Tubefilter News

Boxee wants to be your media center. The New York City-based start-up has high hopes of becoming the easiest and most elegant way for you to watch, play, and look at movies, music, and photos, regardless of whether that content lives on your hard drive, local network, or the internet at large. The company’s goal is to deliver the virtually unlimited entertainment choice and social interactivity of the web to your living room, through a user-interface that’s more akin to an upgraded television guide than a web browser.

Last night, Boxee came a few steps closer to accomplishing its aims. At a jam-packed party in Brooklyn, Boxee unveiled its beta software and gave a sneak peak of its soon-to-be-released set-top box. A ton of news outlets covered the specifics – new and improved navigation and design, the partnership with D-Link and Astro for the development of the Boxee Box, the announcement that the device will be available in stores by Q2 of 2010 for around $200, and the promise of the public release of the software’s beta version in January at CES.

But there hasn’t been much, if any coverage or color commentary provided of the event itself. With that in mind, here are my three key takeaways from the Boxee Beta Unveiling.

Boxee is Very, Very Cool.

Over 2,000 people RSVPed to Boxee’s event. After 750 of them were inside the Music Hall of Williamsburg, fire safety regulations required bouncers to close the doors. A line of Boxee fans unable to enter snaked up the block. To passersby, it must have looked like an (insert your favorite indie band of the last five minutes here) concert instead of a launch party.

How does an 18 month-old internet company still in alpha draw that kind of a crowd to a cash bar in Brooklyn on a Monday night? By being very, very cool.

Boxee has an ethos of cool. There’s a palpable sense of technological savvy, aesthetic commitment, screw the establishment sensibility, and well-placed ego that permeates every aspect of the company. From its open source framework, to the playfully functional UI, to the “submerged cube” box design, it all trickles down from Founder and CEO, Avner Ronen.

Despite being backed by $10 million in venture capital, Ronen’s the type of individual who sports hoodies instead of blazers when presenting at high-profile conferences. He confesses to being “unpolished,” often revealing confidential product details at times and to people he shouldn’t, and being unable to exclude things like pop shots at Sarah Palin from product demos.

It’s yet to be determined if Ronen’s alt attitude towards business will be successful in the long-run, but it’s certainly been successful so far. Boxee’s recruited and poached high-profile talent from Vimeo – including Zach Klein and Casey Pugh – to work on its product and development teams. Employees like these (and their work products) both establish and further promote the culture of cool.

Web series and web video bits worth clicking today:
Julia Allison, host of NonSociety’s TMIWeekly, gives dating and sexual courtship advice on College Humor’s The Crucial Man series (above) to scruffy host Jon Gabrus, who is trying to figure out how to be a gentleman. [College Humor]

Grass Roots, the political comedy on KoldCast TV (below) has scored a distribution deal with The Huffington Post. The site has featured a few political series before like Get Your War On and Swift Kids For Truth. “It sparked our interest because it’s both funny and political, which is the goal of our comedy page,” said Alex Leo Sr. Editor at HuffPo. [Huffington Post]

Babelgum announced they have added another comic strip series, Over the Hedge, has joined its comedy channel adding to other exclusive series like Dilbert and The New Yorker cartoons, also from animation distributor RingTales. Four brief (30-second) episodes of the strip that spawned a Dreamworks film of the same name, are up now on the site. [Babelgum]

Indy Mogul’s The Reel Good Show host Bobby Miller proves he isn’t just a snarky film buff, but also a credible indie filmmaker as his film Tub was picked as an official selection for this winter’s Sundance Film Festival. Also on the list is Tubefilter writer Lindsay Stidham’s film Douchebag, which she penned. [Sundance press release, NextNewNetworks]

Casey McKinnon, host of A Comicbook Orange, guest stars as evil nemesis ‘Kalm’ in episode 6—the season finale— of sci-fi comedy Hurtling Through Space at an Alarming Rate (aka much easier to say, HTSAAAR) today on Babelgum (below). [Babelgum]

Web drama Anyone But Me, from creators Susan Miller and Tina Cesa Ward is prepping for its December 15th premiere of its sophomore season. The series hosted a premiere screening of the new season last night in New York and is rolling out promo videos like Gilmore Girls’ bad girl Liza Weil jonesing for more ABM, and Heroes’ Zacahry Quinto who calls the show “an addiction.” [Emailed]

A college reporter named Lily has developed a source inside of a crime syndicate called – get this – “The Syndicate,” because bad guys hate euphemisms. But when Lily meets her source at a lonely parking garage she gets ambushed by a hit man who shoots her dead. The end. Wow, that wrapped up neatly…or did it? As it turns out Lily wakes up alive and well from the attack, and the mystery behind how she survived the fatal shooting becomes Vetala’s MacGuffin.

Lily starts to have premonitions and the circumstances behind her condition, although foreshadowed, do not come into focus until much later in the storyline. The unfortunate consequence is that the action in the series, while off to a full-throttle start, slows down considerably. The painful care that The Vetala takes not to overstate things becomes its burden. The middle episodes are not so much parts of the story as cryptic warnings of future events. Consequently, the show loses forward momentum. As with all mysteries there is a fine line between intriguing the audience and turning it impatient. Just ask Carnivale.

The actress who plays Lily, Candace Chase, carries the weight of the the story mostly on her own. Vetala does more showing than telling, so dialogue is sparse. Where there are conversations the information is offered up only obliquely. Chase bears a passing resemblance to Laura San Giacomo, and plays Lily as guarded because of recent developments, but that makes it more difficult to identify with the character. Even Lily’s closest two friends, her roommate and a badgering journalism student named Alex who works with her, illicit little more than cryptic asides and rebuffs.

What we have in the end with The Vetala is a good premise with good-looking execution, but a story that needs more time to be fleshed out. Creator and writer Damon Vignale marginalized basic exposition in favor of delving into the greater mythos that is the show’s premise.

I’ll admit, the first time I went to this site, I read it as Korean Bacon (which, by the way is a site of its own worth salivating over). But Korean Beacon as it maybe, is a relatively new site all about Korean-American life and culture. Let’s face it, Koreans are pretty cool. They have John Cho (FlashForward) and Ken Jeong (The Hangover).

“The Korean wave is happening and Hollywood is importing Korean artists and talent into the American mainstream,” says Korean Beacon. So fittingly, they tapped another Korean rising star, Christina Lee, host of video game news series Pulse on the PlayStation Network, to host a weekly Korean-American pop culture series for the site.

This series nails the newsy recap genre in which it plays—it’s topical, niche, and short—clocking in at just over a minute breezing through its news bites without a dollop of unnecessary fluff. Internally, they call the series ‘Beacon Bits’, which seems like a better name choice than the generic and somewhat misleading Monday Mashup. I was expecting a different kind of mashup.

Web series and web video tid bits worth clicking today:
David Henrie, 20 year-old star of Disney Channel’s The Wizards of Waverly Place, made a guest starring appearance on Illeana Douglas’ Easy to Assemble series set yesterday. During the shoot, which takes place on a flight Sweden, Henrie tweeted out a photo of him sitting next to SNL vet Tim Meadows. (Full disclosure: I too was on set for an appearance in the series.) [@David_Henrie/Twitter]

Toy ideas for the Holidays are all over the place. But two ladies, who could easily be an SNL skit of their own, have a daily toy show full of gems like environmentally safe Tegu magnetic building blocks. Pretty cool toy. [Daily Grommet]

IFC premiered its new 4-part web series The Unclothed Man today from graphic novelist Dash Shaw. The series leads up to the release of Shaw’s latest ‘The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D.’ [Monsters and Critics]

MySpace reality series Married on MySpace, which starred the “charismatic” couple Elle and Tito is heading to TV, in the form of Elle & Tito: The Married Life on Latino broadcaster SiTV. [Variety]

Penny Arcade, the popular web comic on video games and gaming culture, has launched the two-part pilot to their new web series PA TV, which no doubt spends some time at the sites well-attended Penny Arcade Expo (PAX). [Penny Arcade]

Venice The Series, a new steamy drama series debuted online last week to a not too shabby 65k views on the pilot on YouTube. The indie series “unifies the gay lifestyle with the straight world; people of color with multi-ethnic groups; and people in Venice, California with the global community,” according to the show’s mantra.

Time for a little Monday afternoon web series game time… The name of the game is “Spot the Brand in This Web Series.” This sort of subtly branded web series come of the ad agencies from time to time, cleverly void of any sponsor pre-rolls or display ads from their reticent backers. Some hit, some miss—like Proctor & Gamble’s not-so-viral Zack series for Tampax from earlier this summer.

The target this time is Moochie, a six-episode comedy web series from earlier this fall. The setup of this series is pretty standard—three underachieving 20-something guys living together—though they do have a lazy talking hamster named Moochie.

We’ll leave out the name of the ad agency (that would be too easy), but we will say that director Matt Lenski helmed the series with the help of editor Heidi Black and musician Dan Deacon. Views haven’t exactly been through the roof on the series on YouTube, though it did get pushed out through Xbox, Yahoo, Vimeo and VideoEgg as well. See if you can spot the brand and product in this series.

Atom.com’s new series The Berry/Agee Experiment is an experiment indeed. Can an inside joke between two friends be enjoyable for other people? Can a funny song be expanded into a video mockumentary? Can this be kept up for several episodes? The answer is both yes and no.

Luckily, the two friends who share the inside joke are Matt Berry and Steve Agee, both very funny dudes with serious comedy street cred. Berry is a veteran of British TV comedies The Mighty Boosh and The IT Crowd, while Agee is best known for his role on The Sarah Silverman Program. They became friends when Berry came to LA to guest star in a Silverman episode and after he left town, they kept in touch by composing and recording songs that hilariously insulted each other and e-mailing them back and forth across the pond. And The Berry/Agee Experiment was created to turn their audio assaults on one another into a video web series.

The songs themselves are hysterical, as Berry and Agee verbally and musically spar in a tongue in cheek feud that quickly goes blue and somehow manages to get more and more inappropriately side-splitting as it continues. One song has Agee taking on the role of a robot sent back in time to warn the world that Berry has a strain of AIDS so potent it will one day threaten to wipe out mankind. Another has Berry complaining that he can no longer have sex now that Agee’s repulsive image is burned into his brain. These contemptuous compositions run the musical gamut, covering several genres. There’s the jangly country blues number “Dead Matt Walkin,” the psychadelic soundscape “Matt F**ks Hookers,” and “Super Steve” a parody set to the tune of Supertramp’s “The Logical Song.”

Global environmental outfit Live Earth hit the scene with a bang back in summer of 2007—07/07/07 to be exact—with a worldwide live concert event with more than 150 musical acts in 7 continents. Kanye West, Kelly Clarkson, Black Eyed Peas and Jack Johnson all headlined the event that drew awareness for the world’s emerging Climate crisis. Now Live Earth is prepping their latest global event—Run for Water with lead sponsor Dow—taking aim on the worldwide water crisis an international (think 192 countries!) series of 6km run/walks (the average distance women and children walk everyday to secure water) with local concerts and water education events on April 18, 2010.

To build awareness for the April event, they launched LiveEarth TV today, a hosted web series acting as a hub for all of the celeb-laden build up. Jessica Biel, Pete Wentz, Alexandra Cousteau, Angelique Kidjo and Jenny Fletcher are all attached and took part in the kickoff event in episode 1 (above). We’re not sure how they managed to snag internet citizen-journo Shira Lazar away from her insanely booked schedule, but they did. Lazar aims to be a informed voice for the millennial set and this fits right in line.

Live Earth’s Interactive Director Andy Sternberg said they plan to produce 8 to 10 episodes of the series leading up to April. The opening episode gets its share of one-on-ones with the celeb activists, but also ends up dishing some gripping facts about that state of water these days:

“1 in 8 people don’t have access to safe, clean drinking water. That leads to 1.8 million deaths each year, mostly in children under 5.”