Keen On… John Cabrera: How H+ Turns Us All Into TV Producers [TCTV]

Andrew Keen

Andrew Keen is an Anglo-American entrepreneur, writer, broadcaster and public speaker. He is the author of the international hit “Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is Killing our Culture” which has been published in 17 different languages and was short-listed for the Higham’s Business Technology Book of the Year award. As a pioneering Silicon Valley based Internet entrepreneur,... → Learn More

Tuesday, August 21st, 2012

The boundary between television and the Internet continues to be swept away. The latest example of a show that brings high-quality production values to the Internet is H+, the multimillion dollar Warner Brothers-funded interactive show about a future in which we all have our technology implanted in our brains.

But what makes H+ so revolutionary is less its message than its medium. As the series creator John Cabrera told me, Smart TV “changes everything”. The YouTube distributed H+, he explained, goes beyond the traditional linearity of video content on networks like Hulu or Netflix. By running the series on YouTube, Cabrera insisted, he is empowering the audience to use the playlist feature to turn themselves into the series’ director. The audience will thus tell the H+ story, Cabrera told me. We will be the ones piecing together the narrative in an online series that eliminates the linearity of traditional storytelling.

For anyone interested in the way in which television and the Internet are merging, Cabrera’s H+ is essential viewing. You can subscribe here to the series. H+ launched on August 8th and already has over a million views and more than 40,000 subscribers. Not remarkable numbers, perhaps. But encouraging for a high-quality series that demands its audience be as intelligent as its content.


Over the past decade, John Cabrera has worked as a writer, director, and actor at the Hollywood studio level as well as across a range of newly renovated and brand new areas of the Entertainment Industry. Cabrera began his career as an actor, making over 40 guest star appearances on such shows as “CSI”, “NCIS”, and “The Office”. He was a member of the supporting cast of NBC’s “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” and The CW’s “Gilmore Girls”. He...

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