I just came from the extremely amusing “Trusting Talent: My Damn Channel” panel presentation at the Content Theater in the Central Hall. And besides being rather chuckle inducing (you should really check out “You Suck at Photoshop” and other programming at www.mydamnchannel.com ), it was actually rather thought provoking.

The entertainment site’s president/CEO, Rob Barnett, showed up with two stars/programmers of two of the eight channels on My Damn Channel–internet/cable TV oddball Andy Milonakis and legendary comedian/satirist/author/actor Harry Shearer, and in between clips and jokes, they proffered their theory that My Damn Channel and certain other entertainment sites finally have a chance at success now that “the bandwidth is finally there,” in Barnett’s words. He laid out a business model that doesn’t attempt to craft a new paradigm so much as combine old and new paradigms together.

The old paradigm–that you need established talent with name recognition and built-in audiences to lure eyeballs and advertising dollars best in any sort of broadcast medium. The new paradigm–such talent, when placed into the kind of user-generated content universe that swirls around the foundational core known as YouTube, and then given, more or less, free reign to produce whatever they want, can bring success to themselves and their entertainment home base.

The problem when starting up, according to Barnett, was how to make it all make sense financially in a medium where advertising models come and go on a daily basis. What My Damn Channel created, according to Barnett, was a three-point business plan. First, the channel’s operators agree with talent on concepts and budgets up front; second, My Damn Channel pays all production and web and technical and marketing costs; third, the talent gets total creative freedom to create whatever short-form bits they want. My Damn Channel then syndicates its programming over the web, including to YouTube, and is now selling advertising. Once production costs are recouped, the site revenue shares with its talent.

Shearer insists the creative freedom is the “new paradigm” part of the equation–hence, the name of the panel, “Trust the Talent.” He adds that it reminds him of the work he did in the very early days of cable television, before “things changed.”

“We don’t have to kneel before executives trying to convince them we’ll be funny,” he told the audience. “We have a more direct relationship with our audience when there is no gatekeeper because they tend to [expletive] things up.”

As to whether audiences will ever pay the kind of attention to Web-based original programming outside of traditional, linear broadcast approaches, Shearer suggests that “audience are platform neutral when it comes to what they watch,” and predicted this kind of programming will rapidly influence viewing habits of entertainment seekers around the world.

Shearer also emphasized that “any medium is more interesting at the beginning of its life, before they set all the rules,” and therefore, the work and time he puts into his My Damn Channel programming is more than worth it to him. Indeed, Shearer made news at the event by officially announcing a new programming venture he will debut on My Damn Channel which incorporates animation and motion capture technologies.

The new Shearer show will be called “The Alphas,” featuring Shearer playing two characters who are in the news each week, much the same way he does in skits on his National Public Radio show, “Le Show.” But this time, the characters will be animated via motion capture. The concept, Shearer said, goes back 10 years but he could never figure out how to do the bits in a visual medium before because, until now, produced pieces took so long to put together that the news stories he was parodying were often no longer topical. With help from My Damn Channel, however, he’s put together a small, dedicated mo-cap studio and started figuring out a workflow that will be able to turn short skits around within a few days. He showed a rough test at the Content Theater panel, and it looked promising.

Meanwhile, here’s a sampling of other one-liners from the panel:

*On production time and resource issues, Milonakis stated that “I do it all on a real-time scale, usually with a web camera. If it is a three-minute video, then it takes three minutes to make.” Shearer, however, promised his material is “just a bit more labor intensive than all that.”

*On the nature of web entertainment and the ability to express his personal insanity to a large audience, Milonakis pointed out that “If I put lipstick on my dog and make out with it, I’m a crazy person. But if there is a camera there, it’s entertainment. It validates me.” (Or so he claims …)

*On the interactive nature of entertaining on the web, Shearer wasn’t worried. “There is an interactive medium in comedy too–we’ve had it for years. It’s called heckling.”

Oh, and one more thing, in terms of where technology is heading, Milonakis insisted that “we’ll have flying cars within two years.” It had nothing to do with the subject at hand, but he really seemed to want people to know.

–MG