Two days and two episodes into the new 80-segment, Internet-only show Prom Queen and I’m completely hooked.

Ok, not really. High school dramas aren’t really my thing, and I’m betting I spend a lot more time watching Justin.tv than Prom Queen. But the show does have merit (the story moves along briskly). MySpacers may be drawn to it, and it is as good as much of the user generated content out there. Michael Eisner’s Vuguru may have a mini hit on its hands. Episode 1 is embedded above. Episode 2 and future episodes are here.

Advertising intrusion was not as bad as I had feared after reading Eisner’s interview last week. There was a three second pre-roll ad for the upcoming Hairspray movie, a short ad for Verizon Vcast and then a fifteen second post-roll ad for Hairspray again. There were no obvious product placements that I saw in the first two episodes, and the last two ad units were easily skipped since the episode was over. Three total seconds of forced pre-roll ad watching for 1:40 worth of actual content is a lot better than normal TV.

With a budget of $100,000, the show could be very profitable.

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Prom Queen is coming, and it will be distributed on MySpace. Is the future of new media going to be a world where stories are told over eighty episodes that are each ninety seconds long? And advertising galore – pre rolls, post rolls, and product placements. This may be the highest advertising to content ratio ever seen. The budget for the show is just $100k, which is nothing more than a rounding error in Hollywood.

If enough MySpacers put up with the ads and watch Prom Queen, there will be literally thousands of these shows hitting the web. And all the big portals will gleefully pushing them to us, because they’ll get a revenue share from all those ads.

And if there’s a show that’s any good, users will strip out all those ads, mash those eighty episodes together into one 700 MB file and put it on bittorent. Then the lawsuits will start.

In an interview with NewTeeVee, ex-Disney Chief Michael Eisner (the guy behind Prom Queen, through his startup Vuguru) talks a lot about protection of intellectual property (”I think the Viacom lawsuit [against Google/YouTube] is very promising”) and how people must get paid for their work.

Those are important messages, but as I said with a post about Clown Co., save it for the shareholders. Users want a compelling product, with as few ads as possible mucking things up.

He never talks about the user experience, of the rise of the cream from the chaotic cesspool of user generated content as a real threat to Hollywood’s professionals. He thinks new media is nothing more than “technological advancement and expertise in distribution and exhibition.” “Old media, where he lumps “Greek mythology and Shakespeare and Eugene O’Neill and Happy Days” together, is where the creativity is. He says old media types “understand motivation, and character, and where the denouement goes, and how to develop interests between characters, and make people laugh, and cry”

It’s good to see the Shakespeare and Happy Days guys trying new things. But I think he’s underestimating the seismic shift that’s occurring right now around content creation and distribution. Unlike before, the audience can easily create their own content and distribute it to millions on YouTube. Some of that content will be better than anything Hollywood produces. And it won’t cost even $100k to create.

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