Page 335 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

1 | Onl ne D g tal F lm and Telev s on

More versatile media companies have made use of viral video to get in touch
with their viewers and to gain attention for their products. For instance, cable
stations such as Viacom-owned Comedy Central have taken opportunities to
use the Internet to interact with viewers and to initiate culture-producing ac-
tivities. Comedy Central (after having pulled most of its content from YouTube)
offers almost all episodes of its popular The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and
The Colbert Report on its Web site edited in much the way that fans edit clips for
sharing on YouTube. Comedian Stephen Colbert has called upon his viewers to
contribute erroneous information on the collaborative Web encyclopedia, Wiki-
pedia, as well as offered a “green screen challenge,” for which viewers could use
green screen footage from his visit to Skywalker Ranch to contribute their own
movies on YouTube. In a similar vein, the marketers of the 2006 movie Snakes
on a Plane included an online contest to which groups could submit their own
short movies based on the ad-lib, “[Animal] on a [mode of transportation].”
Finally, some movie distributors have purposely fed corrupted versions of mov-
ies into bit torrent communities so that user-pirated movies, once shared and
opened, do not show the expected movie. Porn video companies have made use
of the model but to their advantage; they send out files mistitled as mainstream
movies that, once downloaded and opened, show pornography and feature their
Web site addresses to attract more traffic.
Online film and television has just started its first wave of popularity. It re-
mains to be seen how the media and the online communities will continue to
grow in the future and how corporations will shut down or work with pirated
material that is shared between peers.

see also À La Carte Cable Pricing; Alternative Media in the United States; Digi-
tal Divide; The DVD; Internet and Its Radical Potential; News Satire; Online
Publishing; Piracy and Intellectual Property; TiVo; Transmedia Storytelling and
Media Franchises; User-Created Content and Audience Participation.

Further reading: Davis, Joshua. “The Secret World of Lonelygirl15.” Wired 14, no. 12 (De-
cember 2006): 232–39; Follansbee, Joe. Get Streaming!: Quick Steps to Delivering Audio
and Video Online. Burlington, MA: Focal, 2004; Garfield, Bob. “The YouTube Effect.”
Wired 14, no. 12 (December 2006): 222–27; Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: When
Old and New Media Collide. New York: NYU Press, 2006; Keen, Andrew. The Cult of
the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture. New York: Currency, 2007;
Kharif, O. “Online Video: Next Stop, Nasdaq?” Business Week, September 27, 2006.
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/sep2006/tc20060927_385661.htm;
Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity. New York: Pen-
guin, 2005; Levy, S. “Lawrence Lessig’s Supreme Showdown.” Wired 10, no. 10 (October
2002). http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.10/lessig.html; Mullaney, T. J. “Netflix:
The Mail-Order Movie House that Clobbered Blockbuster.” Business Week, May 25,
2006. http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/may2006/sb20060525_268860.
htm; Rayburn, Dan, and Michael Hoch. The Business of Streaming and Digital Media.
Burlington, MA: Focal, 2005; Shalat, Andrew. How to Do Everything with Online
Video. New York: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media, 2007.

Tamao Nakahara