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.