The Curiosity Room

The digital library of Thom Woodley: film work, webseries, advertising and ephemera.

Copyright 2007-2012
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Diorama TV is an experimental web video channel with two major pieces. On the content side, it was dedicated to curating 'HBO quality' material on the web, with a Brooklyn edge. On the technical side, it is an experiment in using autoplay to create couch-friendly webTV watching.

While myself and my partners (Stephen Petronis, Joe McHeffey, Tim Atkinson and Ashlea Hartz) were able to release the site to good responses, the site has not made it past the Beta stage. The various reasons probably say a good deal about the state of web TV. One was the difficulty of getting enough new good content to populate the site. We have over 100 hours of material, but we were facing steep challenges in releasing new content. Another is inherently strategic; consumers don't seem to want to have to go to another brand new site to find video.

But the biggest reason was the simple fact that we didn't have the money to promote. There's a reason venture capital exists: you can have the best and most interesting idea in the world, but if the money doesn't come in at a certain point to shepherd it into existence, it will die on the vine.

There is talk of using the DioramaTV name as a curated YouTube channel to focus on the content. Currently, the site is experiment is on hiatus, but is still active at dioramatv.com.