Clip and play

For Justin Roiland, 26, the collision of new media and old TV has been both kind and hopelessly cruel. ''House of Cosbys," his series of animated shorts that aired on Channel101.com, won him well-placed friends, a talent agent, and, as it whipped across the Web, a hefty fan base.

But the brand of humor that worked so well for a Web-savvy crowd -- ''Cosbys" was about a collection of Bill Cosby clones, some with superpowers -- also earned the ire of a mainstream TV icon. Bill Cosby's attorneys sent a ''cease and desist" letter and threatened Channel 101. ''House of Cosbys" is no longer available on the site that made it a hit. (The Web being the Web, one can still find it without too much trouble.)

Cosby may not have gotten the joke, but some TV programmers did; Roiland says he's been enlisted to help develop a sketch-show pilot for VH1 based on the content of Channel 101. It's one of many television shows in the works trying to capitalize on the buzz of ''viral videos," those short clips, from animal bloopers to ''Brokeback Mountain" parodies, that circulate online with rapid speed.

VH1 still runs its oldfangled ''Top 20 Video Countdown," where James Blunt and Kelly Clarkson reign, but it has also introduced ''Web Junk 20," a show featuring comic Patrice O'Neal poking fun at a series of Internet clips. Bravo has a series called ''Outrageous and Contagious: Viral Videos," a similarly themed clip show with a voice-over that's almost as sarcastic but less profane.

The USA Network, meanwhile, has ordered a pilot for a late-night talk show based on ebaumsworld.com, a Howard Stern favorite that features videos and prank phone calls made with clips of celebrity voices. NBC is planning a show called ''Carson's Cyberhood," an ''America's Funniest Home Videos" knockoff starring MTV-host-gone-mainstream Carson Daly.

Roiland says Channel 101 has opened industry doors for him; several network executives have said they love his work, even if they're not quite sure what to do with it. Still, he worries that the very qualities that make online videos so appealing -- the no-holds-barred creativity, the instant gratification -- aren't always easy to translate to TV.

''If you're making something for a network or anybody, if they're paying for it, they're going to want to get in there and meddle and change things and compromise your vision," Roiland says.

For TV producers, the appeal of Web content is obvious: It's popular, abundant, interactive, and often free. ''Purely from a production standpoint, these shows are the next generation of reality TV. We're just providing the forum," says Michael Hirschorn, VH1's executive vice president for original programming. And he figures most Web videographers would love the recognition. ''For all the success of MySpace and things of that sort," he says, ''there still is a magic to being on television."

Still, there's something undeniably different about Web fare, from its speed to its interactivity. Take the popular blog ''Ask a Ninja," which posts a series of low-budget comedy sketches (''Can Ninjas catch colds? Well, I guess the better question would be, 'Can colds catch Ninjas?' "). Fans don't just watch and enjoy; they've created a mini-industry of loving imitations and musical remixes posted on video-sharing sites like YouTube.com.

True, TV is trying to mimic the nature of the Web; Hirschorn praises the authentically ''crappy" quality of some ''Web Junk 20" clips and says the show has gained a following by inviting viewers to submit their own videos to a subsidiary website, iFilm.com. But some Web pioneers say that by trying to harness the ephemeral, the slower-moving TV industry risks looking hopelessly behind.

''Why don't you tune into this cable station on Monday at 3 and we'll show you what you could be downloading to your computer at any time," scoffs Dan Harmon, 33, the co-creator of Channel 101. ''I think they're actually right now going, 'Oh, wow, look at all the content that's free.' They don't understand that it's their own demise."

Indeed, many Web entrepreneurs are tapping into a growing market for short-form entertainment: 2 1/2-minute films delivered to cellphones, iPods, and PlayStation Portables. And while TV networks are increasingly releasing full shows on iTunes, some say the mobile universe is made for smaller appetites.

''TV is a 30-minute world," says Scott Roesch, the general manger of AtomFilms.com, an entertainment site that has recently made some of its content available on mobile devices. The Internet, he says, is ''an entertainment-snacking medium. [Viewers] have their finger on the remote control all the time."

For TV executives in search of an audience, viral video website numbers are clearly seductive. Ebaumsworld.com gets 1.25 million unique daily visitors. Roesch's AtomFilms, which helped to popularize JibJab's 2004 parody cartoon that had George Bush and John Kerry singing ''This Land Is Your Land," draws about 5 million users per month, most of them young men. YouTube, which launched officially in December, streams 30 million videos each day, and draws 9 million visitors per month.

And thanks to the proliferation of camera cellphones and digital editing programs, the Web audience offers an endless supply of video clips. Eric Bauman, the 26-year-old from Rochester, N.Y., who created eBaum's World as a high school senior, gets 4,000 e-mails with content every day, said his father, Neil, who helps run the growing multimedia enterprise. Eric used to run the site alone from his bedroom. Now, he's purchased an office space and hired a staff to sift through submissions.

In many cases, viral video is nothing more than an inside joke, filmed awkwardly by cellphone; a ''finger breakdancing" clip, which recently got some 300,000 views on YouTube, wouldn't win awards for cinematography. Many of the viral clips that reach TV shows are local news bloopers or odd snippets of foreign shows.

But in some cases, the clips are rich amateur filmmaking with strong production values and high cleverness quotients. And it's hard not to think of the Web as a sort of farm team for TV, especially since the networks are scouting.

''South Park," aspiring animators know, had its origins as an online Christmas cartoon. The 21-year-old creator of the short film ''MySpace: The Movie," a massive YouTube hit, recently got a development deal from mtvU. Last year, ''Saturday Night Live" hired a trio of roommate-filmmakers -- Channel 101 veterans -- who posted their work on their website, thelonelyisland.com. Now, they're largely responsible for SNL's infectious ''digital shorts," such as ''Lazy Sunday," a rap starring Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg on a trip to see ''The Chronicles of Narnia," or this month's ''Natalie Rap," with Natalie Portman in gangsta mode.

The prospects are appealing for would-be auteurs, who often spend long hours on their labors of love. That's how it was for Roiland, a Californian who discovered Channel 101 when he was a junior-college student with TV aspirations. The Los Angeles-based venture isn't completely Internet-based; five-minute submissions are screened monthly in front of a live audience, which votes for the top five ''prime time" shows. But the videos are all available online, and the enterprise is driven by a Weblike sense of speed. As soon as the audience tires of a show, it's canceled.

Roiland's ''House of Cosbys" cartoon -- a paean to Cosby, the movie ''Multiplicity," superhero comics, and the Smurfs -- was a giant hit on Channel 101, voted to ''prime time" for five months running. It was heady, Roiland says, but it was serious work, which he did while on unemployment with the help of a cadre of friends. When the cease-and-desist letter came, just before his fifth episode was due to be screened, Roiland was almost relieved.

''I was kind of, to a certain degree, hoping for some easy way to stop," he says.

Still, across the online world, the ''House of Cosbys" affair became a symbol of the difference between old- and new-world sensibilities, a cautionary tale about a media giant bigfooting a tiny Internet guy. That tension has only continued. NBC recently asked video-streaming websites to take down some 3,000 clips it says are copyright violations -- most famously ''Lazy Sunday," which a viewer had posted on YouTube.

NBC wants to keep the clips on its own websites and has made some available on iTunes, says Julie Summersgill, a spokeswoman for NBC Universal. ''The rules of the road are being developed," she says. ''We think it's important to try to establish a process and procedures for protecting copyrighted material."

But when online video can be passed along with the press of a button, it's hard to control where content stays -- or how users will change it. Like ''Ask a Ninja" and the ''Brokeback Mountain" trailer, ''Lazy Sunday" inspired dozens of YouTube parodies and made its way to countless smaller websites, too.

Copyright complaints are ''just people wringing their hands and doing whatever they can to slow things down," says Harmon, of Channel 101. ''I think everybody knows that, in the end, technology has a life of its own."

Some networks have tried to embrace the Internet spirit; Hirschorn says VH1 often sends video clips to YouTube to generate buzz for its shows. Julie Supan, YouTube's senior director of marketing, says ad agencies have also been known to ''seed" the site with ads and other clips, using YouTube's viewers as a focus group.

That's all shrewd strategy, says Roesch of Atom Films, who thinks the Internet can spread short-form content in a way that television never could. JibJab's ''This Land" 2004 election parody, he said, was funny, memorable, and topical. But what really made it succeed was the fact that it could be shared.

''If that piece had been created for the 1992 election, say, and appeared on 'Jay Leno,' it would have been the buzz of water cooler talk for a few days," Roesch says. ''When it debuted on the Web, you had people finding it, sending links around, television news programs seeing this activity, taking clips of it, and reporting on it. Suddenly, everybody knew about it."