Will video kill the TV star?

Right now, an ever-­increasing group of people are writing on each other’s walls, posting videos and checking out ­profile pages. Nothing new in that you might think – except that most of them don’t even exist!

Kate Modern is an online supernatural drama that’s airing on social networking site Bebo. Best described as a kind of Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Skins, and set in London, it aims to combine the inter­activity of social networking – where fans can do everything from commenting on particular episodes, to interacting with characters – with scripted “webisodes”.

Kate Modern was conceived by the team ­behind the 2006 Internet ­phenomena Lonelygirl15, the show that was also a scripted webisode drama and which caused a web-wide hunt after hints it was fake, but culminated in an audience of over 30 million.

There’s a blurring of reality, just as TV was new, Internet video is new now, and now with social networking people are taking that a step further. KM is a clever use of the platform, where blogs are part of narrative and user generated content is incorporated to become important later in the story – everything they do feeds back into the ­narrative so it’s totally inter­active – and that’s what people ­expect now.

Intriguingly for drama, it is funded almost solely by product placement – ­everything from Microsoft maps to Orange mobile phones are on display, ­reflecting the more relaxed (for which read: virtually non-existent) regulations of the Internet.

Coming soon after ­acclaimed documentary-maker Roger Graef started making ITV.com’s first online ­docudrama Web Lives, along with the increasing popularity of web comedy in everything from YouTube to ­Channel101, this is reflecting the shift in how we view entertainment. The Internet is shifting – it’s about much more now. It’s entertainment, it’s lifestyle.

You can watch Kate Modern at: http://www.bebo.com/katemodern