Eyelab is a small division of the CBS corporation, whose employees - all of them under 30 years of age - whose job is, literally, to chop-up CBS' TV show content and repackage it for distribution online.
How I Met Your Mother - the TV sit-com in which one miss Britney Spears recently made a highly-touted guest-appearance - was chopped into an online feature entitled, Talk Nerdy 2 Me. This package, under two minutes in length, was distributed to nearly 200 major sites across the Web, such as MSN, CNet, and Bebo.
While a lot of the "webisodes" - which are not truly original content, but clips from television content - Eyelab creates play like promos for the TV shows, others are completely new takes on them, such as Smut Whisperer, in which clips from Ghost Whisperer were collected, with random words bleeped-out. The idea is that TV producers are trying to learn how to work with the medium instead of viewing it as competition.
Well-made material related to the shows is hoped to spark interest both in the shows on TV, as well as online. And while I applaud the effort, the truth is that these cats still don't quite Get It; the Internet is not just another way to distribute, market, and/or promote content made for other mediums, regardless of how it is repackaged. But, again, I applaud the effort.
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© C Harris Lynn, 2008
A rambling melange of pop-culture.
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