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TWO-MINUTE TREAT From the Internet micro-sitcom ‘Ram & Ria’ and right the band Prana

Just like how ‘The Office’ launched a spin-off of the comedy series called ‘The Accountants’ as web exclusive ‘webisodes,’ starring a section of the cast from the main show, to give the series an extra dimension.

A Malayalam rock band (Avial), a Tamil rapper (Yogi B) and even recently, a Tamil pop band called Prana have made a name for themselves by posting their music videos on Youtube and pushed album sales by offering their niche listeners free sample downloads. Obviously, the key to their success is that they’ve all tailor-made the content within the limitations of the medium. Each episode, ‘mobisode’ or ‘webisode’ is not longer than a music video. About two to three minutes each. Hence, it doesn’t take more than a few seconds to stream and view. What’s more, thanks to applications like Miro, episodes are downloadable and can be transferred for viewing on your mobile phone.

The small screen is shrinking by the day. “With broadband becoming a reality in India, more and more people are logging online to watch entertaining videos,” says Manish Agarwal, vice-president, marketing, Rediff.com.

Conceived and produced by PixelKraft, Ram & Ria is based on the life of a typical South Indian man, his charming Mumbaikar wife and their endearing chemistry. Siddharth Kumar, creative director of Ram & Ria, says that the inspiration came from the dearth of contemporary Indian content online. “We strongly believe that there is great market for real content being produced for alternative media such as Internet and mobile,” he adds.

“I did ‘Ram & Ria’ because the idea of watching a serial which ends in two minutes was very appealing,” says Aarti Aney who plays Ria. “Plus it was for the Internet and so people could watch it at their own pace, in any order they chose, and as many episodes as they want. The script was funny, very relatable, the couple wasn’t glamorous per se’ neither did they live in some architectural monstrosity like in an Ekta Kapoor soap.”

About 25 episodes of Ram & Ria can be viewed on www.ramandria.tv or on Rediff iShare.

While it may be early days for popularity of the Internet sitcom to translate into revenue, the web-episode seems to be a potent tool for cross-media promotion for existing TV shows. To take a cue from American television, web episodes are used to build excitement around existing TV shows, like ‘Lost”s ‘Missing Pieces’ and ‘The Office’ spin-off ‘The Accountants’ have demonstrated. Ask any ‘Lost’ fan, and he would tell you how important it is not to miss watching any of the ‘Missing Pieces’ before the start of the season four.

Internet users are known to have a short attention span given the slow bandwidth rate and availability of choice of content – Youtube, GoogleVideos, BigAdda and Rediff iShare have thousands of videos, and there are personal videos put up on Orkut and Facebook to choose from, clips from their favourite TV shows, concerts and even music videos made specially for the Internet.

Filmmaker Pradeep Kalipurayath was so fascinated with the idea of Malayalam rock that he insisted on shooting a video for the band Avial. “There was so much energy in their music that I instantly knew it was a genre of music that had great potential,” says Pradeep. “It was just the matter of bringing out that energy through visuals. And with Youtube, Nada Nada just spread like wild fire. Nada Nada got over 75,000 hits on Youtube.

The latest on the Internet bandwagon is Sindhu who along with friends Naushad, Navin and Vijayagopal formed Prana, shot a music video themselves, put it up on Youtube, created a website (pranatheband.com) and sold copies of their album, offering a free sample of their songs.

“Our music is spontaneous and momentary. To capture the essence of the band, we shot a video,” says Sindhu. “Within two days of putting up the video, we sold 20 albums. Mostly NRIs have been picking it up.” In a month, Prana has sold over a 100 copies. A small start but a significant one. At a music store, they would’ve sold less.

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