The Strand, Venice CA Premiere Episode
The Strand, Venice CA is one of the more interesting drama to appear this season. Following the lives of several individuals within the Venice vicinity, the show can be thought of as sketches of intersecting lives. Styled with cinéma vérité camera movements, the show attempts to be a documentary with the narrative storytelling of a scripted show.
It is an idea whose time has come. With the advent of the P2P file protocol Bit Torrent, large amounts of data can pass through the networks without hogging the bandwidth of any one individual servers. The Strand utilizes this very same protocol to move its episodes through the Internets.
With the current timetable of most shows on broadcast and cable changing, and particularly with the popularity of PVR's such as Tivo, along with emerging medium like podcasitng, individuals are becoming more and more their own content programmers. So why is it that on demand programming has not catch on as it should? Cable companies have been providing on demand programs for some time, though most are movies not single episodes of your favorite dramas or sci-fi's.
The Internets are one arena in which such ideas can come to fruition, with the users comfortable with choosing their own contents and at a time of their convenience. Of course there are others who will say how exactly can the producers of programs make their returns on the investments if not with the old paradigm of sponsorships. The answer may lie in the route taken by The Strand: micropayments. Charging 99 cents an episode may not seem like much, but when one takes into consideration the unlimited boundaries of web audiences [read: worldwide], the potential for a business model is there. This may all sound like a return to the rhetorics of the bubble years, but the truth of the matter is one cannot ignore the reality of the Web environment.
Will The Strand be the breakout show that will make all that is said happen? Time will tell. As of the first viewing of the premiere episode, I can say that it is not for everyone. It is getting a lot of press however, and if more content providers present themselves with a diversity of products, we may in fact have something that may change the future viewing habits of some broadcast audience.
Freaks, Geeks and Muscle Beach. Welcome to Venice Beach, CA. There's no other city in America quite as colorful, crazy, or content. The Strand takes us into the lives of several characters that inhabit this offbeat, slightly surreal world and shows us that no matter how different we are on the outside, we're all basically the same animal on the inside.Yet the thing about The Strand is that you will not see it on broadcast television, nor cable for that matter. It is a web only program that can be currently downloaded from the show website. The first episode can be view with a free pass, but subsequent shows are paid through micropayments using Bitpass.
Whether you're a yuppie living on the canals, a skate punk looking to score weed or just a homeless guy asking for spare change, the emotions and motivations that make up the human condition are shared by us all.
It is an idea whose time has come. With the advent of the P2P file protocol Bit Torrent, large amounts of data can pass through the networks without hogging the bandwidth of any one individual servers. The Strand utilizes this very same protocol to move its episodes through the Internets.
With the current timetable of most shows on broadcast and cable changing, and particularly with the popularity of PVR's such as Tivo, along with emerging medium like podcasitng, individuals are becoming more and more their own content programmers. So why is it that on demand programming has not catch on as it should? Cable companies have been providing on demand programs for some time, though most are movies not single episodes of your favorite dramas or sci-fi's.
The Internets are one arena in which such ideas can come to fruition, with the users comfortable with choosing their own contents and at a time of their convenience. Of course there are others who will say how exactly can the producers of programs make their returns on the investments if not with the old paradigm of sponsorships. The answer may lie in the route taken by The Strand: micropayments. Charging 99 cents an episode may not seem like much, but when one takes into consideration the unlimited boundaries of web audiences [read: worldwide], the potential for a business model is there. This may all sound like a return to the rhetorics of the bubble years, but the truth of the matter is one cannot ignore the reality of the Web environment.
Will The Strand be the breakout show that will make all that is said happen? Time will tell. As of the first viewing of the premiere episode, I can say that it is not for everyone. It is getting a lot of press however, and if more content providers present themselves with a diversity of products, we may in fact have something that may change the future viewing habits of some broadcast audience.
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