by Dark Horse the following officially licensed Guild-related products are now or will soon be available:

• A limited-edition necklace version of the staff carried by Day’s avatar Codex, by independent jewelry designers Jenny and Jimbob.
• A Codex Halloween costume for adult ladies, by HalloweenCostumes.com.
• Two posters, available for sale on ThinkGeek.
• A line of “animated maquettes” (think small hand-painted statues) of Guild characters, by Quantum Mechanix.
• A set of collectable trading cards, created by Cryptozoic.
• A limited-edition six-pack of soda by Jones Soda.
• A booster pack for the classic card game Munchkin, created by Steve Jackson Games.

What do many of these things have in common? They’re all the kind of merchandise you might run across while attending a gaming convention. And that’s not a coincidence.

When preparing to launch the fifth season of The Guild (which will premiere its season finale this week), both Evey and Day said that they were looking at a much more ambitious concept — instead of shooting largely in apartments, the season would take place largely at a geek conference. “We were on location 90 percent of the time, there were tons of extras — it was more of a movie shoot than any other season,” Day said via phone.

But because, according to Day, the budget for Season 5 was relatively equivalent to Season 4, they needed to look to other means to supplement the production — thankfully, though, the conference setting offered a natural opportunity to integrate product placement. “The question was ‘Can this add to our universe?’ instead of it just being ‘Please give us some money,’” Day said.

This product placement took multiple forms. For example, according to Evey via email, HalloweenCostumes.com PR representative Stephanie Beadell approached The Guild the day after they’d realized they needed multiple conference-appropriate costumes for Tink (Amy Okuda), as well as enough costumes for an auditorium’s worth of background extras.

“HalloweenCostumes.com provided costumes in exchange for advertising and promotion of their company. And because almost all of Tink’s cosplay outfits use their costumes as a base, it’s nice for the fans to know where to go if they want to make one of those outfits to wear to a Con,” she said.

As the show is already sponsored by Microsoft and Sprint, Day and Evey were careful to run all additional product placement deals by those companies, and were careful to seek out things that would “in no way trample over their brands,” as Day put it.

And from those product placement deals, many of the merchandising opportunities later emerged. For example, the Steve Jackson Games deal followed the prominent placement of Munchkin in the Season 5 premiere, and HalloweenCostumes.com pitched the idea of a well-made officially licensed Codex costume after supplying the production with other costumes. “The things we’ve done have been very carefully picked for the cool value — they added value to how people enjoy the show,” Day said.

The Cryptozoic trading cards are another example of a property approaching The Guild for a potential merchandising opportunity, in this case through Felicia Day’s agent at ICM, George Ruiz. “We’ve all been huge fans of the show since the beginning and thought Guild trading cards would be really cool,” a Cryptozoic press representative said via email. It’s the first deal they’ve made with a web original property, but “I don’t think it will be the last. Web broadcast is really no less impactful than traditional networks. For us and our customers it’s already a well accepted form of content distribution.”

Cryptozoic's "Guild" trading cards will be available for purchase

On the surface, a merchandising blitz like this could be seen as “selling out” — except that everything that’s being manufactured has real appeal for the show’s established audience, the core demographic of which is not just passionate about the show, but gaming culture in general.

“I think the origins of the term ["selling out"] probably come from someone not preserving the heart of why people like something in order to make a profit,” Day said. “I’m confident that we’ve taken every consideration to make all our partnerships fit with our show philosophy and our fans and we’ve heard very little feedback to the contrary.”

“Being able to partner with brands with independent cred was very important to to me, because that’s the spirit of the show,” Day added. “We didn’t want to partner with anyone that people wouldn’t think was cool.” According to Day, fans were as excited about the specialty Jones Sodas as they were about actual episodes.

When asked what her favorite piece of merchandise might be, Day’s first response was the Codex Halloween costume, which enables folks of all shapes and sizes to dress up just like her. “I never thought that would happen,” she said.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Where the next-generation console fits in today’s video game market
• How consumer media will change in 2013
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1

The Guild, in case you’re new, is the long-running series about a pack of socially awkward MMORPG addicts, created by Felicia Day and produced by Kim Evey. Launched independently in July 2007, the show has received over 100 million views (according to an official release) and attracted a worldwide fan base that fills convention halls.

I mention the convention thing because, as promised at the end of Season 4, the action of Season 5 will involve the characters attending a convention for the unnamed game they play. According to Evey, to handle this production requirement they’re not only considering shooting certain scenes at a small convention, but working with additional brands.

“We haven’t really had success with brand integration aside from Microsoft and Sprint, who help us make sure their brands are visible but not obnoxious,” Evey said via phone. “But the brands that we need now are brands which would sell their wares at a convention like this, and are willing to be in our show.”

Season 5 may also require some featured players who are cosplayers — preferably, people who cosplay original characters as opposed to copyrighted ones. “We’re going to reach out to that community to see if they’ll come down and be a part of the show for a day,” Evey said.

The regular cast will be returning, as well as Sean Becker as director. Shooting is set to begin in late spring, with production running, according to Day’s estimation, a few weeks behind last year’s schedule — thus, look for the show to premiere in late July or early August.

Evey was unable to say if there would be a new music video this year to follow in the tradition of Do You Wanna Date My Avatar? and Game On — in part, she says, because they’re “a ton of work to put together in the space between production and Comic-Con [where they've premiered each year].”

“It’s still a challenge, because we’re still a web series, we still have to ask our friends for help, still have to ask for discounts on things. For everything [Day] writes that we want to try to accomplish, it’s still kind of impossible without that help,” Evey said. “We’re learning every year how to stretch our budget further and further.”

Meanwhile, the audience for the show is growing, especially as new distribution platforms are added every year. Season 4 will soon be available on Netflix Instant, and the DVD will be released on Feb. 22, thanks to a distribution deal with New Video.

“We’re lucky that we have such an eager fanbase and that our numbers have stayed so high,” Day said via phone. “Partnering with Xbox increased our fanbase in a real way — it introduced us to millions of people who never would have seen it before.”

However, The Guild is by far not the only project Day has going on — she will be guest-starring on the SyFy series Eureka when it returns from hiatus, starred in a SyFy original werewolf movie and recently completed shooting an upcoming project, dubbed #mysteryproject on her Twitter feed, that will be announced next week.

Do all these projects mean this could be the last season of the show? While nothing is set in stone, as Day writes Season 5 (the entire season is written at once, she says, much like a feature film) she isn’t approaching it like it’ll be the finale.

“For the end of this season, I have an idea for what I want to do and it’s definitely not closing a door. I’m definitely not planning to make Season 5 the final one,” she said via phone. “The characters are a vast well. I can’t stop coming up with ideas for them.”

Photo courtesy Knights of Good Productions.

Related content on GigaOM Pro: (subscription required)

• By The Numbers: Budget Analysis of a Web Series
• Sony vs. Microsoft: Whose Mobile Gaming Strategy Will be Better?
• Shattering the Fourth Wall To Find Web Audiences

This doesn’t make Red the highest-rated cable original movie premiere SyFy’s had this year; that would be Lake Placid 3, which was watched by 3.0 million last August.

But according to SyFy executive VP of programming and original movies Thomas Vitale, with whom I spoke via phone, “Any time you break two million viewers on a Saturday night, you’ve got a big, big success. It’s a lower viewing night in general, with a lot of DVR playback happening.” (Another factor Vitale didn’t mention: the fact that Red aired the Saturday before Halloween. In addition, these numbers do not account for DVR viewing, stats which aren’t available yet.)

He attributed that success to both the film’s high concept premise — a modern-day Little Red Riding Hood, fighting werewolves — as well as Day’s star power.

Vitale said that he and the SyFy team had been looking for a project for Day for a while, specifically citing Dr. Horrible as one of the projects that put her on their radar. When the idea of doing a spin on the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale came up, “It all kind of happened organically — the timing was just perfect.”

Vitale was quick to say that while Day’s 1.7 million Twitter followers were not a factor in her casting, it was the “icing on the cake. She probably brought a lot of fans to the screen — that always helps, to have someone able to do grassroots marketing just by talking to her fans.”

Day said via email,”I had an amazing experience on the show, more so knowing that the opportunity was most likely tied to my hard work creating my own web show. I know that my Tweeting about the show definitely raised awareness, I got tons of feedback and was touched that people genuinely were excited for me to be on their TVs. It’s that kind of fan support that keeps me going.”

When Red was first announced last March as a 2011 release (the effects work was completed early, allowing it to premiere in late October instead), I wondered how Day’s online success might affect the film’s performance, writing that “By 2011, TV and web content might be well-integrated enough that we’ll see TV commercials for Red plugging its star as ‘Dr. Horrible‘s Felicia Day.’”

It’s still 2010, and the TV commercials didn’t mention Dr. Horrible. Instead, they just said “Felicia Day is RED.”

“That’s what makes her a fascinating person to talk about,” Vitale said. “In five years, there will be a number of household names who are self-made, but she’s one of the first.”

Related GigaOm Pro Content (subscription required):

• With TV Apps, Over-the-Top Video Gets New Backers
• A Guide To Online Video Monetization Options
• New Use For Web Stats: Finding Hot Markets, Offline

Riese: Kingdom Falling, re-edited in collaboration with the SyFy team, has a faster pace and voiceover narration by Amanda Tapping (Stargate SG-1), and the show’s fairy tale feel is now enhanced with the words “Once upon a time…” The original first episode was completely consumed by a fight between lost princess Riese (Christine Chatelain) and her pursuers; in this new take, there’s plenty of set-up and exposition establishing the kingdom of Eleysia, a kingdom in flux.

SyFy has an exclusive window for Riese‘s relaunch, keeping it geoblocked to the United States, but co-creator Ryan Copple promises via email that it will be available internationally “VERY soon.” The Riese iPhone game, which features narration by web maven Felicia Day, has also been submitted to Apple and should be available for download by early next week, if not sooner. The show will also soon go live on Hulu, where plenty of behind-the-scenes content is already available. Amanda Tapping’s involvement is notable because her own independent web series, Sanctuary, made the transition to television in 2008 and has been a solid performer for SyFy ever since.

It’s that model which Riese may replicate, according to Copple in a phone interview earlier this month, depending on the show’s online performance and discussions with international broadcasters “interested in seeing how the web-to-TV development can work.”

Related GigaOm Pro Content (subscription required):

• Three Reasons Over-The-Top TV Apps Will Beat Big-Cable
• New Use For Web Stats: Finding Hot Markets, Offline
• A Guide To Online Video Monetization Options

Riese, originally an independent production with a budget of $200,000 and a cast drawn heavily from popular sci-fi properties like Stargate Atlantis, Battlestar Galactica and Smallville, has been offline since February 2010 because of a distribution deal with Fireworks International.

That will change by the end of this month, when SyFy, following its pick-up of the show last April, relaunches the series on SyFy.com. According to creator Ryan Copple, with whom I spoke via phone, the SyFy re-release of Riese will initially be geo-blocked as SyFy has an initial window of exclusivity. However, the series will go international shortly thereafter.

And it’s got a shiny new edit, thanks to Copple and his team collaborating with SyFy. “[The episodes] are so much better now — tight and quick. And Riese herself is much more captivating now,” Copple said about the re-edit. “It’s completely different now.”

No matter how much the episodes might change, Riese is still a transmedia experience, something that began even before the show’s launch, thanks to a puzzle-based game that revealed secrets about the mysterious religious cult at the heart of the show.

The iPhone game developed by the Vancouver-based Genius Factor Games — an RPG card-style battle game set to launch towards the end of the month — will take that even further thanks to Day’s narration. “We’ve been trying to make Riese go from a steampunk action show to steampunk fairy tale, and as part of that we’re trying to imbue the world with a narrator,” Copple said. The game play, thanks to Day’s voice-over, will thus be infused with more information about the world and people inhabited by Riese.

As for a potential TV adaptation, the Riese team has been talking with both SyFy as well as international broadcasters “interested in seeing how the web-to-TV development can work.” The Riese team is also in talks with a major publisher for a series of novels set in the kingdom of Eleysia.

This is all possible because Copple and co-creator Kaleena Kiff still hold the rights to their intellectual property, and thus have control over all potential franchising. “It’s the one thing to take away from the whole web studio thing,” Copple said. “We haven’t relied on anyone else yet, so why start now?”

Related GigaOm Pro Content (subscription required):

• The State of Social TV
• Are Sponsored Apps the Key for Traditional Media in Mobile?
• 5 Tips for Developers Targeting the iPad

Steve Levitan Gets His Wish: “Modern Family” Leaves Hulu (Briefly); Levitan’s show has been off Hulu, ABC.com and ABC’s iPad app for the past month or so, as its streaming rights expired on July 27. (MediaMemo)

Vidyo Bets On The iPad And iPhone For The Future Of Video Conferencing; soon you will be able to access and connect with Vidyo from any platform, whether it be an Android phone, iPad or computer. (TechCrunchIT)

Syfy Books Felicia Day’s Red for October 30; the Felicia Day-led telefilm — now monikered Red: Werewolf Hunter — will premiere Saturday, October 30 on SyFy. (The Futon Critic)

SpeakerText Automates And Crowdsources Video Transcripts; angel-funded startup SpeakerText is relaunching with a new way to automate the transcription process and attach the full transcript as part of the video player in a drop-down window. (TechCrunch)

Cable’s New Pole Problems; some cable operators are worried they might have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in additional pole-attachment fees as a byproduct of the FCC’s proposed reclassification of broadband service. (Multichannel News)

The Attack Of Branded Content: Who Will Control TV On The Web?; advertisers love broadcast and cable TV because of its massive reach into every home, but they are finding it nearly impossible to replicate that reach on the Web, which is where branded content comes in. (TechCrunch)

TAN partners with TubeMogul to bring PlayTime to India; Times Audience Network (TAN) announced today a strategic partnership with leading video advertising and analytics platform TubeMogul to launch PlayTime in India. (press release)

After being asked the question, “How did you get first introduced to The Guild?,” more than 2,750 fans have responded with their stories of finding the show through friends, blogs and other services. And while there’s a wide variety of responses, Jeff Koenig, digital media producer at CJP Digital, was the first to notice one of the most popular answers: People discovering the show via the Do You Wanna Date My Avatar? music video, produced last year to promote the premiere of Season 3.

In a breakdown of early Facebook comments posted to his personal blog, Koenig found that of the first 249 respondents to the survey, 17 percent of fans cited Date My Avatar as what led them to the show, making it the second-most popular response behind “Referral from friend/relative.” It also well exceeds discovery through Xbox, the Dr. Horrible DVD and Netflix (though one commenter noted that at least in the case of Netflix, that might not be accurate).

Koenig’s results have not been updated since the initial 249 comments, but a casual scan of more recent responses supports the fact that Date My Avatar was a key gateway for fans — whether they found it through a friend, MSN.com (where the video was at one point featured) or by searching for “world of warcraft songs.”

It’s no wonder they created the Bollywood-inspired followup video Game On, which — since debuting a month ago — has racked up more than 500,000 views on Bing and more than 600,000 views on YouTube. Not only that, but when released on iTunes, the song beat Katy Perry’s California Gurls.

It makes sense, if you think about it: Date My Avatar‘s slick production values combine nicely with a strong nerd sensibility to make it the best conceivable calling card for the show. Also, if you’re familiar with the song and you’ve read this far, be honest — is it stuck in your head again? Because it sure is stuck in mine.

UPDATE: A Guild rep writes in to say:

The Facebook wall post was simply a matter of engaging our fans, as we always try to do with our supporting web and social media sites. It’s clearly not a statistically significant ‘survey,’ just a discussion we started with our fans.

Related GigaOm Pro Content (subscription required): Should You Super-Syndicate Your Web Series?