Tubefilter News

The 2010 FIFA World Cup has begun. If you’ve caught the football fever, you already know where to watch all of the games online and on your phone. If you’re looking to catch the football fever, you need to watch three things:

1) ESPN’s I Scored a Goal in the FIFA World Cup Final, a sports documentary that features interviews with every living soccer player who scored a goal in the FIFA World Cup Final and highlights how the event impacted the players’ lives (which we also covered last week)

2) Visible Measure’s rundown of five of the most-viewed online video ads associated with the World Cup. Online ads from Puma, Pepsi, Carlsburg, Coca-Cola, and Nike have drummed up more than 37 million views and counting. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s World Cup spot for Nike – possibly the greatest commercial for anything in recent memory with a nod to its own virality around the 1:57 mark – has accrued more than 22 million views on its own.

3) Adidas’ sporty redux of the famous Mos Eisley Cantina scene from Star Wars features the likes of Snoop Dogg, David Beckham, and other famous faces from the music and entertainment industries. It speaks more to pop culture and cheeky nostalgia than the thrill of the game, which makes sense given the label is trying to hawk its Star Wars line. It also explains the relatively low by comparison 2+ million views on YouTube.

After months of build-up, and waiting, fans of the open entertainment platform Boxee finally have a date to mark on their calendars for the release of the lauded Boxee Box. The set-top box from equipment maker D-Link will help bridge that crucial gap between laptop and living room TV, putting Boxee in a head-on slugfest against the likes of AppleTV, Roku and the latest entrant, Google TV.

The public on-sale date for the Boxee Box is set for July XX, the company announced this afternoon.

Until the Box hits shelves, the platform is only available for Mac and PC users through a free downloadable standalone application. But still, Boxee already has its legion of fans of its library of content-driven apps, and most online networks have either already launched their own or have one in the works. Web TV networks Revision3, Crackle, Next New Networks, KoldCast TV all have apps on the service, along with some shows themselves like The Guild, Pure Pwnage and Kevin Pollak’s Chat Show.

Last night, Electus unveiled the first episode of its new branded entertainment series from Jason Bateman and Will Arnett’s New York based production company, DumbDumb. Sponsored by Wrigley’s Orbit gum, Dirty Shorts was created, directed, and executive produced by the duo. They also saw fit to cast themselves in its first episode, ‘The Prom Date,’ which examines “the dirty world of student and teacher dating – and how the parents of the student involved react.” The show will be distributed on YouTube.

In January, DumbDumb sealed a production deal and funding from Electus. The brainchild of former NBC Entertainment Co-Chair, Ben Silverman, the IAC-backed studio, which was announced last summer, has secured distribution deals with Yahoo and recently launched SoBe Studios, in partnership with PepsiCo and CollgeHumor, another IAC property. The studio has also broadened its horizons into television and will launch Pedro & Maria, an interactive telenovela sponsored by Proctor & Gamble, later this year.

Bateman and Arnett took the stage at Digitas’ NewFronts in New York City this week to pitch their wares to the brands in attendance. “I think you have to be a little more obvious with humor on television. On the internet, they’re willing to find the funny. That’s the stuff that makes us laught a little bit more. People are more predisposed to find that or look for that online,” said Bateman.

The following is not only a cautionary tale but one of making lemonade out of lemons (or whatever the internet equivalent of that would be…making jpegs out of pixels?). Our story begins with a pair of teens, Josh and Brian, in small town in Texas by the name of Nacogdoches who are visited in class by independent ARG producer Jeromy Barber (Madison Atkins). According to Josh: “he opened my eyes to where entertainment is heading. I remember him talking about the possibility of the audience, the people watching, having a real influence over a movie or a TV show … I thought, that would be amazing. So, I got my roommate Brian to help me, and we are going to make our own (ARG). We ARE making our own.”

So Josh and Brian came up with a production company name: Big and Awesome Productions and were overjoyed to find that BigAndAwesome.com was available online. “Brian and I thought we bought BigAndAwesome.com last Tuesday, but didn’t,” explained Josh. “We bought the hosting, but forgot to click the box to register the domain.”

Thinking their site was secure, Josh and Brian hit Twitter, setting up the account bigandawesome and began to promote their site to the first 1,000 ARG-related Twitter accounts they could find. “Apparently, that’s a party foul, following 1,000 people in a day, but we didn’t know,” said Josh. “Rowan72 did. We got her attention, and when she noticed that the site was not registered, she registered it and decorated it a bit with a bunny, a pancake and some sharp words of wisdom.

The Gregory Brothers are still the web’s reigning masters of the auto-tune. And this year’s Streamy Awards proved to be a matchmaking of two of the web’s most popular web series—The Gregory’s breakout news-politic series Auto-Tune the News and the Streamy-winning machine that is The Guild.

So after meeting in person at the Streamys, the two groups decided to team up for a little auto-tuned recap video (above) of Season 3 of the popular online gamer comedy—spoiler alert in the video if you’ve haven’t watched S3 yet!

Kevin Rose, one half of the hosting duo behind Revision3’s most popular web series of all time, Diggnation, is apparently not leaving the web show after five years, despite a report by TechCrunch today to the contrary.

The TechCrunch report from Michael Arrington cite a source that they “believe is accurate,” claiming that Rose will be leaving the series. It didn’t however mention any time frame for the departure.

While not responding directly for comment, Rose instead turned to Twitter-and his 1.1 million followers—to make a statement on the issue:

On this week’s episode of The Web.Files the lovely and talented Kristyn Burtt interviews the red carpet guests attending the premiere of DailyMotion’s new comedy series, Squatters. For those unfamiliar with The Web.Files, it is a weekly web series that gives audiences an inside look into the web TV space. In addition to hosting, Kristyn Burtt created the show along with the series’ producer, Sandra Payne (Life with Kat and McKay). Also, she looks fetching in a fedora.

Squatters is a show about two guys who make a bet to live rent free for a year in New York. And its online home, Dailymotion is a French video site is similar to YouTube, but with more nudity. (Oyez, I hope I don’t get fired before I get my Tubefilter new writer gift basket, complete with complementary Drew Baldwin headshot.) In addition, to the attendees sharing their thoughts on the series, many of them also share the strangest place they have ever woken up. Most of them are actors, so they are fairly strange places.

Yesterday, four year old Quantcast, the media measurement and analytics company, which has raised over $50 million dollars to date from investors led by Founders Fund and Cisco Systems, scored a major win against its rivals, ComScore and industry heavyweight, Nielsen, in a bid to land Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditation for its syndicated online audience measurement service. Both Nielsen and ComScore’s competing online measurement services, NetRatings and Media Metrix, respectively, are currently under audit review by MRC, and have been for quite some time.

The MRC, which was established in 1964 at the behest of Congress as an alternative to government regulation of the broadcast industry, has long been the gold standard of ratings accreditation in fields as diverse as television, radio, multi-media, and print. Until now, their internet accreditations have been limited solely to publishers and ad networks — Quantcast is the first syndicated ratings measurement service to receive the official MRC stamp of approval.

“We were impressed with many of the innovations introduced by Quantcast,” said MRC Executive Director, CEO George Ivie. “Its accreditation is a notable step in the continuing evolution of the state of online measurement.”