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I can see it now: A highly regarded WOW player doesn't show up to two consecutive raids and the entire guild leaves their basement to figure out where he disappeared to.

Alternate title: "The girl with the Dragon Mount."

Iv already seen that one, its called The Guild.
http://www.watchtheguild.com/

Just go watch / friend http://nixiepixel.com/ while you're waiting. And maybe also http://watchtheguild.com/ while you're at it, though Felicia Day is not *quite* as nerdcore.

Unfortunately, I don't think this will work quite as well for movies.

Don't be so sure. We're already seeing the rise of series such as Felicia Day's The Guild and Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog , which has been free online in various official capacities. Also, Google has started producing full-length movies, such as Girl Walks Into a Bar . (The latter of which even features some semi-big names, like Carla Gugino, Josh Hartnett, Danny DeVito, and a bunch of other names you'd probably recognize.) Also, Hulu is producing a show, The Confession , starring Kiefer Sutherland and John Hurt, both big names in the business.

I honestly think--and hope!--that the times of big television networks being the gateway to what we can and can't see are soon to be over.

He was recently on The Guild-- seasons 3 and 4.

People enjoy MMORPG's, there's even successful web comedies about that sort of thing. http://www.watchtheguild.com/ But I'll tell you what, it's depressing. I just find it like watching a show all about alcoholics drinking themselves to death. There are really people who live like this.

That's how I feel about all sitcoms. It really struck me when I was living in a geek house near downtown Santa Cruz that threw massive wild parties that I realized that I was more interesting than the dipshits on TV. Cured me to the point where if I had to be in a certain place at a certain time to see a TV show I could give it a miss. Now I'm a rental viewer. I just barely have the bandwidth for streaming so I only use netflix on PC (it has the biggest buffer of all options save youtube, which has time limits even when someone has uploaded what I want to watch.)

Sure, lots of people on TV have more money than I do, but I can probably count on one hand the number of sitcom characters that seem like someone I'd want to hang out with.

Could you imagine a universe, where successive Pacman clones are more expensive, so the last one will cost 150 million dollars?
Thats the MMORPG business for you. Cloning a formula that seems to work, in a very expensive way, for a public that is progressively more bored of the formula.

Well, that's the real problem. Storylines were added to provide some context to the play mechanic itself. Doom2 was the last storyless shooter I enjoyed. I didn't find another shooter that sparked my interest until Half-Life and it was that addition of story that sucked me in. I'd compare it to what happened with movies -- people used to be satisfied watching kinescopes of simple activities and were amazed by a train coming out of a tunnel on the big screen. After the novelty wore off they started having to supply storylines to give those moving pictures meaning. The exception to that rule, of course, are the casual games, the ones that are basically where coin-op arcade games were at in the early 80's. Something like Angry Birds has as rudimentary a storyline as Donkey Kong but the play mechanics keep people coming back. But something huge and complex like an RPG, it had better have a good storyline to provide context to everything or I'm completely bored. Dragon Age bored the snot out of me. I know I'm the minority opinion here.

The thing is, there's only so much storyline in even a poorly done single player RPG. You play, you grind, you reach the end, you move on to the next game. The insidious thing with MMORPG's is they have you play the same bits over and over and over and over. Which might be fine if those sections were fun games in and of themselves but that's just it, they're not fun. That's why people pay gold farmers so they can get new gear and go back to the fun stuff.

Honestly, I don't see where people find the time for this sort of thing. People enjoy MMORPG's, there's even successful web comedies about that sort of thing. http://www.watchtheguild.com/ But I'll tell you what, it's depressing. I just find it like watching a show all about alcoholics drinking themselves to death. There are really people who live like this.

Miro, previously called Democracy Player (as previously noted on slashdot), is an aggregation of independent TV programs. I believe it is exactly what you are looking for.

See also the Wikipedia articles on Web series and the (now defunct) Open Media Network ... and YouTube.

Other recommendations would include Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog and The Guild as well as others listed on Wikipedia's Internet television series.

Maybe I wasn't clear enough. The "crap" that I referred to "stealing" is only ad-supported stuff. Like a broadcast TV show that I might record and then watch while skipping the ads (I don't bother doing that any more), or a web page that's festooned with annoying ads (that I happily block). I don't pirate music at all. I have just under 3,500 songs in my music collection, and I've paid for all of them either by ripping a CD that I bought (and still own/possess), or by buying them from a digital provider like iTunes or Amazon. I am quite happy to support providers of quality content, including music, TV shows, movies and software. Even the CDs I own were mostly bought new (except for out-of-print stuff that's not available new), so I generally don't double-dip by buying a CD that somebody else has already ripped. Heck, a friend recently turned me onto the web series The Guild, and I bought it in the iTunes store rather than watching it for free on their web site. I was happy that a portion of the purchase price would be going back to the creators of that series.

My point was simply that I despise ads so much that I refuse to tolerate them at all. I will pay for quality non-ad-supported products. If a product is only available in an ad-supported format, I'll either block/skip the ads or just live without the product.

In the article the author raises an interesting point:
"I just made fun of Little Gray's sex life for raiding 405 WoW dungeons, but am I any better? Are any of you? Maybe we are, maybe we're not....It might not be considered a "real" accomplishment to beat Bejeweled 2. It's not like Mike Leyde is a New York fireman or a scientist making lifesaving medical breakthroughs. At the end of the day though, he's achieved more through playing Bejeweled 2 than we have through pouring derision upon him and his ilk via the Internet."

Here's the rub: you (me, everyone) made fun of him for what, a few minutes? But he played a game for 2,205 hours to be "the best". He wasn't saving lives, he wasn't improving mankind, he wasn't doing this to make money (like a Starcraft player might), he simply sat on a chair and played for 2,205 hours, and he did that in just 3 years, which averages out to be 2 hours a day every day. That's a lot of wasted time within a short time frame, and he doesn't even have a train village to show for it like a model train builder might. I'm sure there's WoW players who might average out to be the same, but no one's telling anyone about it, and there's a lot of social interaction in WoW as anyone who watches The Guild knows.

Although maybe I shouldn't talk: how many hours does the average American watch TV a day? Although they wouldn't lock someone up for watching TV for 2 hrs a day, but if they did something crazy like, throw rocks at a tree for 2 hours, everyday, for 3 yrs, someone might notice. I think this guy needs professional help.

Detecting the FBI agent pretending to be a 13 year old girl could be useful, for many reasons. But despite the stupidity of such an easily fooled system for general use, there is a legitimate use: physical therapy with Wii-like or Dance-Dance Revolution like components, designed to measure progress in a genuine fitness program.

And for related entertainment, there is the video "Do You Want To Date My Avatar?" at http://www.watchtheguild.com/the-guild/the-guild-music-video/.

For this, he deserves a guest spot on The Guild. If he can spin this into a chance to meet Felicia Day in person, then he can be a winner, not just someone famous for having no life.

You don't need a torrent, each episode is about 5 minutes long. You can catch all of season 1 at their youtube channel and season 2 at their watchtheguild.com. You can also find the episodes at MSN but its a bit harder to find them in the right order.

If we had a world without copyright, then you could say goodbye to mass media as we know it. All the book companies would dry up tomorrow. As would the music studios and the movie companies.

Instead we'd live in a world where content is created and paid for:
* by the creators who do it because they love it. E.g. Star Trek: New Voyages.
* Those who refuse to create unless paid up front through donations. E.g. The Guild
* People who use their creation as an advertisement for hard to reproduce goods such as t-shirts. E.g. Questionable Content
* People who perform live such as in concerts or theatres.

In fact I think if we lost copyright we'd completely lose the movie theatre (whose experience is now up shit creek) and would see a boom in live theatre. I think we could stand a chance where we live in a world that has Star Trek episodes performed in theatres rather then on televisions.

The draw would become seeing it in person, as well as getting the story. These groups would also film a closed session and put it on the internet for free after a week or two as a form of advertisement.

In such a world only a very few would be able to afford to live off the fruits of their labour.

Definitely check out "The Guild" on YouTube. It's a webisode sitcom about online gamers. It spoofs a WOW-like guild in the style of "THe Office". It has 5 episodes up, totally independent and funded by fans, with millions of hits. More than that "Quarterlife" show. http://www.watchtheguild.com/ http://www.youtube.com/watchtheguild/ It stars a girl, Felicia Day, from Buffy, who writes and produces it as well. Hilarious if you know online gamers.

I suspect a lot of Slashdot's audience has played either tabletop D&D or some form of MMO or online RPG. This online web series should instantly appeal to you. It's written, directed, and produced by Felicia Day, who was a slayer in one season of Buffy. Hot red headed actress aside, this series is great and a ton of fun to watch. The jokes are witty, and it seems to capture the funny shenanigans of an online group of friends in a fresh way.

I highly recommend that everyone check out The Guild and support your favorite web-based TV shows. Shows like this have a real possibility of breaking the grip on entertainment that large media companies have. If they succeed they show others that it is possible to go straight to internet and bypass the media cartels.