Last week was a long one for me. I love how things are going here at Next New Networks (yikes, is that really what our company is called? People let us get away with that one?) but there are some things we’re doing that are insanely ambitious and it makes for some long days and nights. I’m haunted by the unread or unreplied emails, the simple tasks I didn’t get done, the ideas put on the list months ago we haven’t had time to do. I can get a little tired, a little worn out.

But then I came home late last Friday night, and noticed that the N-Bot Twitter page had linked earlier that day to a new episode of Thread Heads: “Viewer Appreciation Week.” That sounds promising, I thought, and I clicked through to check out the new episode.

My friends, I got a little weepy. Check out the episode if you can — I’ve embedded it above. Rob and Corinne do a roundup of a lot of the fun things going on at ThreadBanger — response videos from YouTube and our site, comments, forum posts — and it’s magic, at least for me.

Why? You have to understand, a year ago, the first five of us were working on the initial plan for the company. We had some experience under our belt with a couple early breakout hits in video podcasts and online shows. We had a lot of ideas about how internet video could be special and different, and what we thought were some of the things it needed to do. We talked a lot about how the most exciting stuff — both on TV and online — seemed to always be coming from a conversation with the audience, and how making shows cheap and fast allowed you to get closer to what the audience really wants than what was possible on TV before. And we were out of necessity soon talking a big game about how if we made shows with interesting voices from those communities, and built community submissions and creativity into the shows from the beginning, a kind of virtuous cycle should start to occur, in which people would love shows more when they had a stake in them, and would get more and more involved, and the shows would get better and more interesting (and as a happy effect, more cost-effective) as a result. I even had this ridiculous slide I did late one night to try to explain it to investors and potential partners, which never changed, and looked pretty much like this:

We’d seen this sort of thing happen already on Channel Frederator and VOD Cars, and it was something I saw happening with Rocketboom when I worked with them. It was starting to happen very quickly with Ze Frank’s new project, and dozens of other podcasts and online shows. What we didn’t know was whether these were flukes, something like a passing fancy, or something that you could nurture, and have happen again and again, for lots of different groups of people, and create something advertisers would want to get involved in and support in a big way. It’s what we set out to try.

Fast forward one year, and I’m seeing literally one of the first things that we hoped would happen, right in front of me, on ThreadBanger. Twenty episodes in, we’ve built a pretty amazing relationship with a bunch of people who clearly love the thing we’re doing, and know that ThreadBanger and Thread Heads are theirs. They’re making the Thread Heads hand signs, trying out the how-tos, and most importantly, filming their own projects and videos and sending them in, fully expecting that we’ll very likely put what they sent us on the network. I have to say, it’s one thing to say it’s going to happen, and another thing entirely to see it happen, with real people you’ve never seen before. Cool, interesting people.

And it’s not just on ThreadBanger. JETSET’s latest episode shows the same thing going on — you can see a core group of fans on MIX starting to get really active in creating the weekly show. Indy Mogul, Pulp Secret, Fast Lane Daily, Veracifier, all are building some really interesting stories. We do some things better than others; we forget things and have to remind ourselves; we try things that work and things that don’t — but the Monday meetings where we all sit around and talk about programming on our networks are getting to be a lot of fun. I sat in today’s meeting and us founder guys were clearly NOT the center of conversation — there is a momentum around the networks, and the team we’ve built to run them, that’s driving things forward now. This is not a slide show in Power Point, not a great-sounding theory, not a bunch of good PR. There are a lot of people starting to watch these networks, by any account. And these people are sending things in. And I watch their videos, read their comments, and I love these people for getting involved with us and making their own TV, or whatever this new thing will be called.

Long way to go still, obviously. Lots of things we have to prove for Next New Networks to get to be a long-term part of this new thing going on. But it feels good to watch an episode like Thread Heads #20 — or just about any episode of any of our shows, and think — the new TV is here, and it’s freaking fun. Like Herb said, the cat’s out of the bag now. What are we all going to do about it?

This blog post could probably have used more editing.

Please promulgate us on the interweb.

Posted by Tim at 12:28 am on Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 in Audience, Blogcetera, Featured Networks, Next New Networks. You can follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.