OTT & Transmedia

A new Vanity Fair piece makes it official: the traditional late-night talk show is no longer the only game in town. Instead, digital creators like Brittany Broski, Bowen Yang, and Amelia Dimoldenberg are "shattering the talk show format" by building something looser, more intimate, and entirely online.

Why Digital Creators Are the "New Late Night": Unlike network shows struggling for a fraction for an audience, these hosts thrive on "realness" and their unfiltered personalities. As Broski puts it, fans crave genuine "parasocial connection" with celebrities, not rehearsed talking points. The gatekeeping power of traditional late-night is dissolving—an appearance on a popular YouTube show is now a Hollywood "rite of passage," as Glen Powell said of Hot Ones.

The Deep Connection to Podcasting: Many of these shows are, at their core, video podcasts. Las Culturistas is a podcast with recognizable hosts and a strong demographic behind them and now hosts its own award show on Bravo)! With often spend an hour or more with a single guest—a format that allows for depth impossible in a six-minute network segment. YouTube reports that viewers watched over 700 million hours of podcasts on their TVs last October alone. Streaming services are taking note, with Netflix signing major deals to develop its own video podcast slate.

Audiences Don't Need TV for Zeitgeist Commentary Anymore: The traditional late-night monologue has been replaced by a thousand different authentic conversations online. The new hosts generally avoid political edge (with Ziwe being a notable exception), focusing instead on collaborative, positive spaces where audiences can connect directly with personalities they trust.

Breaking In: Luck vs. Training?: The path varies wildly. Some, like Broski, found fame almost accidentally—through a 2019 kombucha-tasting meme. Others, like Ziwe and Julian Shapiro-Barnum, bring clear creative vision, aiming to create something "literally for a YouTube audience." Kareem Rahma's finds his Subway Takes series taking off on social media and YouTube as the host found no luck selling the series to a network before hopping on socials with celebrity guests to someone just sitting on the train looking to offload their thoughts. Amelia Dimoldenberg graduated with a journalism degree and most recently striked up a film centering her Chicken Shop Date concept. While luck can open the door, sustaining a show requires entrepreneurial hustle—from funding projects with brand deals to turning down buyout offers to retain creative control.

The table is getting more crowded, but as Broski notes, "there's room for everyone"—because unlike network television, these shows aren't fighting for the same time slot. They're available anytime, anywhere, and for a new generation of viewers, that's exactly what late-night should be. What does this mean? Late night won't be ditched for some time but it's clear that leveraging a new audience has allowed these hosts to break a door they couldn't even open when going the traditional route, from produced films to serious acquisitions, the road may not be as narrow as one thinks.

I was just watching a video by a YouTuber I’m subscribed to, Greg Owen, about Millennial writing, and he and several commenters made an excellent point:

Sincerity is largely missing in today’s creative works. The reason anime is as popular as it is, for example, is that no matter how over-the-top the plot and the characters are, they are played completely straight and serious without any asterisks. They buy into their own product, have fun, and encourage you to dive in as well. And you do, and you have the time of your life.

This is especially true with transmedia. It’s much harder to sell a big story when you’re being ironic about it, when you can take a risk (that I’d argue shouldn’t even really BE a risk) and be sincere and win audiences that way. You gotta commit to what you’re selling because if not, who will?

This is the video if you wanna watch it for yourself:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NGSkq9WeNcI&pp=ugUEEgJlbg%3D%3D

Curious to know—what’s your all-time favorite transmedia world? I’m talking stories that stretch across books, games, films, maybe even comics or animation. The kind of universes that just keep expanding and still hold up.

Here are a few of mine:

1. Shrek – Wildly entertaining across formats and ages

2. Star Wars – From novels to games to streaming, it’s a global myth

3. The Lord of the Rings – Still the blueprint for cinematic worldbuilding

4. Underworld – Dark fantasy done loud and stylish

5. Van Helsing – Gritty, gothic, and underrated in how it crosses mediums

These kinds of OTT worlds have inspired how I build my projects for film, games, and streaming.

Would love to hear yours—what transmedia world has stuck with you over the years and why?

As I promised a couple days ago, for this lounge, I have concluded a case study of the Dungeons & Dragons franchise, as it relates to transmedia. This is very instructive, as D&D has over 50 years since its creation, and has been and remains a transmedia phenomenon. I encourage everyone interested in the "transmedia" world to read the full article, which links at the bottom of this post. Here, I include only the executive summary. HOWEVER, before that, I invite your comments and I also want to make a couple observations not directly addressed in the case study but which is fundamental to the success of D&D: it was and remains a unique and original contribution to both gaming and narrative structure. The latter even has a label: "emergent narrative" - which is a topic all its own. But the lesson here is, if you want to be a successful transmedia franchise, you need to do Ph.D. level work, in that you create something which is an original and unique contribution to media and story. Most of us are not capable of that. And now, the summary (link to full paper at bottom of page):

Overview and Financial Evolution

Since its creation in 1974, Dungeons & Dragons has evolved from a niche tabletop wargame produced on a $2,000 budget into a massive transmedia lifestyle brand. Today, the property is a primary financial engine for its parent company, Hasbro; in recent reports, the Wizards of the Coast (WotC) and Digital Gaming segment generated over $1 billion in operating profit, driven heavily by digital licensing and video game sales.

Creation, Ownership, and Legal Battles

The game was originally co-created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson and published through their company, Tactical Studies Rules (TSR). The property's history is defined by corporate consolidation and bitter legal friction. Arneson was ousted early on and spent years suing TSR to secure his royalties and co-creator credit. Gygax was similarly ousted in 1985 following a stealth stock buyout by executive Lorraine Williams.

Teetering on bankruptcy, TSR was acquired by WotC in 1997, which was subsequently bought by Hasbro in 1999. The brand's history of legal turbulence continued into the modern era, most notably with the 2023 Open Game License (OGL) crisis, where massive community backlash forced WotC to abandon plans to extract royalties from third-party creators and instead place the game's core mechanics into the Creative Commons.

Creative Influences

The foundational lore of D&D operates as a postmodern pastiche. Its mechanics and world-building were heavily inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien (which sparked early copyright disputes over terms like "hobbit"), as well as global mythologies and a specific list of pulp fantasy authors—such as Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, and H.P. Lovecraft—codified by Gygax in the game's famous "Appendix N".

Transmedia Adaptations

Because D&D is fundamentally a world-building engine, it became highly adaptable across various media:

Literature and Comics: The franchise proved the viability of shared-world fantasy fiction through massive bestsellers like the Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms series, alongside decades of licensed comic books.

Film and Stage: After a critically panned film attempt in 2000, the brand successfully translated to the silver screen with 2023's critically acclaimed Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. It has also entered the theatrical space with the officially licensed, interactive Off-Broadway and touring production, The Twenty-Sided Tavern.

Video Games: D&D's ruleset translates perfectly to computer RPGs. The Baldur's Gate series, originally developed by BioWare in 1998, revitalized the genre.

The Baldur's Gate 3 Phenomenon and IP Control

The 2023 release of Baldur's Gate 3 by Larian Studios represented a massive cultural and financial windfall, selling tens of millions of copies and sweeping global industry awards. The game's success was driven by its acclaimed cast of companion characters, such as Astarion and Karlach. However, the project perfectly illustrates the harsh realities of transmedia franchise control: while Larian Studios engineered the cultural phenomenon, Hasbro and WotC retain absolute ownership over the intellectual property and all the original characters. This absolute corporate control was recently highlighted when HBO announced a live-action Baldur's Gate television series helmed by Craig Mazin, a production from which Larian Studios and the game's original writers were completely excluded.

Read and download the full paper here: https://independentproducersguild.org/paper-D&D-history-of-a-%20transmed...

One of my favourite video game series is Danganronpa, a mystery/thriller visual novel about fifteen gifted students at a special academy who are nonetheless forced to kill each other to escape. It’s rich with lore, and so much of it naturally is not contained to the games. You have the anime series (which takes place before and after the events of Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair), light novels, even a stage adaptation. The world is so big, and the characters so fleshed out (even before they canonically die) that you really can see it as a Transmedia masterpiece.

Have you ever played or watched Danganronpa?

Kojima Productions has officially announced that DEATH STRANDING 2: ON THE BEACH will launch on PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store on March 19, 2026, with pre-purchases starting today. The PC edition will feature expanded technical options like 21:9 and 32:9 ultrawide monitor support, full mouse and keyboard customization, and haptic feedback integration for the DualSense controller. Players who connect their PlayStation Network account will also receive exclusive in-game items, including a special suit inspired by the PlayStation logo and unique backpack patches.

I'm interested to see if Kojima's film aspirations will expand as the game gets intro'd to the PC audience since other games had adaptation successes after its PC release, let me know what you think!

The streamer, which is a producer of the stage show, is filming the production this week.

(https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/netflix-stranger-thin...)

Ask Me Anything (AMA) 2/4 to 2/5- How to Work with AI Without Giving it Control of Your Creative Voice

Ask Me Anything | Feb 4–5

This AMA is about finding the balance. AI as an assistant, not an artist replacement.

What This AMA Will Cover

- How to use AI without losing your creative voice

- Where AI is genuinely useful in a filmmaker’s workflow

- Where AI should not be used

- How to set boundaries so AI serves your intent

- How to separate real tools from hype and fear-based narratives

- What informed early adoption actually looks like

I will be answering questions throughout Wednesday, February 4th and 5th, so bring your questions and your curiosity.

Some of his webinars include- AI for mockups and sizzle reels, How to break Story with AI, and much more- https://www.stage32.com/education/search?term=Joshua%20Young

So join in on the AI conversation- https://www.stage32.com/lounge/directing/Ask-Me-Anything-AMA-2-4-to-2-5-...