While the Ten Day Take contest from Comcast and Ziddio may be on hold while we wait for them to announce a winner, another contest I wrote about soliciting user-generated content for the chance to win a competition has declared its winner.
Back in October, I wrote about The Sierra Mist Stand Up or Sit Down Comedy Challenge, a partnership between TBS and MySpace. The contest invited amateur comedians to submit their work on MySpace, then allowing the MySpace community to view those videos and select their favorite amateur comedians. The finalists then appeared on a special that aired on TBS in November, and the winer received $50,000 and a developmental contract with the Turner-owned station.
In that post, I mentioned a variety of other examples of this type of contest as well. This TBS initiative, however, is very similar to the Comedy Central Open Mic Fight I wrote about yesterday. In that competition:
72 comics will be chosen from this pool to then compete in regional competitions across the country. That pool of 72 will be narrowed down to 12 via votes from online fans, who will then compete in a live contest in September. The pool of 12 will be narrowed down to three competitors, who will then have videos posted online, and fans will once again vote to select the winner.
The MySpace page for the TBS contest remains up, featuring the full video from the comedian's on-air performance. Steve Byrne, who was voted the winner, is shown performing one of his routines for the audience when one opens the page, but the page also includes the stand-up performances from the TBS special of all the other comedians who made it to the finals as well.
In addition to those top five comedians being featured prominently on the page still, along with their routines, there is a list of 10 standup comedians who were not chosen as finalists at the bottom of the page, but who ranked highly in the voting. The "Stand Up or Sit Down" page links to each of these contestants' MySpace pages, where many of them have their standup videos posted.
Byrne's comedy bit featured his thoughts on masculinity and his racial identity, part-Asian and part-Irish, making him..."Cauc-Asian."
Byrne has his own Web page, which features his new DVD and links to his appearances on Comedy Central and MTV's True Life, as well as his participation in Comedy Central's Stand-Up Showdown. Also see his Comedy Central page and MySpace page.
Both TBS and Comedy Central are members of corporate partners of C3, but no one was consulted regarding this post.
