The rise of the internet video show - from VHS to MP4

There’s a current trend at the moment on TV, especially on the main channels, to try and produce the cheapest shows that will appeal to the widest possible audiences. There’s the structured reality TV show where you fill a house/town/family full of the in-between stages of human evolution and ply them with booze hoping that they get up to naughty stuff and fall out while some sort of basic arc appears that in no way was driven by the producer stirring the pot and ensuring that certain “characters” arrive at specific places at the right time when the cameras are on. And there’s the internet video show.

No one is safe from some Daniel Tosh ribbing.

 The internet video show is best described as a modern update of You’ve Been Framed. Rather than kill off the “post your funny videos to us and we’ll put them on TV” genre the internet has actually supplied the new breed of the show with a gold mine of material. One of my favourites at the moment has to be Tosh.0 where comedian and host Daniel Tosh takes you through his picks of the videos from Youtube with a sarcastic commentary and a camp persona that gives what is essentially something as mundane as a sick prank gone wrong, a panda sneezing or "the Star Wars kid" so much more depth that you previously thought.

But why does this genre work and why do they keep getting commissioned, and why do people keep watching? The internet is there filled with videos that you can access, for much cheaper than you can a satellite TV channel, any time of the day with little effort. Here are a few ideas why:

Tosh.0 unlocking the depths of the internet to find you the best puking grandmas possible.

1 – The internet is fricking huge! With over 100’s of hours of footage uploaded every minute on Youtube there is no way that you can see everything and even some viral videos might get missed unless you’re plugged into the net twenty-four hours a day. Show’s like this can draw your attention to the stuff that you might have missed and act almost like a filter finding you the stuff that is worth seeing and ensuring that you can avoid the stuff that isn’t.

2 – They’re so cheap to produce. All you need is an audience to come and watch, a warehouse, green screen and comedian with a few writers. There’s a few sketches that happen on the likes of Tosh.0 and Russell Howard’s Good News but they’re mostly in the car-park out the back and don’t require all that much to make.

3 – We like seeing people falling over. It’s simple comedy, man/woman/dog/cat/grandma falls down, it gets a laugh. Now repeat, but this time grandma is carrying a chainsaw/flaming bag of excrement/granddad. Also, there’s a lot of puking on Tosh.0 which is funny, very funny!

4 – Once again the internet is fricking huge! There seems to be an unlimited supply of videos out there and with 100’s of hours of footage uploaded every minute to Youtube they’re never going to run out of material to comment on.

5 – Transmedia. A bit of a buzz word at the moment, and often mistakenly used (probably in this case too). We like to share stuff with our friends on social networks and be the first to “discover” something. Once we’ve seen something on Tosh.0 that our friends might not have we can post it to them on Twitter/Facebook etc… and appear in the know, or even show it to them to have the experience of watching the video all over again with friends.

6 – We’re in on the act. You could end up on Tosh.0 a variety of ways which is both exciting and possibly a little scary, which we enjoy the feeling of. There are a variety of ways that you can end up being on the show; as a guest on the “web-redemption” segment (he brought the Star Wars kid on to hit back at the haters and trolls the one time), via skype as a guest (Tosh had thanksgiving dinner with a bunch of fans that won the opportunity) or even on the videos themselves that are part of the act. In the book What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis states that the most successful media productions in the age of the internet build a community around their main product. Tosh.0 has its own blog that gets hundreds of thousands of visitors and Daniel interacts with his fans via Twitter personally when the show is on (and sometimes on the show goading them the week before to send something to him that he uses as part of the act) and is constantly referencing his stand up acts and other ventures (such has the hilarious Brickleberry) we, as viewer, feel as if we are as close to being part of the show as we possibly can, and thus take ownership over it.

7 – Finally the internet is fricking huge! At the moment the internet is big business. Everyone knows about it and there aren’t many people who can’t access it. People are interested in what’s out there and like being shown the stuff that they might have missed and seeing the people who are involved in creating the content that they are consuming on Youtube, they're slowly becoming the new "stars" of our age.

The internet video show is here to stay so long as the internet is the main medium that the world uses to interact with one another. But even when it is eventually superseded by something else the internet video show will live on just in another incarnation, possibly with Tosh beamed directly into your mind - now that's a scary prospect.