Interview: Matt Bostwick on MTV's Machinima Contest

"It seems like it makes all the sense in the world," said Matt Bostwick, SVP of Franchise Development for MTV and head of the virtual worlds program and ongoing video contest. "It started out with the whole notion of allowing people watching the TV show to step through the screen and enjoy the world with a few thousand of their closest friends. In essence they become the show. " The new contest asks users to create virtual world machinima videos for new artists  and then upload them to Metacafe. "They're living their own little dramas in there and basically becoming the show," explained Bostwick. "We're going further with that, and integrating music experiences is obviously something that's pretty important to MTV. So making their music videos is also a way to showcase up-and-coming talent."

Bostwick says the practice goes back to the early days of MTV, when the network would solicit videos from viewers and new bands, review them, and then air them if they looked good. An unknown could get a national audience in under a week. But while plenty of people are remixing videos and posting them online--YouTube has 262,000 videos tagged "MTV"--Bostwick wants to promote the practice without violating IP. Machinima with new bands gives users a bit more freedom.

"The machinima format is something we're really excited about. Obviously the music video format is important to us. It [machinima] is shaping 21st-century video," explained Bostwick. "We're doing a whole bunch of things with machinima. If you watch the hills, you'll see AT&T spots created in machinima that are sort of stories from inside Virtual Hills. A lot of people are creating sort of so-so machinima, and we're really interested in encouraging artists. Then we'll see stuff that's good. Like any  other art form, we need people who are talented.  One of the best ways to do that is to put it back out for our audience."

While Bostwick isn't sure that machinima can carry a whole series, MTV announced in May that it was interested in putting  avatars on  TV. And Bostwick  wants to work with machinima, but only if it's not a gimmick. Instead, he sees it as another form of reality television.

"To me the more interesting thing is how do you capture the reality of virtually reality in these worlds.," he said. "You're going in there and using a camera to capture virtual life. Then you look at it from a story perspective: what's the creative content and the narrative and what's happening? We're taking cameras into people's real lives—and the's prevalent across the industry—but one of the interesting things about when we talk to our audience in virtual worlds is that they don't see it as virtual or fake. It's just another place that our audience is hanging out where there might be interesting stories."

Once that content makes it onto the TV, even if it's in non-traditional formats, users can remix it again, creating user-generated content based on premium user-generated content. That's a cycle Bostwick would like to see, users giving feedback with their own content and MTV fostering a community by selecting quality work. Right now, though, that might be too difficult.

"Probably the next step, and this isn't an announcement or anything, is to start thinking about creating tools that people can use that are much more broadly accessible to our audience," said Bostwick. "Currently doing machinima requires a pretty high degree of technical aptitude. We'd like to work with partners to really make it simple to use. What's exploded YouTube and all these video sharing sites isn't just the upload capability, but that it's relatively easy to upload and edit video on your computer. You need that on both the creative and distribution end."