To me, the most salient part of the short letter is as follows:

The IAWTV is a non-profit organization that selects nominees and, ultimately, decides the winners of the Streamy Awards. We did not produce the Streamy Awards show, nor did we have any knowledge of the contents of the show beforehand. Like you we watched the show with great embarrassment as our industry was ridiculed and debased.

With due respect to the talented winners of the Streamy Awards last night, you and the digital entertainment community deserve much better. To that end, the IAWTV will ensure that moving forward every event we are affiliated with lives up to our ideals. If the Streamy Awards take place next year, we will approve the show’s producers, vision, practices and its content in advance. We have all worked hard to bring our industry to where it is today. Egregious mistakes were made last night.

If the IAWTV did not have any oversight of this year’s show, who exactly did?  Did Tubefilter?  Did an unnamed third party?  Was there anyone providing oversight at all?  The Executive Producers, from Brady’s call to NewTeeVee, don’t seem to have exercised the oversight I expected from them.

I am incredibly glad to see the Board of Directors taking this as seriously as it should be taken.  I’m glad to know that they will no longer associate with an event that they have no details about.  I think they should have been monitoring things anyway, but at least they understand the gravity of the situation and what level of involvement is appropriate for future events.

The executive producers of the awards have also posted an open letter apologizing for the event on the Streamys site.  Unlike the Chairman of the IAWTV, these individuals appear to have been the final authority on the show planning.  Having spoken to Brady in the past, I can only conclude that they were not keeping tabs on the show as they should have, because had they known what was going into it, I can’t imagine they would have thought it appropriate.

So we’re now hearing apologies from all sides.  I’m glad they have been coming so quickly.  It’s a good start.  However, I think we can all admit that the Streamys (and the IAWTV by association) have a lot of work to do if they intend to keep on existing.  Though personally, I think that a flashy awards show isn’t appropriate for our medium anyway.

Focus on the Content

A lot of people never lost sight of this, but once official campaign season rolled around the majority of my new media Twitter feed became about the endless campaign for votes.  Issues participated as well, promoting our cast, who we felt to be very deserving recognition.  For the better part of 4 months the discussion has been on how to make the Streamy Awards and the IAWTV great.  We didn’t really talk about how to make our content great, which is the conversation I’m much more interested in having.  Sharing our ideas for what works and what doesn’t, sharing new ways to do things.  That’s what I want from this community.  That we focus on how to help each other all make the best content possible.

Build the Community

I think what has always struck me is that there is no site to form a cohesive community, with or without the IAWTV.  Blog entires about the Streamys generated enormous amounts of comments, and the impromptu live chat room proved that the community wants to get together and talk.  This ties back in strongly with my previous point, as talking about what we have in common – our shows – is how we can best build community.  I’d also like to see the community built up geographically.  I found out about the Tilzy meet-ups just after they held their last one.  To my knowledge, there is no large-scale gatherings of the New York web community.  The biggest challenge to establishing one is resources, but I’d really like to be able to get together with people around the area.

Open up the IAWTV

The IAWTV can remain the exclusive club that votes on the Streamys, but they must severely up their level of both organization and transparency.  No one seems to know how admission or the initial stages of voting were really handled, and they deserve to.  The IAWTV holds a very public event that represents our community to the wider world.  As such, they should be accountable to the entire community to make sure that the majority of the community thinks that they’re doing the right thing.

Honor the Best, Forget the Flashy Show

Last year, and even more so this year, I wondered why a global medium was honored at a Los Angeles ceremony that restricts participation to the nominees who can afford to head out there, and the web series public that happens to be local.  I very much like the suggestions I’ve seen about forgetting the show and doing something much more low-profile, like a luncheon or a dinner that is limited to the nominees and their guests.  Now, assuming we ditch the flashy show, why should we continue to have the awards in a fixed location?  We are a very far-flung community.  Reduce the event in its complexity, and you can really speak to the vast array of people out there by holding the awards in different places.  A luncheon or other smaller award show would still allow nominees to all hang out together, and could very well still allow for streaming.  It could still include a video display and in all ways honor those that were nominated as the year’s best.

Wrapping Up

I think that really gets to the broad strokes of what I’d like to see happen in the year ahead.  Some of it concerns the IAWTV, some of it doesn’t.  Mediums are great with or without their awards.  Lets make sure that we embrace the large, far-flung community that is web video and web series and get on with making it an absolutely wonderful thing to be involved in for the professionals and the amateurs.

Nominations

We didn’t get a nomination for Issues, which was disappointing but expected.  We did get to see our buddies from Gold pick up a Best Ensemble nomination, and our most loved hosted show A Comicbook Orange get a nom. for best hosted.  Overall though, I was disappointed in the nominations, and felt like several East Coast shows, such as Downsized, Concierge, Then We Got Help, and The Battery’s Down all got ignored.  And somehow Mr. Deity remains anonymous among it’s West Coast peers.  So the awards season began with me and most of the rest of the NYC Metro contingent feeling rather neglected.  If Issues had gotten any nomination I desperately wanted it to be for Best Ensemble.  Our cast is amazing together on and off the set.  Truly amazing people.

The First Mis-Step: Voting Problems

It was during and after the official voting that problems with the voting became apparent.  First of all, apparently there was a complete opaque selection of semi-finalists for nomination that append around the time of that horrible winter storm.  The one I only know about because Hayden Black tweeted his frustration with shows that were slow to load.  Then there was the talk of the actual member-wide voting for the actual nominees, which was poorly designed with a form that couldn’t be saved for later, incorrect clips being loading into their closed system, and lots of crashing.  The consensus from the discussion surrounding it was that the voting process didn’t have it’s act together.  Sadly, it was a horrible bit of foreshadowing what was to come.

The First Outrage: The For-Your-Consideration Program

The first time I saw that the IAWTV didn’t have it’s footing firmly in reality was it’s short-lived FYC program.  Hours after the announcement broke that the IAWTV would offer mailers and DVDs to members at what ended up being an excessive amount of money (because all members vote on all awards unless they are nominated for one) as well a FYC email blast for what seemed to be an even less justifiable sum (for writing and sending out a rich-text email), the community, nominees and the general population, were up in arms.  Many of the small shows that had secured nominations were unable to pay for such services and rightly worried about what such uneven access would do to their chances.  To their credit, the IAWTV immediately pulled down the program and launched into a (very overburdened) livechat that members and non-members took part of.  It really felt good to have that kind of dialogue, and I hope it continues now that the ceremony is passed.

The Craft Awards

For my part, I can’t remember anything else bad happening between the FYC program and the start of the awards, just lots of dialogue about how the community needed to move forward and become more open.  But then there were the Craft Awards.  While I understand the ceremony was short, sweet, and fun, I had a bad taste in my mouth from the Craft Awards for one very big reason:

How on earth is the Best New Series of the year a Craft Award?  Isn’t the point of winning that award to bring recognition to the recipient? And if so, why give them their award at the less visible of the two events?  Though in hindsight, maybe it was a good thing.  After all, we haven’t gotten to the worst part yet…

The 2010 Streamy Awards Live Ceremony

Or the various other names it’s been going by since it began, such as StreamyFail, StreamyClusterFuck, and various other names that give you a good idea of how the event went.  Let’s begin this part of the entry by simply stating that the IAWTV owes an enormous apology to its membership, the nominees and winners, and the rest of their audience and viewership.

Probably the most forgivable, while simultaneously being the most aggravating of the problems last night were the well documented technical difficulties.  For my part, we gave up on watching the awards early on and relied on the Twitter feed.  Simultaneously live and delayed streams, audio levels that were abysmally low despite cranking up both the computer and the video player, and video that was so jerky that frames per minute rather than per second is the only way I can describe quickly made the awards unwatchable.  It’s obvious from the first hand accounts of attendees that the problems didn’t end there.  And while technical problems affect even the best planned shows, having them happen for an event that was billed extensively to the viewing audience looked very bad and left me wondering if 1) there had been any technical rehearsals, and 2) if anyone was actually monitoring the live-feed.

I became glad  I wasn’t watching rather quickly.  I enjoy a dirty joke as well as the rest of my fellow crew and cast members (and we can be a raunchy bunch), but there’s a difference between trading blatantly inappropriate jokes on set or on Twitter, were your audience is limited to people who talk directly to you and spam-bots, and on an internationally televised live awards show that had many children in the audience.  Revelations that the show was never truly evaluated as a whole, but only thought about bit by bit explains why it played out as it did, but it certainly doesn’t excuse it.  The awards are a very public venue, and the level of common decency that I expect in a public venue that hasn’t limited involvement based on age was noticeably absent.  I’ve felt terrible for nominees who brought their family and their children’s friends to the event, or who asked family to watch.

What took me from disappointed to outright angry was the enormous amount of abusive humor towards the creators in general.  We know there’s currently no money in our medium and that we are a very niche form of entertainment.  We do this because we love it and our fans, and want to be recognized for our hard work, not made to feel like we’re wasting our time.  A survey of the wider public’s continued lack of awareness of the medium is great research.  It’s not a comedy bit to include at an event to honor the creators of that medium’s content.

And while the male streakers may not have been a planned part of the show, where the hell was security to get them the hell off the stage?

Wrapping Up

All in all, I have to say that I’ve been profoundly disappointed by the way the entire 2010 award season played out.  In many ways it appeared that the IAWTV did not consider the true extent of the community and the viewership.  While I was put off by the necessarily closed nature of the first show, I do think it did a lot to speak to what makes this medium great and to instill confidence in creators going forward.  I don’t think we’ll know the true extent of the damage caused by this year’s disaster for some time, but I expect that it will have a negative effect for the medium as a whole.  If the IAWTV is going to attempt to represent the entire community in a very public setting it needs to take firm stock of what went wrong and get back to the roots put down by the 2009 awards.  And it will have to work very hard for the rest of the year to start earning the respect of the membership.  At it’s hear that seems to be the real problem with this season.  The IAWTV essentially demanded respect from the community.  It seems that they lost sight of the fact that respect must be earned.  It is not freely given.

Expect another post tomorrow of how best I think the community can move forward from this point.  However, it will also be a very long post, so I feel it better to really add it in separately.

Now, I’m used to the retransmission fights cable channels and cable networks go through.  Pretty normal.  What’s new, and what ticks me off more, is the broadcast networks (FOX, ABC, NBC, and CBS) getting into the retransmission fee game.  As we learned this past December, CBS is believed to receive $0.40 per subscriber in retransmission fees.  That was the highest fee leveraged until recently.  Then, FOX started demanding $1.00 per subscriber from Time Warner.  While we don’t know exactly how much they settled on, it’s believed to be somewhere close to that.  That deal closed in the 11th hour of 2009, and FOX’s transmission went on uninterrupted.

New Year’s Day brought a temporary absence of the Scripps networks to Cablevision customers, thanks to retransmission fee disputes.  And while it sucked, I’m pretty sure the loss of Rachel Ray and Iron Chef didn’t drive people away from Cablevision in droves.  Three weeks later, the two companies had settled, and Cablevision viewers had Food Network and HGTV back.  It’s also worth noting that Time Warner’s service was never interrupted, even though Scripps was also locked in a retrans. fight with them.  That fight was settled on January 27th.  All of these deals are undisclosed and we can only guess at what the eventual agreements were.

The newest chapter in the 2010 retrans. saga is the cessation of WABC signal to Cablevision customers as of, well, about an hour and eighteen minutes ago.  At the start of Sunday, ABC pulled it’s programming from the network less than 24 hours before the Academy Awards are set to begin.  Not having cable at all in my house – we do all our watching online – the first I learned of this was Tuesday when I heard a commercial about it driving home from a lunch meeting.  It’s rumored that Disney and ABC are seeking $1 per subscriber, same as FOX did in December.

This unfortunately has all the same b.s. and drama that the Time Warner v. FOX battle had.  A major event is on the line – this time the Academy Awards – and the network is painting the cable provider as the bad guy for not giving their customers access to the show.  Which is all well and good, but Cablevision wasn’t the one who pulled the plug.  That was Bob Iger of Disney.  After hours price of Disney stock as dipped slightly while Cablevision holds steady.  Once again, I’m sure the cable provider will have no choice but to give in.  And once again, it pisses me off.

Why does it piss me off?  Because it reeks of desperation that networks feel as their traditional business model crumbles.  Broadcast networks traditionally subsist on the price they can command from advertisers.  Premium cable channels (such as HBO) make their money on subscriber fees and forgo advertising.  Typical cable channels (everything else) makes their money through a hybrid model of the two.  Thanks to a variety of factors such as fragmenting audiences, lack of quality programming, and ever higher demands, advertisers aren’t paying up the way they used to.  That doesn’t affect premium channels, and while it affects cable channels, their retrans negotiations usually play out in relative privacy.  Broadcast networks, however, are currently seeing their main revenue stream dry up.  So, they turn to retransmission fees as a way to make up what they’re loosing.

My problem with this is that advertiser fees were passed indirectly and very minutely to the public.  A company that can afford a national advertising campaign, such as Coke, sells enough product to distribute its advertising costs over a wide area.  The effect is that your bottle of soda may go up a couple pennies.  National cable providers can spread cost in a similar way.  Regional providers, such a Cablevision, not so much.  With a smaller pool to spread cost out over, they’ll have to hike rates higher than their competition.  And obviously, you can see the disadvantage to consumers.  It puts a regional company between a rock and a hard place – raise rates and make customers angry or pull programming and make customers angry.

If broadcast networks want to play this game, I think they should have to convert themselves to cable networks, and they should have to compete directly with other cable networks.  So Comcast, you might want to reconsider what you do with NBC.  I also hear that Les Moonves at CBS would be open to thinking about converting his network to cable if such a move became necessary.  To continue acting as if the consumer does not directly pay for your programming as you start directly charging their cable providers for access to your programming is deceitful.  I also think you need to realize that your business model is dying a slow painful death and come up with a nice list of alternatives.  One of those should be switching to cable.  Another should be experimenting with ways to monetize your programming online.  We’re all waiting to see what happens with Hulu once this Comcast/NBC case is worked out.  But in general, I think it unfair to call yourself a broadcast network when you’re cating ike a cable one.  Make up your mind and get on with it.  And stop demanding money.  Maybe if you actually had some quality programming, we’d think about paying more for you.

Oh, did we mention that ABC also has to renegotiate it’s contract with Time Warner sometime this year?  Looks like they’re using Cablevision to pave the way of whatever demands they hope to hand to Time Warner.

As some of you may know, the 2010 inductees into the IAWTV have been chosen (though not officially announced), as have the crop of shows that are up for the 2010 Streamy Awards.  After watching everything play out over the week so far, I’ve been able to form an opinion of the proceeds, and I must admit that I’m not entirely happy with them.

I think probably the most serious problem I’ve observed in this first year of applications to the IAWTV was the complete lack of transparency over the proceedings.  No one seems to know how the 2010 inductees were chosen.  And while I’m of course disappointed that I and others from Issues didn’t get in, I think the thing that seemed most odd to me was co-creators/co-writers getting different answers in applying.  I think that really confused a lot of us and made us somewhat distrustful of the application review process.  After all, if you have the same credits to your name, why would you get different answers to your applications?  My hope moving forward is that once the craziness of the awards are passed, the group moves towards becoming more organized and transparent in it’s application and acceptance processes.  Since the 2010 nominees haven’t been announced, we don’t know who is in.  We only know who is out if those people choose to say so on a public medium like Twitter.

My next point has been reiterated several times by several people, most recently Steve Woolfe on New Mediacracy, and that is the bubble that seems to be forming around the L.A.-based web shows.  Being a good 3,000 from L.A. in another major web show center (the NYC metro area), I’m noticing that it’s very hard for us to engage with the L.A. shows.  This isn’t true of everyone.  I’ve been talking to David and Andrew of GOLD: The Series for what’s probably closing in on a year.  I’ve recently been talking to Casey McKinnon and Gennefer Snowfield.  But in general it feels hard to reach out and contact the IAWTV if you don’t have a connection to it already.  Even when you do, it’s not so easy.

I know that to an extent, creators in New York are up in arms.  The WGAE has been talking about the LA web series bubble, and members aren’t happy about it.  However, rather than simply get together at our respective geographic locales and get angry, I think we need to be exploring new ways of supporting a geographically diverse group.  Last night’s TinyChat regarding the Streamy FYC program, for all it’s video problems, opened up the floor to a lot of people who normally don’t get included in these situations at all. I was very happy to be ably to talk to Brady Brim-DeForest during that event, and also established contact with a very cool Virginia based film/show creator.

I think that we could expand the sense of community by pursing several avenues.  Firstly, establishing an online community for creators in general, and for IAWTV members specifically would allow us to talk to people who may not be anywhere near us.  I also think establishing meetings in many geographic locales would help build local communities.  Right now the WGAE new media members are all coming together through WGAE events.  I miss the Tilzy meet-ups in New York.  The meet-ups that do occur now tend to be small affairs with no outside advertising.  Unless you already know about them, they’re difficult to find.  I also find it disappointing that the only NYC based IAWTV event was a general interest session held in November.  I was unable to attend that meeting due to work, and have never had a chance to physically hang out with Academy members since.  Makes me rather sad to think about.

The final point I have to hit has also been hit on quite a bit recently.  From what the rest of us got to hear through the New Mediacracy show about it, the Streamys voting process was – difficult.  I think this is another case of a lack of transparency, in part.  From what I can gather, there appear to have been 2 different voting rounds.  During round 1, there were complaints of bad links and slow load times.  That first round also feel on one of the weekends the entire northeast was being slammed by a Nor’easter, which I think may have had something to do with some of the problems encountered.  But since no one knew that the group was voting, those of us who were being affected by that crazy weather didn’t know to be checking up on our sites.  When Hayden Black tweeted about voting and problems, that’s when I checked our website and saw how slowly our videos were loading.  I was able to alleviate some of that with changing the site layout on the fly, but some of it was weather, which was beyond everyone’s control.  I also know of the main vote through Twitter as well.  By that point, I’d been able to fix up the site a bit, though still not to what I wanted.

Again, the most recent episode of New Medicracy raises some good points.  One is the lack of technical knowledge creators my have.  Casey McKinnon and Rudy Jahchan put together a beautiful example of an FYC page that they believed to be the best way to promote a series.  But how many sites lacked that because they didn’t know how to make one.  I know Issues didn’t have one up this year, but will next year.  Things were a little crazy over in Issues land as we set sights firmly on Season 2 and hit the gas.  But I think Casey made a point that maybe the IAWTV or a similar organization should be offering resources to help web creators learn some of these skills.  Some of us love burying our noses in books and playing with software (it’s how I’ve learned most of my editing skills), but for some people, that’s not the best alternative.  I think it all comes back to a need to really unify this community.  And given how spread out we all are from each other, I think that the ‘net is going to be the primary force that can unify this space.  Plus regional groups.  We all want an excuse to hang with other creators.  Especially at bars.