What exactly is Sanc­tu­ary? I didn’t get any wiser by check­ing out my reli­able source of infor­ma­tion, the Inter­na­tional Movie Data Base. Well, there’s an entry, of course, but it wasn’t that use­ful to begin with.
By vis­it­ing the offi­cial site I was able to enhance my knowl­edge to a cer­tain extent. Now I know that Sanc­tu­ary is a web-based series designed for max­i­mum audi­ence par­tic­i­pa­tion. What the hell? I cer­tainly like these “fea­tures” and I won­der if there’s some­thing rev­o­lu­tion­ary com­ing up here. Curi­ous as I am, I con­tin­ued dig­ging things up. Pretty soon I was rewarded with the plot which is known to be as fol­lows: Amanda Tap­ping – faith­ful Star­gate SG-1 view­ers know whom I am refer­ring to – stars as 157 year old Dr. Helen Mag­nus. Helen was engaged to Jack the Rip­per which resulted in the birth of her daugh­ter Ash­ley. Helen’s father started a sanc­tu­ary for super­nat­ural crea­tures col­lected from all over the world, obvi­ously to study them and their emer­gence. Either way, in her work with these crea­tures Dr. Mag­nus has received some kind of longevity, which explains her age. Each episode is about Dr. Mag­nus doing research about mon­strous crea­tures which are the key to the future of humankind.

A brief visit of TV.com revealed that the new series will pre­mier on April 1st, 2007. I’m always inter­ested in new ideas and new sci-fi series in spe­cial. But what’s def­i­nitely more inter­est­ing is that Sanc­tu­ary will be web-based. Accord­ing to Stage 3 Media which pro­duces the “Inter­net Show”, con­ver­gence is the future of media. It believes that TV, video gam­ing and social net­work­ing will com­bine to become a sin­gle, pow­er­ful enter­tain­ment medium. There­fore, an episode is called webisode (That’s a new one, isn’t it?) and will be avail­able in mul­ti­ple High Def­i­n­i­tion res­o­lu­tions. Sanc­tu­ary will com­bine sci­ence and super­nat­ural to cre­ate a fic­tional online uni­verse where there will be direct com­mu­ni­ca­tion between the viewer and the cre­ative team.

This is exactly the approach I expected to see when huge TV net­works neglected the inter­net as a means of dis­tri­b­u­tion and began to blame it for their lack of imag­i­na­tion and fore­sight by telling every­body who is will­ing to lis­ten that peo­ple trad­ing with their intel­lec­tual prop­erty really hurt them. Well that’s what hap­pens to enter­prises who miss an oppor­tu­nity. Whin­ing around and suing indi­vid­u­als won’t change the fact that they’re mov­ing too slow. Inflex­i­bil­ity does indeed come with a hefty price, wouldn’t you say? The inter­net is the future and if the great net­works fail to see that fact they’ll have to pay for it later. In the mean­time, it’s time for new firms to step up and right­fully so.

I’m already look­ing for­ward to this new approach and the promised immer­sive inter­ac­tion. At least, I have what’s needed to play Sanc­tu­ary on my PC. Here are the min­i­mum requirements:

• Dis­play res­o­lu­tion of 1024×768
• Sup­port for Flash 8.0

Of course, you should have a fast inter­net con­nec­tion, I wager. Broad­band, most likely. Well, we’ll see. Ah, there’s one thing I nearly for­got to men­tion. Accord­ing to Gate­World David Hewlett will be guest star­ring for sev­eral episodes.