Column: TV + web convergence a hot topic at SXSW 2015
The NBC TV series “Community” is making the leap to Yahoo for Season 6. Showrunner Dan Harmon and actors Jim Rash (left) and Joel McHale (right) will be on a SXSW Interactive panel about the series. Credit: Vivian Zink / NBC
South by Southwest Interactive approaches like a yeti woken from a deep, snowy slumber. And that yeti loves to binge watch TV. There are an awful lot of TV-related panels and installations at the fest this year celebrating the convergence of television and the web, everything from web series to streaming to virtual reality filmmaking.
In this week's Digital Savant column, in Tuesday's print edition and on MyStatesman.com, I rounded up some of that programming, from the creator of "The Walking Dead" Robert Kirkman's two panels (one of them is free to the public!) to local web innovators like Rooster Teeth to Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who'll be discussing her brilliant HBO series "Veep."
Here's an excerpt from the column:
Is a television show an AMC prestige drama that cleans up at the Emmys? Or can it also be "webisodes" you can only view on a computer or mobile device? Will emerging technologies such as virtual reality headgear, in which the entertainment we view may be slightly different for every viewer, still count as episodic TV entertainment?
We're not going to figure that out in this column, but a lot of thought is going into a collection of "Future of TV"-themed panels at this year's South by Southwest Interactive Festival, which runs March 13-17. Stars and creators of well-known shows including HBO's "Veep" and NBC's "Community" (which is moving online to Yahoo for its new season) will be on panels representing what TV has been and where it's going. But on other panels, including one on building online audiences with YouTube sensation Tyler Oakley and asession devoted to augmented and virtual reality, the old content production/viewership models may be beside the point.
Many will be exploring the ways the line between what is a TV series and what is a Web series is stretching out and getting thinner like an old pair of rabbit-ear antennas.
You can find the full column here. Are there TV panels you're excited about or are you tuning out?
