by Vanessa Meheut , published on 9.06.2011

Vanessa Méheut, analyst with Orange San Francisco. Her areas of interests include traditional and online video, transmedia distribution and marketing, and new ad formats. We gladly share with you her point of view on a “community created show” as she defines Bar Karma.

TV show creator Will Wright is not your traditional TV creator. First he is based in San Francisco, the temple of new technologies and not in LA. Second his background is in gaming: he is the creator of the Sims. So it makes sense that the TV show he co created with producer Albie Hecht, is not your traditional TV show.

Sci fi show Bar Karma is, to my knowledge, the most advanced example of a community created show that made it to the air.  Mr Wright’s background in gaming makes him a proponent of interactive experiences. His point of view on Bar Karma is that community produced TV will create a higher level of emotional engagement and involvement for co-producers in the crowd than any professionally written show ever will.

Bar Karma relies on the wisdom of the crowds but a great part of the work is still done by professionals. The concept is to make it possible for anyone to come up with an idea for the show, from a “one liner” to a complete story-board. They can also volunteer their own creations (music, paintings) to be included in the show.

The community also votes on the suggested ideas, to determine the most popular plots which will then shape where the story is going. But professionals check which suggestions are actually feasible before they are submitted to the vote, and once plots are selected, a traditional production process starts with professionals. There is a few weeks delay between the moment a story is chosen and when it actually airs on Current TV, the TV network that bought Bar Karma.

The TV show premiered on February 11^th 2011 and its first season was made of 12 episodes of 22mins which aired on Fridays at 10pm until season finale on April 29^th. Carrying a strong Twilight Zone feel, the show is about an internet mogul who wakes up one day and walks into an unusual bar where a 20,000 year old bartender informs him that the bar is one of his proceeds for a poker game he won and that he is now in charge of helping the Bar Karma team accomplish its mission.

Outside of space and time, the Bar Karma is a place where lost souls at a karmic crossroads find themselves. Each episode features a new guest of the bar who will need the help of the bar team (a 20,000 year bartender and the on staff waitress) to reflect on their lives, the consequences of their actions and eventually make life altering decisions.

The whole concept of crowd-sourced entertainment is not new and has been tried before. But Will Wright used his background in programming to bring to the table a tool to manage this whole crowd-sourcing process.

The program, called Story Maker, is online and those willing to participate in the story making can sign up on this website and start using the software. A dedicated iOs app for audience participation was also released on the Apple app store. There are no official numbers as to the number of participants for Bar Karma and comments from Mr. Wright at the recent TV of Tomorrow conference in San Francisco suggest it is rather small.

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The show has 5,000 fans on Facebook and the official Bar Karma page indicates that tens of thousands of ideas were studied for the show. It is possible that crowd-sourced entertainment is the type of experiment that probably follows the Pareto principle (20% of the people create 80% of the value.) Mr. Wright indicated before airing that the first episode would credit 30+ volunteer contributions in addition to the show’s professional crew.

As far as distribution is concerned, it looks like Bar Karma has not yet been made available for transmedia platforms: some video clips are available on Hulu and YouTube but full episodes are not available on the traditional web/mobile platforms (Hulu, Amazon VOD, iTunes, YouTube,…) or on Current TV properties, most likely because licensing issues have not been sorted out.

There are a lot of challenges to the concept of crowd-sourcing entertainment:

1/ Hollywood is run by unions and the Writers Guild, which protects the interests of its writers members, will have its says in whether communities becoming authors are entitled to compensation: an interesting concept should not become a way to write shows on the cheap and destabilizing writing talents,

2/ There is no question not all talent is in Hollywood, but there is also no question that not everyone can have a good idea for a TV show plot. Outsourcing the process of filtering out the good from the bad can be a dangerous decision. Other experiments in crowd-sourced entertainment sometimes involved professionals making the calls after reading through hundreds of suggestions to find one diamond worth polishing (eg: William Shatner’s web series The Zenoids). Which raises the question whether such a process (finding a needle in a haystack) can be efficient?

3/ While crowds can be very creative, TV shows have a show runner because stories need to follow a vision, something which is better achieved through one or two individuals guiding a crew of writers than by the hands of an invisible community. Fans of TV shows have strong opinions about developments happening and shows, and don’t hesitate to address the writers with their suggestions, but they still expect writers to have a master plan (think ABC’s Lost). Not to mention the fact that most TV viewers like the passivity of the TV experience and are not looking for a lean forward approach, which means few would actually have the high level of emotion engagement sought by Mr. Wright.

Down the line, and like every TV show, the viability of Bar Karma will be determined on the basis of its ratings, which hopefully will be linked to its quality. Current TV, which premiered in the US in 2005 as an alternative to news channels like MSNBC, CNN and Fox News, is available in 60M households in the US, has a very small viewership which enables it to take this kind of creative risks. Crowd-sourced entertainment is not a mass market and it might never be: numbers in terms of TV ratings have not been made available by Current TV (the network usually carry a rather small 23,000 viewership average in prime time), the show has not been picked for a second season yet. But it can be a brand maker and an interesting differentiator for smaller TV networks. And it is an intellectually challenging concept.

More information about Bar Karma and Current TV can be found on a recent article from the NY Times dated February 2011 and an interview of show creator Will Wright.