Tubefilter News

We’ve been know to spend our share of time on Twitter, but not as much as say @PerezHilton who basically lives on there. The site has basically become a cauldron of celebrity ego masturbation. Thankfully, the guys at Break Media, or more specifically Matty Sumida spends hours combing through the gems of celeb blabber to hand pick the best of the week. He then hands them over to Break staffer and comedian Mike Polk, who writes and stars in their original mocking web series, Tweet Boxx.

The eight-episode series just wrapped up its first season and is currently on hiatus while the company’s busy Creative Lab tends to its other comedy seeds. Polk was part of the creative team acquired earlier this year in Break’s purchase of HBOlab from HBO which brought with it a handful of existing series like Elevator and Man in the Box, along with Woody Tondorf and Danila Koverman.

The first decade of the 21st century has been pretty sweet for comic book fans that like to see their superheros moving instead of static. From the modest ambitions of the first X-Men to the (almost) indisputable masterpieces that are The The Dark Knight and Iron Man, comic book movies have been established as more [...]

We’ve been fans of the concept behind Stylit.TV since it launched earlier this summer. A blend of web series with trendy products e-commerce site, the young startup is trying to build its audience by giving people what they love—lots of high-end gear. Until now, that’s basically meant designer fashion loot scored from gift bags at celebrity events given away via their first series, Gift Bag Robin Hood.

Today the site is launching TechStyle, fulfilling the technophile’s gift bag fantasy. It’s part high-life voyeurism—seeing how the tech elite are hooked up at major events like MacWorld—and part contest as viewers bid points to try to win the actual gear from the episodes.

For the launch of the series, the Stylit.TV team scored internet and tech personality Shira Lazar to guest host. They also found distribution of sorts by teaming up with popular Apple blog TUAW.com to promote the series. There’s one more MacWorld episode coming out after Labor Day and Stylit.TV founder Ken Feldman tells us the plan is to eventually run this as a weekly show.

Is three minutes long enough to get you where you want to go within a sexy dramedy and leave you feeling both satisfied and wanting more? In this case, I’d answer with whatever the Australian word is for “yes.”

There are few unquestionable truisms of the internet marketing, but it’s safe to say that online, men are suckers for scantily clad women. Domain registrar GoDaddy essentially built its brand around that axiom. And for the past two years, ‘infotaining’ how-to web series French Maid TV has been garnering millions of views and thousands of dollars in sponsor revenue.

The latest tantalizing episode (above) was released today, with the costumed maids instructing viewers “How To Make Money with Webinars.” The whole six-minute episode is an exclusive sponsorship by webinar service Dimdim, with the online conferencing product the central plot point as the maids actually set up their own ticketed webinar, an apt choice, “How to Buy Lingerie.”

Despite its bawdy premise, the male-leaning series has attracted a handful of known sponsors over its run with custom episodes built around a problem usually solved by the companies’ products—”How To Find Music You Like” (iLike), “How To Register a Domain” (GoDaddy), “How To Barter Online” (BarterBee.com).

French Maid TV creator Tim Street is a staple on the web video scene, often seen on panels or events espousing his battle tested lessons to eager newcomers or pressing caged execs to cut through the PR doublespeak. His candid videoblogging shoots can quite literally pop out of his pocket in the form of a Flip camera that refreshingly catches his guests off guard.

For avid lonelygirl15 fans, the surprise reveal that the original lonelygirl15 star Jessica Rose has joined the cast of Poor Paul, wasn’t exactly shocking. (Former LG15 star Yousef Abu-Taleb is a producer of the show.) But to the casual web video junkie this catches an extra mouse click or two.

Episode 32, “You’re a Guy”, was released today on YouTube and KoldCast with Rose playing title character Paul’s (Zack Bennett) new sex-charged neighbor Beatrice. Eleven episodes into their second season, director Sean Michael Beyer, who also plays Paul’s dad ‘Mr. Ted’ in the series, will have Rose in several more episodes this season.

Rose is still one of the most universally well known web series actors out there, made famous by hundreds of close-up vlogs as lonelygirl Bree back in 2006 as YouTube was just taking off. Later she would star in WB.com’s Sorority Forever, which is rumored to be prepping a second season, and an unreleased thriller web series called Blood Cell, that drew plenty of buzz (6.8M views on the trailer) but went down with the 60Frames ship despite a deal with TheWB.com. And there was also the YouTube star driven hodgepodge Hooking Up for HBOlabs.

Nothing too groundbreaking in the news today of The Guild Season 3 premiering on MSN’s Parallel Universe after last week’s roll out just for XBox owners. That is, except for the fact that MSN is now allowing embedding of The Guild episodes after being notoriously closed off last season and forcing viewers to head to the cluttered video.msn.com site.

This is a savvy move for MSN, and a necessary response to the significant amount of attention that Season 2 received once it was released on embed-friendly YouTube earlier this year. Fans of the web series are known to share and post videos on blogs and social networking sites all over the world. And let’s face it, web series need to free to live where people are out discussing and congregating around them.

It will be interesting to see the difference in total views on MSN this time around. Of course we’ll have to account for the unrelated spike in the web show’s popularity after its viral breakout “Do You Wanna Date My Avatar” music video, starring creator Felicia Day, and the addition of notables Wil Wheaton and Mike Rose (The Legend of Neil) to the cast.

There are two trends I’ve grown tired of in comedy. The first is a behind-the-scenes look at showbiz. The only people really interested in watching how Hollywood works are people who work in Hollywood and it just always feels self-indulgent. The second is stuff that only exists to make fun of something else. It’s easy to make jokes that say “that TV show is bad” or “that song is lame”, but it’s hard to come up with something original and funny own it’s own merits.

When I was assigned to review Son of a Pitch, a web series that combines both of my pet peeves, you can imagine I was well prepared to hate it. But guess what? I didn’t. In fact, I actually liked it a lot. Why? Because it’s very, very funny.

The concept is simple — two jackass producers pitch terrible movie ideas to a movie studio executive — but the execution is what makes the show work. It could’ve easily went off the rails too. As a friend once said of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s ill-fated TV spoof That’s My Bush, “Sometimes when you set out to satirize bad sitcoms, you just end up making a bad sitcom.” But series creator Andy Mogren has avoided that trap. Everything from the writing to the acting to the editing hits the same pitch-perfect tone.