EQAL’s Miles Beckett

When the series lonelygirl15 premiered on the web it quickly became a sensation. As the first online interactive drama it provided a community that allowed members to connect with the characters and each other and create their own videos and story lines. Miles Beckett, co-creator of lonelygirl15, went on to co-found EQAL with Greg Goodfried, and continues to produce groundbreaking online series.

WS: Given the success you had with lonelygirl15 and katemodern, what advice would have for a producer who wants to launch web series in today’s very crowded online video environment?
BECKETT: What I’ve been telling producers and online personalities is that despite the bad economic climate, which has put a damper on everything, this is definitely the golden age for the independent producer. I would compare it to the period in the ’90s of the independent film movement with Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh. At that time, there were opportunities for people to shoot feature films at a much-reduced cost and there were distribution companies like Miramax that were able to pick them up.

Yes, it’s certainly a crowded online market. Yes, there is a lot of stuff out there, but the good stuff will rise to the top. Even after lonelygirl15, we’ve seen lots of different things that have risen to popularity online, whether it’s [the user-generated clip] "Jake in the Mirror," or Fred’s [YouTube channel, starring a teen who plays a fictional 6-year-old named Fred Figglehorn] or things like that on a variety of different platforms. I would encourage anyone to get a camera and start filming.

WS: What did you learn from the experience of connecting an online series, Harper’s Globe, and its community to a broadcast network series, like CBS’s Harper’s Island?
BECKETT: First of all it was a really great opportunity. When we raised our financing, we were talking about what we wanted to do next and it seemed like a really cool chance to be able to take a TV show that hadn’t even aired yet and work with the creative team to create a seamless experience between the online and the TV.
For a first time, it was a really, really good execution of that. It’s challenging. It’s definitely challenging and we found that it was very different from out previous experience with lonelygirl15 and katemodern, we really didn’t have anyone to answer to. There was a little bit of conversation with Bebo, but barely, they are not a traditional entertainment company, so for the most part we were totally on our own.
It was very different having to talk to the producers of Harper’s Island and get notes and then get notes from the network and then incorporate all of them. I thought it was an interesting learning experience. But at the end of the day, being able to see a TV show where some of our characters were reflected on TV and the TV characters were online, created a seamless experience. For the people who participated in that, it was truly unlike anything else they had done before.

WS: What kind of traffic did Harper’s Globe get?
BECKETT: Harper’s Globe was getting huge amounts of traffic: hundreds of thousands of monthly unique visitors, millions of monthly page views and people were spending more than 10 minutes on the site. It was truly astounding. It was a highly engaged, big community of people, by Internet standards, all dedicated to this show.

WS: Is it important nowadays to have your show, whether it’s made for the web or made for broadcast, to have exposure on social networking sites?
BECKETT: We definitely feel that you need your show to be on Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and on a variety of social sites, but at the same time, you need your own website, where you can control your own content and you can monetize your audience.

WS: What have you learned about online advertising?
BECKETT: Online advertising is more about conversation than it is about broadcast and this presents some challenges to advertisers. Number one, they have to become comfortable with that. Number two, they have to know how to do it appropriately, in the right locations online and with the right ad units. All the packages we are selling to advertisers involve some form of product placement, along with interactivity, maybe it’s a contest or a game. It’s about taking the brand, getting people to talk about it, making it part of their community, having the audience interact with that brand and making it their own.

WS: Tell me about Level 26, the project you are working on with Anthony Zuiker, the creator of CSI. It starts as a book, right?
BECKETT: The site is up right now, so you can go to level26.com, but it is an integrated experience from day one. Anthony came to us and he had already sold a three-book deal to Dutton, a part of Penguin, which is the publisher of Level 26. And he calls it a multimedia “digi-novel.” The first book is Level 26: Dark Origins [about a former FBI agent pulled out of retirement to hunt down a serial killer unlike anything the world has seen before]. You read a few chapters in the book and there is a call to action to go to the website to unlock a cyber bridge, which is basically a video that bridges you between the chapter that you just finished and the chapter that you are about to read. So it might be the killer sitting down to watch a film and you go to the site to watch this crazy ass film.

Anthony wrote the book and produced all the videos. We partnered with him to develop the online experience and how it’s all going to fit together and how it ties in to the book. It’s really cool. Anthony is also writing blogs. He is a born blogger! He didn’t know it, but he is, his blogs are frickin’ hilarious and they are great.

And we are doing a true crime section on the site where we are following actual serial killers, murders and crimes going on in the country and ripped from the headlines. So it’s meant it be a community for people who are armchair criminologists and every one who is a fan of CSI. I think it will be a place for people to unlock these bridges and talk about the book.