So, I wrote this post on the Friday before the Streamy awards. Meant to post it, but wanted to make some tweaks. Then the Streamys... happened... and I wanted some distance from it before making this post. I was considering revising this in light of recent events, but decided to just post my thoughts in their original form. You'll notice some overlap with my post-Streamys post… clearly I was already thinking about some of the growing pains we're feeling right now.

Here it is:

Congratulations to Austin and his entire team for the successful conclusion of LG15: Outbreak. I hope that you all enjoyed it as much as I did. We've been thrilled by the response to LG15: The Show Is Yours over the past couple years. There is such an amazing amount of creativity in the LG15 community. It started in a bedroom with lonelygirl15 and around the country with shows like Rocketboom, Ask A Ninja, and more, but now there's a huge international community of people producing fantastic shows online. Over the past few years, the amount of creativity and innovation has exploded; there's even a professional organization and an awards show!

And that got us thinking. Why limit TSIY to the LG15 Universe?

The more we thought about it, the more it made sense. TSIY should be for everyone. Now, this isn't a well-formed idea right now, it's more the beginning of an idea, but we'll be working on the details over the next couple months. I guess you can think of this as a pre-announcement. Anyways, in the near future we'll be announcing the launch of a new website focused on finding the absolute best social shows the web has to offer... scripted, reality, non-fiction, whatever it might be.

And, yes, I said "social show." I have a pet peeve about the monikers used to describe our art. Web series. Webisodes. Viral videos. They're so limiting.

A social show isn't just video. And, it most certainly isn't static. A social show, just like the internet, is interactive. We MUST embrace this interactivity if we want to push the medium forward.

A social show is like a blog on steroids with multimedia content and interactive "calls-to-action" that bring the audience inside the creator's world. If you've experienced lonelygirl15, Harpers Globe, or the Real Women of Philadelphia, you've experienced a social show. If you've experienced Philly D, iJustine, Epic Fu, or HotForWords, you've also experienced a social show. And if you have, you know that it's addictive. Ever since we uploaded the first lonelygirl15 video to YouTube, we've become addicted to the magical energy that forms between a team of interactive producers and a passionate audience, and we want to encourage everyone to become addicts just like us :)

Okay, that was the sugar. Now for a little medicine. Because we're spinning out "The Show Is Yours" as an independent brand, we're going to stop running an LG15-specific TSIY and will not be producing any new LG15 series in the forseeable future. Obviously this was a very difficult decision for us, but we think it's best to close this chapter in the LG15 Universe and focus on the future. So, in the next few months we'll be rolling out a re-design of the LG15 homepage to focus on improving the discoverability of all the current LG15 shows, episodes, and characters. We're also continuing to transfer shows from our legacy system into Umbrella, including KateModern and OpAPHID.

So, stay tuned. A new website for "The Show is Yours," and a fantastic opportunity for independent producers to partner with EQAL and create the next lonelygirl15.