Battlestar Galactica producer says webisodes will be obsolete

In the nascent world of web produced episodic video shows everyone involved is still trying to figure out how it is going to work. Things like the optimum length of the (web)episodes, ownership of the product and whether they should be treated the same as their television counterparts. At one of the spectrum we have people like Kevin Pollak who produces a full length video chat show (and one I wouldn’t miss) while at the other end we have Felicia Day and her Guild web series.

However not everyone seems to think that these types of web video shows will last. One such person is Ron Moore, known for his work on Battlestar Galactica series, who has stated that he doesn’t like the format.

While speaking at the Banff World Television Festival, Moore said the network and studio requested short, Web-only stories about Galactica just before it headed into its third season in the fall of 2006.

Moore says there were difficulties off-the-bat. “I don’t like the runtime on it, it’s hard to tell a coherent story in three minutes when it’s part of an hour-long show,” he said.

“I don’t know that it’s a format that’s really going to withstand the test of time. It feels like something that people do right now because of technical, sort of, limitations – viewer habits, how much they want to download.”

“I could be wrong, but I don’t see in 10 years people are still doing webisodes.”

Source: The Globe and Mail

I’m not sure exactly what Moore thinks will replace them unless of course it is things like your run of the mill (boring) televisions shows courtesy of geotarded services like Hulu. I think he is being extremely short sighted in his viewpoint and I would imagine that folks like Felicia and Kevin would disagree with him – I know I do.