Oregon Public Broadcasting

If you like being able to get your digital media anytime, anywhere, you're about to get lucky. Recently, Cisco Systems announced it’s working on a set-top box that will let you watch internet video on your TV.

So what exactly might you be watching on that box? April Baer reports on some of the Oregon producers of internet video.

Rebecca Gerendasy is ankle deep in mud, hunched   over her camera at the Ayers Creek Organic Farm. She's on a shoot for her internet-based show,  Cooking Up a Story.

Rebecca Gerendasy: “ ‘kay, Anthony, tell me a little about what you’ve already done today.”

Farmer Anthony Boutard is wrestling with burdock roots, and explaining how he farms through wet Oregon winters.

Anthony Boutard: “You can’t operate a machine in the wet soil, because it will compact it and kill it. So you get into conditions traditional growers work....”

This is not the kind of stuff Gerendasy would have been able to do in her old job, shooting broadcast TV news. She put in twenty years  as a camerawoman before moving on.

She now produces Cooking Up a Story almost single-handedly. The show's become sort of a foodie cult favorite, with over four million online views.  Some webisodes are cooking demos. Others explore food policy, or tell stories about sustainable food production.

Gerendasy hasn't looked back after leaving traditional broadcasting.

Rebecca Gerendasy   "I remember I would try to pitch more of a feature-type story here or there, and it got turned down all the time. Now, on the internet, you can really go into a niche and stick with it."

Cooking Up a Story isn’t making much money yet, but Gerendasy says she's  confident that will come in time. She and her husband/business partner have been experimenting with several different kinds of sponsorship.

The show has just been added by Hulu.com, which could mean thousands more  viewers.

When you watch Cooking Up a Story on different sites, you start to see how internet video is making use of the broadcast business model.   On YouTube, you’ll notice a tiny text ad at the bottom of the window.  And there are other, more familiar forms of advertising taking hold.

Paul Golden    “It hasn’t happened successfully everywhere, but I think it’s starting to.”

Paul Golden is a veteran animator and producer who’s worked for TV, movies, and the web. Golden wasn’t really sure internet video was taking off, until last year.  How does he know? We’re sitting in his cavernous studio office, watching TV -- on his computer.

Paul Golden:  “Yeah, so here’s the Simpsons, we’re going to watch season 20, episode 6, 22 minutes long, and it’s loading the video -- and there’s an ad first!”

Paul Golden: “If you're sitting very close to the screen, it's not that great. But if you sit three feet back, it looks like television.”

There was a time when no one was asking Paul Golden’s company to make commercials for internet video, but he's plenty busy  now.

Paul Golden: "We don't have to create banner ads, or very simple things in order for it to play on the web. Now it can just be the way you produce a high-end commercial for anything else."

There is one difference, he says. His customers' budget for online ads tends to be much smaller than what they'd spend for ads in traditional broadcast.

Paul Golden doesn’t just make commercials. His company, ffake also works on animated shorts. He says the rise of internet video has made it possible for short subjects to re-emerge as their own art form.

Paul Golden: “The barriers to entry are down. There are many more places to show these things. People can get development deals on the shorts they’ve submitted. There are fewer people to tell you, ‘You can’t show that’.”

Doors have opened across town at another Portland studio, Bent Image Lab. Jun Seo Hahm is a young producer who’s come up with a series of shorts called Karnival -- with a K. They’re only seen on the internet. He’s showing me one called Hush Love.

Jun Seo Hahm: “It’s about kind of irony of love.”

A little creature -- like a thumb with dumbo-sized ears -- trumpets “I Love You!” to another of its kind, who promptly falls over dead.

Jun Seo Hahm:  “It’s ... love can kill somebody!”

It’s unlikely you’ll see  this popping up on Nicolodeon. Hahm's style is adorably cute, but also slightly scatological.

Hahm's boss, Chel White, showed this web series to a client in British Columbia. White says the client loved it.

Chel White   “They had some ideas we elaborated on quite a bit. They saw Jun’s work, and they were very excited about what they saw -- both the character design, and the humor.”

The short series became a model for a full-blown ad campaign. White says he’s seeing more of this kind of cross-pollination as internet video develops.

The people who are making the next wave of internet video agree there's one thing the new media and broadcast TV have in common: people don't want to pay to watch either. So those new business models to pay for online shows --  may not be so new after all.

Online:

You can watch Rebecca Gerendasy's series, Cooking Up a Story on --

Youtube

Hulu.com

or at cookingupastory.com

Paul Golden's shorts and commericals can be seen here.

And here's a couple of samples of what Jun Seu Hahm has done --

http://karnival.tv

http://www.bentimagelab.com