MTV's Engine Room

MTV and mtvU's new webseries "Engine Room" seems like a promising and intriguing response to the past success of "The Real World," the popularity of reality-based competition shows (my personal favorite is Bravo's "Project Runway"), and the exponentially expanding YouTube era.  Like most webseries, the webisodes last for 5-7 minutes and explore 16 young digital artists as they compete and create.  I found it particularly interesting that the four groups of four are divided based on their geographic origins- Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin America, and North America.  With an increasing importance of "branded entertainment," the show provides both an expanded outreach for MTV's youthful audience and excellent advertising for Hewlett-Packard's wide range of equipment.  In order to appeal to a larger, more diverse audience, the young digital artists will have visitors such as musicians and one of my favorite writer/director/actors, Kevin Smith.  I love how the series, at least on paper, seems to incorporate various viewpoints from different artistic fields.  I definitely plan to watch the series based on the New York Times article we read for class.  With such a busy lifestyle as an NYU Gallatin student, there is always great appeal in short webisodes that can be viewed in my own time, each one taking up a very small percentage of the day.