McKinney grads to launch app-based TV show

By Chris Beattie

Application-based television could soon be a technology trademark, thanks to two McKinney High School alums.

Ken Morris and Paul Evers are dollars away from launching the app-based TV show, Parked 3D, in hopes of bringing quality, distraction-free television to video-device users all over the world.

"It's kind of like American Idol," said Evers, a 2004 McKinney High grad who began working with Morris on the Parked 3D series about two years ago. "The audience gets to pick what TV shows they want to watch instead of what the studio is telling them they have to watch."

App TV allows users to access primary video and supplemental content, such as behind-the-scenes footage and interviews, within a self-contained app, straight from their iPhones, iPads, TVs and other devices. Through users' donations via Kickstarter, a film creator's dream fundraising initiative, Parked 3D could become the second-ever app-based TV show to hit the market.

The online funding platform, which facilitates the onset of TV shows, books, movies, and other creative outlets, enables app users to pick which projects they'd like to financially back. Morris and Evers will produce Parked 3D, a "heartfelt comedy" series about a musician who inherits his family's theme park after his father's death, if they raise $150,000 in pledges by April 27.

"We want to give the audience the power to choose the content they want," Evers said. "Kickstarter allows them to do that."

Such a technological revolution has been a long time coming for the destined producer duo. Morris graduated from McKinney High a year earlier, in 2003, and hung out with Evers, a fellow theatre kid, throughout their time in McKinney.

Evers moved to Los Angeles after high school, anxious to enter the film world, and Morris followed after he graduated from Southern Methodist University (SMU) in 2008. Their career paths hit a crossroads soon thereafter....