Saturday, September 5, 2009

'The Guild' Season 3 Gets Embedded



The Guild  Season 3 - Episode 1: Expansion Time premiered this week on MSN’s Parallel Universe after last week’s exclusive roll out on XBox. On her blog Felicia Day talked about the premiere of Season 3, the challenges involved in the production and the big difference in their syndication strategy. 

Felicia said:
"Last season it wasn’t embeddable so it’s cool to be able to spread it around this season, thank you MSN and Sprint! Also, it’s now available on Zune and Xbox for all, so download away. Starting next week the eps will be rolling out weekly on all platforms, FYI."
On Tubefilter News, Marc Hustvedt talked about the open embedding:
"MSN is now allowing embedding of The Guild episodes after being notoriously closed off last season and forcing viewers to head to the cluttered video.msn.com site. This is a savvy move for MSN, and a necessary response to the significant amount of attention that Season 2 received once it was released on embed-friendly YouTube earlier this year. Fans of the web series are known to share and post videos on blogs and social networking sites all over the world. And let’s face it, web series need to free to live where people are out discussing and congregating around them."
Marc said that it will be interesting to see the difference in total views on MSN following the success of their  "Do You Wanna Date My Avatar" viral music video which was the #1 video on YouTube with over 3.5 million views to date and was #1 in iTunes music videos and Amazon MP3s. The Guild also recently secured a DVD distribution deal with the same company that released Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog DVD earlier this year. 

The Guild was also recently featured in the Wall Street Journal which noted that while the web series has a very loyal fan base which continues to grow it's still a modest venture. The article pointed out that overall profitability for web series is low and there's been a shift to more celebrity-backed projects.

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