BRBTV, the collection of reference guides to classic TV shows, marks 10 years on the web in 2008.
BRBTV, the web and print brainchild of author Billie Rae Bates, celebrates its 10th year in 2008, and Bates says she's got lots of fun stuff planned for the anniversary year.
"In 1998, BRBTV was just a crazy idea I had while working in the newspaper business in Detroit," Bates says, "and sometimes, when I look back at the past decade, I can't believe how it's grown."
As part of the anniversary celebration, BRBTV.com is featuring signed copies of the print editions of the BRBTV reference books, special bundle packages of the BRBTV electronic products and other features like original press kits of '90s TV shows.
BRBTV was officially launched in 1998 with the Destination: Dallas fan website, dedicated to the popular CBS-TV primetime soap "Dallas" with episode guide, character guide and "fun and useless information" about the show and its stars. Bates followed it up with fan sites for "Dynasty" and "The Dukes of Hazzard," following the same general format and learning as much about HTML as she could in her free evening hours.
As the years passed, she added more and more content to the sites, based on her own viewing of the episodes as well as news stories and items she'd clipped over the years. An editor and writer who holds a bachelor's degree in journalism who by then had worked at three different daily newspapers, Bates applied her love of research and reporting to the BRBTV sites.
"The appeal of these shows is eternal," she laughs. "Every time one of them begins airing again on a cable network, a whole new era of fans is born, especially when you look at a show like 'The Dukes of Hazzard.'"
It was in 2003 when Bates, who'd already published a Detroit-based novel, "Rubi," realized that she had enough content to actually parlay these fan sites into books, themselves. Thus, the BRBTV series of reference books was born, in printable, letter-sized, PDF format, with hyperlinks and full interactivity throughout.
Not long afterward, Bates added a fourth show to the BRBTV lineup, the '80s daytime soap "Santa Barbara," which she watched and loved all through high school and college.
In late 2004, the first print edition of a BRBTV reference book was published: "Dynasty High," named for the website it evolved from. "Them Dukes! Them Dukes!" followed in early 2006, and "Destination: Dallas" rounded out the third print edition of the original three e-books in late 2007.
But for this longtime writer and editor, whose first newspaper clip was printed in 1987 and who has also worked in communications management positions in the corporate world, BRBTV hasn't just been a set of books. In 2006, with the advent of the electronic Amazon Short, Bates launched another BRBTV product: the BRBTV Report, a magazine-length, electronic feature story on an animated TV series complete with episode guide and other features such as cast list, credits and more. Bates launched a daily news blog at the beginning of 2006, expanding on the news pages of the original BRBTV sites. She also has written an entertainment blog for the professional networking site Congoo.com.
"It's been a lot of fun," Bates says of the whole BRBTV thing, "and it's definitely been a labor of love. At times over the past 10 years, it seemed like another full-time job on top of the full-time job I already had! But we live in interesting times -- our generation has the privilege of knowing what life was like before the Internet and knowing what it's like after the Internet. Without the web, there would be no BRBTV, at least not the BRBTV that exists right now, and because of that I've felt very blessed in the past decade."
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