Snackertainment!

This month's Wired magazine has a large spread on what they are calling "snack culture". What is snack culture, you ask? It's the idea that a lot of the entertainment we now consume comes in small, metaphorically bite-sized, pieces.

You can see this all over the place. YouTube videos have become an entertainment form in their own right. "Webisodes" and "Cellisodes" (two- or five-minute episodes of popular TV shows specially produced for the Internet or mobile) have been increasing in frequency. And ITunes has contributed greatly to the demise of the long-playing record in favor of the single.

Wired also adds to this list of snacks things like ringtones, widgets (why take the whole program when you can just add a few features to your desktop?), and even the lowly blog -- snack reading at its finest.

Why is all this happening? You might argue that peoples' attention spans are getting shorter. Or else we now have the gadgets to allow us to kill five or ten minutes while waiting at the doctor's office.

Whatever the cause, we are clearly seeing some sort of cultural paradigm shift here. And being VCs, we soon ask ourselves, "How do we get in on this thing?" Sadly, YouTube has already been spoken for. But we are seeing other signs of activity in this space. Most recently (and locally) we can point to Evergreen's investment in Aniboom, the "YouTube of Animation". I presume we'll see some more in the future.