 Welcome to our newest chapter of the future of storytelling. After an introduction to the basics of storytelling, we spent last week discussing TV series, a media format that is not at all new but nevertheless still enjoying, if not still gaining, great popularity. One of the major reasons TV series are an important part in this course lies in its key role concerning the evolution of another serial audio-visual format, the web series and other serial web content. To think of the audio-visual web series as one format or one unified media content category is of course as wrong as to speak of the movie or the TV series as one always similar format and medium. No, to be honest, well, it's even more difficult, but we'll see that now. So, what is a web series? If you ask this question about five years ago, the answer would have been that a web series is in its core a series originally designed and produced for a web platform. It can consist of either single episodes or continued storylines. Episodes of a web series are usually called webby-sodes. When I got my first ever writing gig in 2008, it was to create a web series for a German team networking website. There were three major rules that were given to me by the production company. Create a series whose episodes are not longer than three to five minutes with less than four to five recurring characters and possibly make it play in one location, preferably an elevator or something else that is easy to design and cheap to rent. Why? The location and actors restrictions were completely based on the low-cost policy attached to web series because anything else was just not affordable for the production company. Successful financial models did not exist. If we look at the financing of international TV, the program and shows are either funded by commercials from the private sector like in cable TV or as for example with Germany's public service broadcasting by the taxpayers money called GEZ. Also, there is pay TV like Sky or HBO, channels that the audience directly pays for. Obviously, big-budget ads are only placed with programs that are attached to thousands, if not millions of viewers, not a fictional series that is unknown and presented on YouTube and therefore has no money to employ well-known actors or offer a high production value. Basically, it was a vicious circle. The missing funding resulting in low production value and little to no marketing for the series and the low production value and missing marketing resulting in low attention, little audiences and little to no funding. If we look at the TV ratings of one of Germany's most successful access primetime shows in 2011, Um Himmels Willen, for example, 6.5 million viewers were already called an all-time low compared to usually about 8 million viewers. If we compare this to the most successful German web series on former web series Platform 3 Minutes called Blutsbrüder, Blood Brothers, 170,000 clicks on the pilot episode were already one major success, the basically best success this platform ever had. Getting back to the rules given to me and my writing task, this explains the restriction of cast and space. But what were the reasons behind limiting the length of each episode to 3 to 5 minutes? Professor Dr. Jan Desemeier from the University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam describes the fear of web creators that is directly connected to its distribution platforms like YouTube or Vimeo. They are very afraid of the short attention span that you can switch on your computer from one item, from one show, from one formation, to a program like this one, to another. You switch without switching because most of the time you may have opened several windows and you can just switch between them just by letting UI passing to the next information or the next show or the next offerings in another window.