The smart ones did.
If you are serious about creating online entertainment there is absolutely no reason that attending SXSW Interactive (SXSWi) shouldn’t be on your must-go list. The five day conference, which just wrapped up Tuesday night drew 12,000 of social media and web junkies for a non-stop, bleary-eyed bender of business cards, panels, free BBQ and new connections. It was like camp for internet people.
And that’s my point. If you’re making any kind entertainment on the web, you are internet people. Meeting other internet people is part of your job. The apps and tools that are emerging out of the developers at SXSW matter to your web series.
Entertainment on the internet spent the past 5 years learning how to go from crawling to standing up and making its first wobbly steps. Now it’s 2010 and mainstream eyes are gooing over this clever toddler of a medium. The really interesting stuff—like location-based interactive ARGs built around a web drama—is just getting started.
The tools and apps startups, many of which came in from San Fran, need the web creators and storytellers, and vice versa. The guys at Boxee didn’t throw their daytime kegger house party on Sunday just to throw back Shiner Bock. They wanted to meet the content folks.
Chevy even shuttled a number of web video and social media creatives on a 30-minute ride out to a BBQ dinner at the Salt Lick just outside of Austin. They wanted to hear what these creators have in the works, and how perhaps they could get involved to support that.
And Pepsi teamed up with web show hub blip.tv to create the PepsiCo Podcast Playground, bringing in Epic Fu host Zadi Diaz to interview a number of web video people like Kenyatta Cheese, Tim Street, Gary Vaynerchuk, Brett Register
, and yes, even me (see below). They care about this space, and it’s much deeper that slapping logos on signage and passing of free soda. They want to know what is coming next.It’s not just the companies, but the vets of the video scene that are mingling around and are flush with lessons learned and advice on growing an audience online like Steve Garfield (he even wrote a book on it), iJustine, Kevin Rose, Phil De Franco, Taryn Southern, Leo Laporte, Amanda Congdon, Gary Vaynerchuk, Kent Nichols, Shira Lazar, Alex Albrecht, Amanda Coolong and Steve Woolf.
I even tweeted during the Packaging, Pitching and Presenting Your Digital Content panel (produced and presented by our friends at NATPE) that one of the audience members hijacked the panel during Q&A announcing that he was from Oscar-winning production studio Lakeshore Entertainment and that they are just now getting into web content and looking for pitches after the panel. Needless to say even a few of the super-agents on the panel went outside to meet him afterwards.
The cons? Cost. Sure, passes to SXSW aren’t cheap at around $500 (depending on when you pulled the trigger), and getting to Austin isn’t free either. So to combat this turn-off I’d suggest a two-fold plan of attack:
To help out, Tubefilter will sponsor a pass to 2011 SXSW Interactive for a web series creator who has never been before. We’ll have more details later this year about how we’ll figure out who to take, but feel free to leave a comment below with your name and an idea of how we should pick the creative one to join us.
One of the best ways to break out of the “LA (or NY, or YourCityHere) Bubble” is to hop on a plane and leave it every now and then.
Top photo by Steve Garfield. Middle photo by George Ruiz. Bottom photo by laughingsquid.
Footballco is betting on the growth of soccer in the United States. Over the past few…
As the co-host of the Creators in Fashion show that took place on April 25, Matthew Patrick (a.k.a. MatPat)…
Welcome to Millionaires, where we profile creators who have recently crossed the one million follower…
Alphabet's earnings report for the first quarter of 2024 sent its stock price soaring sky-high.…
Snap has had a rocky couple of years: several quarters of flat growth or declines,…
Welcome to On the Rise, where we find and profile breakout creators who are in…