Here's another interesting item on the Web video frontier: United Talent Agency, one of the biggest talent firms in Hollywood, has opened up an online arm in order to scout out potential talent from the Internet world.
The goal this time around, executives say, is not only to recruit the next generation of television and film writers and directors from the relative obscurity of sites like YouTube and Revver. It is also to help the major Web portals that are hungry for original content to find the creative people they need — just as movie studios have long turned to talent agencies when looking for new directors, screenwriters and actors.
“It starts with just helping identify people on both sides of the aisle,” said Brent Weinstein, head of the new division, UTA Online. “The barrier to entry is so low, everybody is now a potential artist. So there’s this great unwashed of talent out there, 99.999 percent of which is probably not good enough to have a traditional film and television career. But on the Internet, a lot of different types of things go. And yet for buyers, this is a wall of people, so how does a brand know which one of them can help it execute?”
This is yet another indication that we are seeing the rise of a new type of entertainment medium. Short-form video or semi-pro video or whatever you want to call it has gotten a real boost in recent months, certainly since the Google-YouTube deal.
It looks like the future of entertainment (or at least some of it) will reside in all the semi-professional stuff that makes buzz on the Web. Now it seems that Hollywood has started to take notice as well.
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