Austin Improv

Direct competition often makes things better, too. I'm not saying we should go out and put shows up against what we're already doing. We've been pretty good about programming in a considerate way. The only things that overlap right now are Maestro and Whirled News which compliment each other well. And pretty soon we'll have Coldtowne at the Velveeta room against the Mainstage show, which is workable, too.

Competition is inevitable, but the more we co-operate and embrace as many people as possible the better we can grow the market with competition instead of fighting for a smaller market.

acrouch wrote:That's the whole point of all of this. This is a tool to make improv bigger. Not you or me or some dude doing ComedySportz in his basement, but IMPROV. And we can only do that if we genuinely represent all the improv happening, or at least are supportive enough to list it on a website that is supposed to be your one-stop place to find out about improv in Austin. And it's not like listing people costs us anything.

I think we're in this weird growing stage right now where we have quite a few shows, but the number is small enough that it still seems (both to audiences and to us) that they are all connected somehow. I envision a situation in a few years where Austin Improv.com lists the shows the way the Chronicle lists music gigs. There's just a running list of them, with descriptions. Actually, maybe that's a better format for the show listings page. Maybe do away with the big flashy images for the first splash page, and have the listings in a column, with a small image/description of the show, with links that take you to a special happy page with show description and troupe description and larger images.

Maybe I'm just babbling.