Come, meet Lonely Girl & Kate Modern: Is this the new Vouyer ?

If you’re tired of TV soaps, check out the interactive action on the Net

I would love to call up Smriti Irani and dig out the real story behind Tulsi, but I don’t have her number, and even if I did, Ekta Kapoor wouldn’t let me discuss it. Rewind to a few years ago when tech geeks were still talking of interactive television and looked forward to the DTH so that we would be able to decide the future and shape the serial as we wanted. But with so many plots changing so often and yet with the characters frozen in time, interactive television would not have helped much.

Then came the Internet and companies like YouTube started beaming videos created and uploaded by people that you could stream and watch. The ones that made most sense were the ones that were humourous, like the Mentos and the Coke videos.

Eventually, Orkut, YouTube and others changed the way one communicated, networked and formed communities—and called it Social Network. Of late, a company called EQAL has been successfully producing two online interactive dramas: Lonely Girl and Kate Modern.

Imagine a high school girl with swooping eyebrows, boy problems, a webcam somewhere in the US with a room filled with stuffed toys. I am not talking of the girl next door or the girl on that X rated credit card hungry website. LG (Lonely Girl is about 496 episodes old having begun in June 2006) is based on the life of a young girl called Bree. There was a time she would stream on YouTube and now it revolves around her friends and family. The series is short and has regular updates of video feeds posted by the fictional character.

Kate Modern is in its 260th episode—it started in July 2007—and is the sister series of the Lonely Girl. The show is set in England, bears many similarities to Lonely Girl, and in its second season, is generating an increasing amount of interest.

Such online dramas show that the Internet TV has arrived. The phenomenon would not have worked without the explosion of broadband and the advent of YouTube. The other reason for its success is the hybrid form of story-telling. What makes it important enough for me to write about it is that, as a viewer, you can correspond with the characters and even alter the plot.

The Internet, or as it’s now called, the Web 2.0, is a relatively new medium for everyone. The way people looked at Internet till a few years ago was how they looked at a newspaper or a radio; the same boring content would be everywhere. So if you miss your action of the daily soaps and the K action on TV is too much for you to bear, head for www.lg15.com, and discover a life beyond TV.

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The Above Article was printed in the Indian Express, on Sunday, May 11, 2008