Tubefilter News

The NewTeeVee Live conference in San Francisco this week reinforced the dramatic changes headed our way — whether it be TV, movies, or web television, 2010 promises to be an interesting (and confusing) year for content front.

Regardless of your industry bias, whether it be to Silicon Valley technology, managed networks, consumer electronics manufacturing, broadcast, or Hollywood, there is no fighting the fact that the ‘convergence’ we’ve been touting for over a decade has finally arrived. The playing field is packed with exciting offerings, but sorting through these choices — and understanding the relative advantages of each — promises to be a bit challenging to the average consumer.

Deals kept flowing this week in web series as the Auto-Tune the News clan (The Gregory Brothers) signed an ad deal with Sony Electronics. Their new sponsored episode will hit YouTube in the next few weeks and feature fellow web huckster Julia Allison.

Yahoo rolled out another TV recap series—these things are really popular on Yahoo—with What’s So Funny debuting Monday. ConAgra Foods signed on to sponsor the series, so hosts Shira Lazar and Mike Bachman end up mixing in some sponsor love in their daily duels. And we took a deeper dive into the made-for-mobile and mobile web series world with a feature on the state of the mobisodes.

Revision3 made news twice this week—first with the launch of their second scripted comedy series INST MSGS, which acts out real life internet chatter (and secret confessions). Following that, the online network debuted a partnership with its sister site Digg.com to launch DiggTV which will serve as a distribution hub for Rev3′s Diggnation, The Digg Reel and Digg Dialogg.

For fans of Community, NBC has created a virtual community college that won’t make you go to class or give you bad grades. The mock campus website, complete with an Admission page (you are already accepted) Administration and Faculty, Campus Connect, and the AV Department is full of facts a fun about this comedy that features: Joel McHale, Chevy Chase, Gillian Jacobs, Yvette Nicole Brown, Danny Pudi, Alison Brie, Donald Glover, and Ken Jeong.

While Jeff played by Joel McHale is the cool man on campus, his friend Abed played by Danny Pudi is the quintissential AV Club kind of guy. Scene after scene, Abed shares encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture and films. Abed’s pathalogic obsession with movies, steers him to the film department. In this week’s episode, the other characters on “Community” discover that Abed is copying their life and turning in into student films. Glimpses of these films, which include The Guild’s Sandeep Parikh playing Pudi’s Abed character, can be seen in the show, but the whole masterpiece can be viewed on fictional Greendale Community College website on the AV Department page.

Imagine yourself on a reality competition show. When you get cast, you see yourself winning challenges and coming home with the prize money, but the ‘reality’ of the situation is that there is only one winning person or team. The rest of the competitors are shed each week. From Survivor to Project Runway reality competition shows have one thing in common, voted off contestants can’t go home. Networks go to great lengths to protect the integrity and outcome of the game. Show results are guarded with confidentiality contracts. It’s true, who would watch a competition show, if they already knew who won.

So what happens to the cast offs? On Project Runway Kit Scarbo make it past the half way mark before her avant-garde dress sent her packing. She told Tubefilter she spent the rest of the competition sequestered in an apartment in a nearby building with the other designers.

This season on Amazing Race, racers have found themselves at the top of giant water slides and skiing indoors in Dubai. Jessica Stout and Garrett Paul came into the race ready to tackle all of these challenges. After surviving a license plate search, booking a flight to Tokyo, eating sake bomb on a Japanese game show, and digging in the mud in Vietnam, they had some back luck. Jessica was set up for the challenge to heard a giant pen of ducks, but the animals proved to be to unpredictable and uncooperative. When they arrived last at the next stop, they were eliminated. It was a blow for this team of seasoned world travelers. Stout, a travel writer and Paul, an engineer, were shocked to be out so early. Next stop for them was Elimination Station.

It’s a flurry of activity in the studio as guests from the Live! From the Future With Stuart Papp show linger and the crew of the RadNerd Show rush about, trying to organize media with the operations manager, preparing for sound check, going over their outline of segments with their special guest Sara Fletcher from My Secret Girlfriend. There is an electricity and excitement in the air and at the center of it all is Brian Gramo, Overlord of theStream.tv (I had to make up a title because as the space under his picture on the website states: “I don’t really have a title, but if i did… I’d put it here!”), orchestrating the transitions with the stature of someone with a combination of natural talent and years of experience.

It’s Tuesday, November 10th and it’s the premiere (or as the network calls it, the pilot presentation) of the RadNerd Show on the interactive entertainment network and the hosts of the show, Beau Ryan and Leo Camacho don’t want to leave anything to chance and are armed with extensive notes. Ryan and Camacho aren’t new to the station, having done six months of the post-show for one of the most popular shows on the network, Coin-Op TV Live. The show’s producer, Jared Greenhouse, comments on the fact that he’s never seen a show with so much media in the 10 o’clock slot, which is deemed “After Hours” and has a tendency to have a more laid-back feel.

Before the show goes live, I take a few minutes to chase Gramo around with my digital voice recorder and talk to him about TheStream.tv. “It’s TV you can yell at,” he begins. “Doing it live I don’t think is unique … we do do it live more often than most people. There’s live big budget productions and then there is all of the other stuff. There is American Idol, there is So You Think You Can Dance … I think we’re creating a quality product for our budget level, which is pretty low.”

There is also a great sense of community attached to the network as well as tons of ways for those watching to directly influence the shows. “If enough people are in the chat room yelling the same thing, we can see that and that will effect the show immediately,” Gramo explains. “It’s still at a point where it’s a really tight community, it’s not so big that we can’t give a little TLC to everyone.”

Looks like TMI Weekly’s Julia Allison isn’t going to be the only web celebrity plugging Sony TVs and laptops this holiday season. Indie breakout satire series Auto-Tune the News from The Gregory Brothers has inked a sizable promo deal with Sony Electronics. Michael Gregory touched on the deal while speaking at NewTeeVee Live conference today. The auto-tuning foursome—which is actually three brothers, one sister— Sarah, Evan, Andrew, and Michael have been making waves (and friends with T-Pain) since dropping their first musical mashup on YouTube back in April.

There aren’t many details to report, other than it’s going to be some sort of “viral campaign” produced alongside Sony’s longtime LA-based agency 180. “It’s going to be similar to the kinds of things you’ve seen from us,” Gregory tells us.

The deal with Sony was said to have come before the pair singed a non-exlcusive distro deal with Next New Networks’ Barely Political channel. The series broke out this summer/fall as one of NNN’s top performers across the board. “The most grueling part of Auto-Tune the News is actually watching the news,” said Gregory during the panel.

Revision3′s Diggnation, its super popular weekly web series of internet culture, finally has its own home on the social news site which gave it its name: Digg.com. It seems like a no-brainer, but for some reason despite the close alliance between the show and the site it hand’t happened until now. There is of course the Kevin Rose connection, who is a founder of both Rev3 and Digg, and co-host of Diggnation along with Alex Albrecht.

As part of the new partnership between the two companies, all of the Digg related shows—Diggnation, The Digg Reel, Digg Dialogg along with less frequent Digg Townhalls and Diggcetera—will have a hub at newly launched DiggTV. For the Revision3 series, the site is just embedding the Rev3 player. While Digg users already made up a large part of the series viewers, the new distribution channel for the shows means regular placement, and reminders to watch, in front of the 10 million-plus Digg.com monthly audience.

Can you believe FEARnet is already onto its eighth original web series already? The Comcast-backed horror hub, which recently launched Fear Clinic, is now gearing up for Post Mortem with Mick Garris. The interview series will feature five minute episodes, in a “Charlie Rose of Horror” fashion, with various horror directors and other luminaries like Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven, Robert Englund and John Carpenter.

Mick Garris might in fact be the Charlie Rose of horror, having a rolodex that reads like a who’s who in the genre after creating The Fantasy Film Festival and Showtime’s Masters of Horror anthology series. “There is nobody in the business who can bring to our audience what Mick can – an unprecedented knowledge of the industry from the ground up, and a network of A-List colleagues who are happy to share with him and our viewers their experiences, stories and insights about fear-inspired entertainment,” said FEARnet’s President Diane Robina.

The series is being produced by Jetpack Media—the same shop behind comedy favorite Old Jews Telling Jokes. Jetpack’s Eric Spiegelman is producing Post Mortem and Perry Martin directing.