By Asher Moses
When the three-time Emmy-nominated producer Stan Rogow wanted to get a sense of where television was headed, he turned to his 13-year-old son Jackson.
Jackson and his friends were increasingly shunning broadcast TV in favour of other mediums like the internet, so when he was looking for his next project, Rogow knew he had to do something different.
The result is Afterworld, the first television series to be made available on mobile phones and the web simultaneously.
And in keeping with the demands of the YouTube generation, each of the 130 episodes is just over two minutes long.
Afterworld - an animated sci-fi series about life on earth after an inexplicable global event renders technology useless and 99 per cent of the population missing - premiered last night on the Sci Fi channel on Foxtel, but it's also available on the mobile phone on Telstra's Next G network and on the internet through the Sci Fi channel's MySpace page.
Rogow, who was the executive producer of the popular Lizzie McGuire series, said his production company, Electric Farm Entertainment, was also developing a game based around Afterworld which he planned to launch by early next year.
Brent Friedman, who wrote Afterworld, joined Electric Farm after spending several years at the game maker Electronic Arts, where he worked on classic titles like Command & Conquer and Mortal Kombat II.
"I think this is where it [the TV industry] is heading, and I also think that at the end of the day it will not necessarily be the end of network television, but I think it's going to be a different form of network television that will offer the experience on multiple platforms," Rogow said in an interview.
Figures from TV ratings group OzTAM show TV viewing audiences have fallen by almost 6 per cent in the past five years, and that drop increases to 17 per cent among 16 to 39-year-olds.
By contrast, research firm Roy Morgan said time spent online by 14 to 25-year-old "heavy internet users" doubled from 18 per cent in 2002 to 36 per cent in 2007.
Ian Moate, a project manager at the Sci Fi channel, said changing consumer viewing habits were the primary driver behind the channel experimenting with new distribution mediums, such as MySpace and mobile phones, for Afterworld.
"From our perspective the industry's changing so much at the moment, so everyone's trying new avenues and new areas and we're definitely in that territory as well," said Moate.
Rogow said he published the first 10 episodes of Afterworld on YouTube "just to see how people responded", and was blown away by the response.
But unlike most of the short clips on YouTube, millions of dollars have been spent on creating Afterworld. Rogow said it was a major challenge crafting a cohesive narrative for each episode while keeping their length below three minutes.
"These episodes are very very dense and there's a lot of information in them, and so it's not just three minutes of 'name your favourite television show'," he said.
Rogow said the next generation of TV viewers were losing interest in half and one-hour dramas, which is why he repeatedly passed on the opportunity to develop Afterworld into a live-action TV show and a full-length motion picture.
"I saw my son watching a chunk of CSI today on YouTube ... but I must tell you if I said to him what day of the week is CSI on, he couldn't tell me," Rogow said.
"I think that's a statement in and of itself because I think it's about people wanting to have control over when they watch and what they watch."
The Sci Fi channel, in addition to broadcasting a new episode every weeknight at 7.30pm for the next 26 weeks, will show half-hour catch-up episodes every fortnight from August 22. Exclusive web-only bonus content will be published on the channel's website.
"This is a totally new frontier ... I think in some ways we're a year or so ahead of most people in terms of the approach of the material, and by the time they see this we'll already be working on the next iteration," Rogow said.