Tubefilter News

Babelgum has picked up exclusive first run distribution rights on Scott Adams’ Dilbert animated cartoon series as well as the New Yorker’s and a handful of others—Bloom County, Michael Fry and T Lewis’ Over the Hedge, Paul Gilligan’s Pooch Café and Richard Thompson’s Cul de Sac. The deal is with RingTales, an online distributor of animated cartoons, and adds to Babelgum’s previous library of non-exclusive cartoon clips from the company.

Popular cubicle dweller Dilbert had previously been a major hit on iTunes, where it claimed the #1 podcast spot earlier this summer with over 2 million downloads for the month of July. The new Babelgum deal means it will have first run on new episodes, before its other partners like iTunes, MSN and even Dilbert.com.

The short, under 30-second clips will live on Babelgum Comedy’s Animation sub-channel. Given their bite size lengths and name recognition it’s likely these series will do well on Babelgum’s not too shabby mobile app which makes for fast access to their growing library. Back in July, the site announced it locked exclusive mobile distribution rights on content from celeb-backed comedy hub Funny or Die.

The International Academy of Web Television will be celebrating it’s first birthday next month. Looking back over the past year in web television, it’s exciting to see how much the world of online entertainment has grown, and even more exciting to catch a glimpse into its very promising future. As a community driven membership organization, composed of the leaders and pioneers of the online entertainment industry, the IAWTV is an important piece of the web television ecosystem — but its work is only just beginning, and it’s looking to expand its ranks.

On October 19, at the Digital Hollywood conference in Los Angeles, the Academy held its inaugural membership meeting and hosted a broad-ranging conversation about the issues facing our emerging industry. A subsequent New York based meeting for prospective members will be held tomorrow, November 18th in Manhattan.

As Streamy Awards season edges closer, the IAWTV has formally launched its annual Membership application window, which extends through January 15. If you have considered applying for membership, now is the time to submit your application. As newly appointed IAWTV Chairman, Michael Wayne, said in his letter to the membership, the IAWTV “will only be as good as the collective efforts of its members. So, if you are truly interested in helping us build the IAWTV into a world-class organization, here is your opportunity.”

If the RIAA issued platinum certifications for web series, the offices of KnowYourMeme would be decked out with some serious bling. Originally conceived by Rocketboom producers way back in December 2007 as way to air daily episodes while the production team was on Winter vacay, the spinoff series has gained some serious traction as a resource and discussion board for online, cultural phenomena. Know Your Meme’s informative, sporadic installments document the discovery, dissemination, and decline of internet memes. To the uninitiated, that might sound like a small, nerdy niche, but then you hear the numbers and accolades: the website’s traffic chart looks like a hockey stick with well over half a million visitors a month (and growing) and TIME called it one of the top 50 best websites of 2009.

So, what’s next? What happens after you win at the internet? In the words of Texas rapper Chamillionaire, “It’s one thing to go platinum. Where do you from there? Then Weird Al calls.”

“We were contacted by Davis Cox from Apex Exposure, who was promoting Al’s new best-of album,” say Know Your Meme stars and producers Kenyatta “Yatta” Cheese and Jamie “Dubs” Wilkinson. “Davis was already aware of both the show and the community that our viewers had built around Know Your Meme and thought it’d be a perfect fit.”He was right.

With news last week that Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse officially got the cancellation axe from FOX, there’s all kinds of speculation about what’s next for the captain of the Whedonverse. There’s still talk about Whedon’s digital studio plan, which would include a second season of his web musical Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.

But first up might be something else, especially with Whedon’s The Cabin in the Woods film pushed to 2011. Sci-Fi Wire spotted a casting breakdown for a new Buffy the Vampire Slayer web series in the works. Jane Espenson recently talked to A Comicbook Orange about her writing work on the Buffy Season 8 comic book series, which could come into play in this new project.

Whedon isn’t officially listed on the casting breakdown, though casting director Jeff Shuter (Invincible) is.

Judd Apatow is letting the internet interview him, live, on Funny or Die’s Writers Room series this Wednesday at 12:30 PST. They are taking questions for the famed comedy writer-director (Superbad, Anchorman, Pineapple Express) on Facebook and so far 160 people have submitted their pressing inquests. From the looks of it, this could be worth a new lunchtime browser window. Over/Under on number of Freaks and Geeks questions is 4.

Some highlights:

Would you ever consider making us a good, R-Rated cartoon? Far too few of them. (Jim Moore)

The Three Men and a Baby trilogy will be finishing up with Three Men and a Bride, fans of the trilogy are dying to know if you will be working on this much awaited project? (Dave Hanson)

How come “Walk Hard” tanked so hard? That one was kinda not too shitty. And when I say “not too shitty”, I mean “I could still smell the shit that was ‘Walk Hard’, I just couldn’t see it on-screen.” (Dave Betten)

There is no MPAA for web series (yet), so that leaves sites like us with the job of throwing down the “moderately-NSFW” tag for series like this one. (In this case, headphones at the office should suffice.)

Take a couple of hungry, web savvy NYU Tisch grads and throw them into the scripted web series world and you get a promising looking comedy Ryan & Collin which premieres later this week on the 19th.

The setup of the project is a classic nice guy/bad boy college roommate duo. Ryan (Rob Mor) is the hard working nice guy who’s constantly tempted by his devious roommate Collin (Craig Knowlton)

The four-man 20/20 Pictures team, which includes Mor and Knowlton, are all former NYU film school friends. It’s clear they put a little more polish into this one than most of the college age indies. They even have their one-liner pitch ready at the hip: “If Family Guy had sex with Arrested Development and had a baby.”

But in an ever-crowded field of web series entrants, it’s pretty clear these guys went the the raunchy side to stick out. “The internet is undeniably the next frontier for motion picture story-telling but on it, you’re competing with everything from a sneezing panda to every fetish ever conceived so, to stand out, as filmmakers we felt like we really had to take a bold creative stand,” said producer John Logan Pierson.

Not since the Streamy Awards have we seen this many web series stars in one place. Ok not really, but with the fourth season of The Temp Life, the Spherion-backed comedy about life inside a dreadful NY temp agency kicking off today, the cast is loaded up with notable web series stars.

The casting moves are signs this four-year old web show is growing up with the medium in which it plays. Call it Web TV’s version of keiretsu. Creator Wilson Cleveland, CJP Communications’ Head of Digital Media, built the show back in 2006 for the firm’s client Spherion. Incidentally, Cleveland also stars in the The Temp Life, as Nick “Trouble” Chiapetta, the once-CEO of Commodity Staffing, the shoddy agency. This new season picks up with some major changes once Chiapetta returns to office after a 33-week AWOL.

Notable guest (web) stars:
Thom Woodley — co-creator and star of All’s Faire, The ‘Burg and Vuguru’s The All-for-Nots.
Taryn Southern — creator/star of Private High Musical, and star of Sorority Forever, Woke Up Dead and the recent Wrong Hole video with DJ Lubel
Chris Murray — co-creator/star of Hedge Fund
Rachel Risen — star of The Hayley Project
David Nett — co-creator/star of GOLD
Sandeep Parikh — star of The Guild, creator of The Legend of Neil
Angela Espinosa — co-creator/star of Groupthink
Wendy Rosoff — co-creator/star of Groupthink

Behind the camera, more web series regulars were enlisted. The Hayley Project co-directors Andrew Park and Jato Smith were tapped to shoot the new episodes, with Streamy-nominated Break a Leg creator Yuri Baranovsky writing them alongside Cleveland.

It’s a little more than just stunt casting for some press hits, with the shows themselves actually woven into the storylines. Hedge Fund’s Claude S. Dutchy, LLC hedge fund is the entity that’s taken over Commodity Staffing now, and Murray plays his character from that series. Groupthink’s Espinosa and Rosoff make an appearance as their office comedy’s quirky characters later this season. And Taryn Southern sure didn’t play it safe with a straight cameo, opting instead to go with an anomalously odd character for her guest bit in one of the show’s “online resumes.” (See below)

Web television aficionados will probably find Downsized to be something of an enigma through the first few episodes, and with good reason. As is the case with other mediums, the most successful of web series tend deal in the currency of escapism, whether they’re meme-ripe comedies or eye-dazzling action/adventures. Downsized, on the other hand, has no interest in taking us away from the real world or its concerns. It’s instead best described as a series of dramatic vignettes, following three sets of characters throug lean times while providing a clear message: everybody feels the recession, but they do so in their own, personal way.

The characters are familiar, not because of their conformity to archetypes or because we’ve seen them before, but rather because they’re so close to real. There’s Beth (writer and director Daryn Strauss), the smart, career woman who’s brusquely let go from her company; Lowell (Duncan Murdoch), the sharkish “efficiency expert” who deals in corporate cliches like “being a team player”; Astrid (Shannon Conley), the smarmy-yet-sympathetic beauty pageant coach who squeezes money out of gullible clients to pay her credit card bills; and Leyla (Esra Gaffin), the immigrant cleaning lady whose tearful workplace breakdown makes her less invisible than her broken English ever could. These are not the type of people we visit YouTube to watch—they’re the people we pass on the street every day.