Airing soon on a gas pump near you

By Paul Brownfield

April 30, 2006 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

I recently became a viewer of “A Message From Batman.” I am one in a community of 266,569 (and counting). Not exactly a television show and not exactly on TV, “A Message From Batman” has nevertheless been on the air now -- two weeks -- longer than, say, “Emily’s Reasons Why Not,” the sitcom starring Heather Graham that ABC pulled after one episode, at a cost of many millions of dollars.

“A Message From Batman,” I feel confident, cost considerably less, because it’s basically a portly guy with a beard in a Batman costume (though you can see the Nike swoosh on his chest, just to the right of his Batman insignia) talking to his camera: “I took my pros and I took my cons, and I weighed them,” he says. “And I decided the only way to really avenge my parents was to dress up as a giant bat and attack criminals. I’m still kinda working that one out.”

It’s airing on YouTube.com, the popular Internet site whose motto, “Broadcast Yourself,” is a terrifying as well as exhilarating prospect in an age of more mutable TV -- TV you can send and receive and create and purchase, so much so that the content itself has become airborne.

I still haven’t uploaded, though I download now on a regular basis, and just the other day I took a walk with several episodes of “The Colbert Report” on my $450 video iPod. If you happened to notice me crossing Wilshire against a red light, oblivious and laughing at my hand -- hey, thanks for stopping. I was watching television.

That walk was kind of out-of-body, given that I’m used to watching TV on a sofa and don’t bother to look both ways before going to the kitchen. But this is where TV comes from now -- not only from a box sitting in a distressed-oak armoire or the rafters of a bar but also out of your hand and/or phone and/or computer.

The paradox of airborne content is that with accessibility comes work, with options come obligations, so many notes to self: TiVo Clooney on “Bill Maher,” download “Colbert” off of multipass on iTunes, catch up on overdue DVD of Season 1 of “24.” We are all bloated with options, our own forgetful programmers, trying to keep up. Or not.

A one-portal experience

ONCE upon a time, television could be counted on to come out of your TV -- as opposed to your telephone, your iPod or your computer -- on prescribed dates and at prescribed times and from (largely) prescribed creators. Your job was simply to show up, or not. This was a time when you actually had to leave the sofa to change channels, when VCRs were magical if cumbersome instruments, when you and your friends might videotape yourselves goofing around just for the sake of goofing around -- without any sense of distribution streams out there.

Back then, Jay Leno, still just a comic, went on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” and riffed on an ad campaign for TV Guide whose tagline was “Because television is getting more complicated every day.”

“It’s tough trying to get through the TV Guide in one sitting,” Leno said. “ ‘Honey, let me just put my bookmarker on “Crosswits” at 6:30 ...’ ”

Leno’s joke is no longer a joke.

Television is everywhere now, taking up more and more of daily life’s wall space -- not just at the gym and the airport terminal but also at the supermarket checkout line, the basketball game. What did people do when they used to have to just, I don’t know, wait somewhere? As technology has rushed in to stave off our limbo states, each week seems to bring another headline about another heretofore unadorned space in daily life where televised news and entertainment is a constant companion. “NBC Offers Gas-Pumping Entertainment,” I read the other week, in an article announcing NBC Universal Television Group had made a deal with something called VST Media Network to make news and entertainment product available on gas-pump screens.

It’s still a ‘tubular’ world

DO I want to watch television while I load up the tank or stand in line at Ralphs? Nobody asked; it is merely presumed that I do, or will, and that it doesn’t feel invasive, networks and studios knowing that a captive audience is an increasingly movable object.

Amid this, it should be noted that television viewing through the television remains the dominant medium, by far; a survey released earlier this month by the Television Bureau of Advertising found, among other things, that “adults continue to spend significantly more time with television than with other media” -- 264.8 minutes in a 24-hour period as opposed to 85 minutes of Internet viewing. But anecdotally it can sound like the revolution is being televised everywhere but on your TV.

“I’m on the Internet a lot more than I watch TV, and most everybody I know is,” ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel, another late-night talk show host, recently told The Times. “And yet if you watch most late-night talk shows, it’s as if it doesn’t even exist.”

Kimmel was speaking as the progenitor of MTV’s “The Andy Milonakis Show,” which is but one of the successful test cases of what is often referred to as “multiplatform media.” With Milonakis, what began as a guy doing bits on his webcam from his apartment blossomed into a popular website, which caught the attention of Kimmel, who played Milonakis clips on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” which in turn fed traffic to Milonakis’ site, whereupon MTV signed him up for a show, which now airs on TV and on the Internet.

It’s at once more grass-roots than and less reverential of the old models, although in cyberspace you still have to sit through commercials.

A boomer watches “Lost” on his bedroom TV on Wednesday at 9 p.m. Maybe he records it on his Tivo and begins watching at 9:20, so he can skip past the commercials. But ask the kids of Generation Next if they’ve seen “Lost,” and maybe they’ll tell you they watched a pirated episode off the Internet or sampled the 2-year-old pilot on their iPod, buying it for a $1.99 off iTunes.

Acknowledging these more freewheeling relationships with their shows, the broadcast networks all make, at the very least, video bites of their series available on their websites. On Monday, ABC.com will start offering day-old- bagel versions of their prime-time series, free, with two one-minute commercial breaks.

Albert Cheng, executive vice president of digital media for the Disney-ABC Television Group, said the experiment is designed to feed “this ecosystem of having younger generations wanting to do things when they want it and how they want it.”

That too is why the TV business hasn’t moved aggressively -- as the music industry did -- to stop pirated content from being thrown about the Web, particularly when it circulates in bite-sized samples.

“There’s a fine line between what’s piracy and what’s promotion,” is how Peter Levinsohn, president of Fox Digital Media, put it. “You have to balance that out.”

“I don’t know that the Web stuff is replacing TV stuff, it’s just adding,” said Michael Hirschorn, executive vice president of original programming at VH1 and the creator of “Web Junk 20,” a kind of “America’s Funniest Home Videos” for the Internet age. The show, hosted by comic Patrice O’Neal, airs on the network and on VHI’s website, where the premise remains the same -- “to rank and rank on” the week’s best and worst viral videos, brought to you by VH1 and iFilm.com, a popular video website.

“It’s multiplatform media 1.0,” Hirschorn said of “Web Junk 20.” “We did this show to learn how this works. And we’re taking a lot of lessons from it.”

Creativity, crassness unleashed

IT was on “Web Junk 20” that I saw the video clip of Iranian policewomen in burkas rapelling down a building, as well as a lizard terrorizing kids (who were wearing pork chops on their heads) on a Japanese game show that had bounced, like Milonakis, between tube and Web.

In its nascent stage, TV on the Web, by and large, is refreshingly democratic and predictably bad. At least that’s been my experience on sites including iFilm.com, YouTube.com, eBaumsWorld.com and MySpace.com, all of which curate boatloads of video ephemera but, unlike actual television, create networks of instant feedback and word of mouth.

In this way I finally got around to watching “Lazy Sunday,” the “Saturday Night Live” rap parody that launched a Web hit, as well as the 4 1/2 -minute “Adventures of Boner Boy,” a homemade short in which a guy goes about his day -- clothes shopping, working out at the gym -- with a giant erection.

What the latter bit lacked, if I may be so bold, was any kind of production value beyond its premise -- a facet of Web TV that you either embrace as part of its miscreant appeal or that has you heading for the nearest cyber-exit.

“It’s kind of like this hippie generation of media,” said Frank Chindamo, adjunct professor at the USC School of Cinema-Television and founder of Fun Little Movies, whose website, FunLittleMovies.com, features over 400 such short shorts as “The Mini Bikers,” about midget crime fighters.

“We’ve got people running naked in the streets in terms of media. A lot of it is, ‘Hey, why watch a show when you can make a show? Why watch a show when you can discover something and send it off to your friends, and be cool for sending it out?’ ”

“Send this to a friend!!!” a prompt with the “Adventures” short encouraged. I declined. Nor did I much adapt, generally, to watching TV on my computer, although most stuff streams now in the blink of an eye and you can kill hours surfing; in this way I watched grainy video of a hockey brawl from a 1981 Kings-Flyers game, the orgy scene on “Without a Trace” for which CBS Corp. was fined by the FCC, and half of a “Simpsons” episode called “Lisa Is a Vegetarian.”

On Channel101.com, a site that acts like a virtual network, with “prime-time shows,” “failed pilots” and “canceled series,” I watched an episode of “Yacht Rock,” a sendup of ‘70s light-rock icons Hall & Oates and Kenny Loggins.

“Yacht Rock” was clever, silly and clumsily acted -- all of which made it seem more authentic, even in its badness, than bad network TV.

One day began on YouTube, which as of earlier this month was streaming about 35 million videos a day and gets an audience of more than 9 million people a month, according to the Web measurement firm Nielsen/Net Ratings.

On YouTube, content is teasingly divided into categories such as “most viewed” and “top favorites.” Unlike other sites (for $3.95, for instance, Google video offers Kobe Bryant’s 81-point game against the Toronto Raptors), a preponderance of the content on YouTube is homemade, a network of content created by an audience throwing stuff against a wall. Everything sticks, although some stick more than others. I couldn’t resist “Brad Pitt Gets Abducted.” This turned out to be an appearance Pitt did on an old episode of MTV’s “Jackass,” in which he was kidnapped while waiting in line for a hot dog at Pink’s. From there I found myself watching Pitt star in a Heineken ad on DevilDucky.com, where I also watched a NASA plane crash test from inside the cabin, the half-a-”Simpsons” episode and then a college kid shouting with glee all over his dorm for getting past level 60 in the video game “World of Warcraft.”

These were clips but also, in a way, episodic, for they had arcs -- a beginning, middle and end. As in the case of the crank caller to QVC on eBaumsWorld.com, for instance, there was dramatic tension (What would the caller say during the Dell computer presentation? As it turned out, that his Dell was very reliable for his porn viewing).

There are, of course, girls gone wild all over these sites -- or if not exactly wild then wild with enthusiasm, so many Paris Hilton wannabes dancing and/or cavorting for the camera, in what can perhaps charitably be described as “American Idol” meets “Showgirls.” “My Latest Hot Video,” one was called, and I watched a robotic girl do a not particularly sexy dance in a bowler hat, jeans and a halter top. Over a million people have watched this video.

I thought of passing it along to a YouTube friend, perhaps Batman or Boner Boy. But then he’s probably seen it.

Contact Paul Brownfield at calendar [email protected].