It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these.

My progress on archiving had been stalled for a little bit. I got about half way through the Revision3 Beta shows, and then had other things that demanded my time. Working through the past week I’m down to just one more show which I am trying to download as I type. Surprise, sometimes downloads don’t go the way you want them to. Focusing on Revision3 Beta shows, I believe I’ve already touched on how these shows are hosted for streaming on Viddler instead of the standard BitGravity download CDN. But why you may ask? With those unfamiliar with the concept of Revision3 Beta, I don’t hold anything against you. It’s another one of those little failed projects by Revision3 that you’d be lucky to find any information on these days. Here is an archived page of the line up. These were little independent series that were “talent-farmed” (quoting Wikipedia on this one) with hopes that they’d one day make it to a full-on Revision3 show. A pretty awesome idea if you ask me, and something that had a lot of potential. The project was apparently halted because of a lack of funding, but if you watch any of these shows you wonder what the hell that could mean. The shows don’t seem to be getting any money, running Viddler accounts can’t be too expensive, and basic web hosting is pretty cheap. I’d wonder if someone just didn’t want it around anymore. Even though Revision3 shut down the Beta project, many of these shows went own to produce more episodes outside of the Revision3 banner, but most ended up with a short lifespan anyway. Most of the shows continued to upload to Viddler and these episodes basically have to be downloaded manually. This can be a pain if there are many of them. Thankfully, a lot of these shows uploaded their back catalog of episodes on other sites such as Youtube, Vimeo, or Blip.tv. Using youtube-dl, downloading  these videos from more popular sites can be automated for the most part, making things much easier. It would still be nice if the tool had Viddler support, but Viddler isn’t a popular platform and beggars can’t be choosers.

Going back to regular old Revision3 shows, Unboxing Porn has finally been moved to the Archived page after being out of production for quite some time. On top of that, Ask Jay and Epic Meal Time are now moved over as well. So, I did what anyone would imagine and performed a download sweep of those shows. As usual, I found some numbering errors. Epic Meal Time goes out of sequence for two episodes, and has a completely messed up episode feed. Fortunately, I was able to pull all of the episodes they put out under Revision3 without any considerable hunting. Ask Jay turned out to be perfect, which is always helpful.

While I was originally worried about the state of Revision3 after the Discovery deal, I’m surprised by what I see today. While I thought many shows were going to be cancelled, the network is actually growing considerably. I’d estimate that the number of shows currently being produced has almost doubled since the start of the summer. I can’t help but wonder if this is a measured approach, or if they’re just throwing shows against a wall to see what sticks. Either way, I’ll be sure to follow up and see what they axe.

The more shows they end up making, the more I’ll end up preserving.