Tubefilter News

Yesterday, YouTube’s CitizenTube channel released its highly anticipated interview with former President Bill Clinton, on the eve of the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI).

Jessie Spano is so excited. Shel’s also so scared.

The most histrionic scene in all five seasons of Saved by the Bell is etched in the minds of every child of the early ’90s. While Joey Lawrence’s “Woah” and Pauley Shore’s “Wheez the Juice” have fallen by the wayside, Spano’s exclamations after overindulging on caffeine pills have stood the test of time.

So, if you’re someone like Dan Levy and creating a web series that’s an amalgamation of your favorite early ’90s sitcoms, this is a scene you want to spoof. And wouldn’t ya know, Levy channels one helluva Elizabeth Berkley.

In the first installment of Atom’s latest web series, Dan Levy’s Laugh Track Mash-Ups, Levy plays your stereotypical, naive high school student from which all after school specials are made. Dripping with impressionability, Dan dives headfirst into illegal substance abuse with the helping hand of resident bad boy, Snake. His downward spiral is frowned upon by his whitewashed social circle, but they’re all present at his hospital bed side when he wakes up from the drug-induced hysteria, apologizes, and pledges to be a better person.

It’s an installment of your favorite childhood sitcom, condensed into a seven-minute minisode, with familiar didactic overtones and references to TV shows like Hangin with Mr. Cooper, Saved by the Bell, Clarissa Explains it All, Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Family Matters, Dinosaurs, Alf, Blossom, Home Improvement, and many, many more. It’s also very good, but only if you’re not expecting a clever send-up or tongue-in-check critique.

In Laugh Track Mash-Ups, Levy prefers emulation over derision. Everything becomes a lot more comical when you think of the series as an ode to, or reenactment of those classic sitcoms, instead of just a way to make fun of them. Over e-mail, Levy and Laugh Track director and editor, Payman Benz, told me how the series came to be:

Tubefilter: How’d the series get to Atom?

Dan Levy: Me and Todd Strauss Schulson pitched it to Atom a few months ago. We didn’t have all the ideas, we just really wanted me to be a butler to an all black family. Then eh booked his first feature, Harold and Kumar 3, and said Payman would do it and do it well. He was so wrong!!!!!

Tubefilter: What kind of budget were you working with?

Payman Benz: We didn’t have much, I can say that. Like any other web series, we called in many, many favors. They seem simple but there’s a lot that went into them. First off, we shot them all at a studio in the valley where A LOT of porn is shot. That’s why the sets are so weird/perfect. But renting a porn studio for 3 days isn’t cheap. We also needed 90s wardrobe, and our costume designer Eva Fredrickson had a field day putting everything together. She rocked it.

All the technical requirements, plus the 5 million actors we had working with us made this project bigger than any of us expected going into it. But we all loved it and loved the 90′s, so we had to make it work.

Tubefilter: Did you do anything else to get that early 90′s feel?

Payman Benz: We shot these with 3 cameras, in standard-definition DV, 30 frames per second. I wanted them to be as ugly as shows in the 90s were. If we shot these in HD, they would not have been as funny.

Tubefilter: You got anything else for me?

Payman Benz: The 80′s aren’t funny anymore. The 90′s are back. Whoomp, there it is.

Check out weekly installments of Dan Levy’s Laugh Track Mash-Ups on Atom. And keep your eye out for a slew of appearances by talented actors, including James Adomian, Danny Pintauro (Jonathan on Who’s the Boss?), Jareb Dauplaise (Hard Times of RJ Berger), Tiny Lister, Kate Micucci, Kato Kaelin, Casper Van Diem, Hal Rudnick, Taryn Southern, Greg Benson, and Eric Andre.

If you find yourself to be a fan of Dan Levy’s work, you can also go back and watch his Crackle series, My Long Distance Relationship.

lg15-in-the-bedroomIn the Bedroom, the 433rd episode of lonelygirl15, broke the 50 million view mark on YouTube. The video is also currently number 13 on the all-time most viewed list for the Entertainment category and the 81st most viewed video of all time on YouTube.

Jonas (Jackson Davis) posted the video on March 7th, 2008, where it quickly racked up the views and continues to do so, averaging approximately 80,000 new views a day some two years after the conclusion of the series.

Granted much of the video’s views can be attributed to the provocative title and enticing thumbnail (which the LG15 producers inserted as a flash frame into the exact center of the video – at the 1:26 mark – so YouTube would be sure to grab it). The image features a suggestive shot of Jennie (Melanie Merkosky) in bed. Also, the video contains one of the series’ more memorable surprises as well as an important plot point.

In a time when most web series are lucky to gain 5,000 views, the fact that a single episode of a series has reached the upper echelons of popularity on YouTube should be inspire fellow web series producers. If nothing else, it clearly demonstrates the importance of a good image to entice clicks. After all, breasts evolved for thumbnails.

The number one late summer jam amongst the cool college kids and hip young adults is Cee-Lo’s “sunny take on classic soul,” F*** You. This Fall’s top single for the prepubescent crowd is Fred Figglehorn’s family-friendly, feel-good anthem, Who’s Ready to Party? The latest single from the YouTube phenom’s upcoming studio album was released yesterday to coincide with the basic cable television premiere of his made-for-Nickelodeon movie.

So, who is ready to party? Judging by the ratings for Fred: The Movie, you are Fred. You are.

fred-the-movieThe 8PM EST showing on Saturday night turned out to be basic cable’s top TV movie in 2010 with kids 2 to 11 and 6 to 11 (which, despite being almost concentric circles in the same Venn Diagram, are apparently different advertising demos). It drew over 7.6 million total viewers, including 3.3 million kids 6 to 11; 3.1 million Tweens 9 to 14; and 4.0 million kids 2 to 11 (which, when you get rid of dupes, apparently totals 7.6 million).

The movie was conceived by Brian Robbins, directed by Clay Weiner, written by David A. Goodman, produced by Robbins and Sharla Sumpter Bridgett of Varsity Pictures and Gary Binkow and Evan Weiss of The Collective, and stars the creator of YouTube’s second most subscribed to channel of all time, Lucas Cruikshank as Fred Figglehorn. It also features “iCarly’s Jennette McCurdy as Bertha, British teen sensation Pixie Lott as Judy, WWE’s John Cena as Fred’s dad, and Siobhan Fallon as Fred’s mom.”

Here’s a brief synopsis:

The film follows Fred after he discovers his long-time crush, Judy has moved away. Fred embarks on a journey to find her, and when he does, he’s devastated that he hasn’t been invited to her party. This blow fuels a grand scheme that ultimately makes Fred cooler than his classmates could ever imagine.

Though if you prefer a complete play-by-play and/or reviews as told by enthusiastic youngins, check out drenkeeg’s run-on-sentence rundown, or watch AlexNuisance’s take (“It’s both good and crap at the same time!”), or hear andrewroxman’s balanced opinions, or check out the tens and soon-to-be hundreds of YouTube video commentaries on the film.

If you missed Fred: The Movie, you can catch it again on Friday, September 24 on Nickeledeon, or buy the DVD available October 5. After that, if you want yourself some more Cruikshank on the small screen, you’ll have to wait until 2011. Next year he’s set to start in Nickelodeon’s live-action, Mork and Mindy-esque sitcom, Marvin and Marvin.

Brightcove is an online video platform geared towards major media companies with “more than 1,800 customers in 48 countries, which operate video across nearly 10,00 websites.” Tubemogul is an “online video analytics and advertising platform that processes billions of video streams every month” from over 200,000 users. In 2008, Brightcove licensed Tubemogul’s InPlay technology to provide its customer base with a robust analytics tool. Now the two companies are collaborating to release quarterly online video research reports.

In Online Video & the Media Industry, Brightcove and Tubemogul looked at data from a cross-seciton of Brightcove’s customer base from the previous two quarters. They came away with some interesting findings.

Newspapers and Magazines are Pushing a lot of Online Video
The BP oil spill had at least two unintentional beneficiaries: YouTube’s ad network and the online video department at newspaper websites. In Q2 2010, online video streams from newspapers’ online destinations grew by more than 65 percent.

In the past quarter, newspapers and magazines have also generated a respective 2.3 billion and 1.3 billion video player loads, up over 38% from the Q2 2009.

In the View Battle of On-Site vs. Embeds, On-Site Wins
Whether it’s due to a restrictive embed culture from some major media publishers, the “premium long-form nature of their content,” or a sign that big portals are winning the online video traffic game, only 1.9% of major broadcasters’ video views occurred via embeds. Newspapers had the highest number of views via embeds at 13.6%. Magazines, music videos, radio, and pure play online media properties came somewhere in between the two.

With the exception of video coming from pure play online media properties, viewers also tend to spend less time watching embeds. Your average view time for videos from online media properties is 1:32 on-site, and 1:45 if it’s embedded. Views on major broadcasters’ destinations clock in at 3 minutes on-site, and only 1:59 off.

Facebook Refers More Video Views than Twitter
Which makes sense given Facebook has 500 million active users to Twitter’s 190+ million. Google’s still bigger than both of them, accounting for 64% of third party traffic, followed by Yahoo at 11.9%, Facebook at 4.3%, Bing at 2.6%, and Twitter at 1.2%.

All of those referrers, however, account for less than 20% of all video streams. 81.9% of video streams “were discovered via direct traffic or navigation within a publisher’s own site.”

Download the PDF of the full report here.

Today Break Media and brand partner Toyota launched Standup Stories: “My First Ride”, an original web series featuring six standup comedians who share the story of their first car experience—part of Toyota’s recent Camry and Corolla “Auto-Biography” campaign.

Takashi Murakami is Japan’s Andy Warhol. He conceptualizes popular Otaku themes as subjects for high art masterpieces, and then repurposes the motifs again for mass commercial consumption. Along with Yoshimoto Nara, Murakami helped rejuvenate contemporary Japanese art and make lonesome, anime-inspired, self-pleasuring cowboys with amazing control of their bodily fluids the Campbell’s soup cans of Japan.

He’s also one of 13 judges for YouTube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video.

Earlier this summer, in collaboration with HP and Intel, YouTube and the Guggenheim Museum asked online video auteurs to submit works of “animation, motion graphics, narrative, non-narrative, or documentary work, music videos and entirely new art forms – creations that really challenge the world’s perceptions of what’s possible with video,” in hopes of showcasing digital media as a respectable medium for high art.

YouTube announced today that YouTube Play received over 23,000 submissions from over 91 countries. The Guggenheim curatorial team narrowed those submissions down to a shortlist 125 videos long. YouTube Play’s esteemed jury will now make up to 20 selections to showcase online and at a special Guggenheim exhibit in late October.

Murakami’s excited to watch the submissions, exclaiming how YouTube incites artists with a revolutionary spirit and also terrifies them with a Katana. I’m not quite sure what that means, but I know you should be excited, too. If you head over to the YouTube Play channel, a click on any of the shortlisted videos is worth your while. Submissions range from “students, video artists, photographers, filmmakers, composers, video game programmers, an American Women’s Chess Champion, a comedy improv group, a Swedish rock band, a South African hip-hop group, an Australian electronic music producer – and a lot more.”

It’ll be interesting to see which videos make it into the museum and if YouTube Play can help shift cultural conceptions of YouTube and digital media at large. If the site and medium can be as well known for art as it is for music videos and laughing baby brothers with cannibalistic tendencies, maybe in the near future Murakami and future artists will compete for shows in cyber space instead of real estate in a museum.

WME Entertainment—you know, Endeavor’s new name after its shotgun wedding with agency with William Morris—has apparently helped score $300 million for private equity media fund for The Raine Group, in which the agency owns a sizable stake.

The one year-old Raine Group, run by former Goldman Sachs banker Joe Ravitch and former UBS partner Jeff Sine, was able to raise the private equity fund to invest in content across all sorts of media—”from content providers like global comic book brands to sports leagues to ‘really anything but not to make movies or television’, according to Nikki Finke and her venerable sources.

We’ve been saying for a while now how someone needed to raise a fund for original online content, ready to commit the kind of dollars needed to garner some blockbuster level attention. To be sure, this new Raine fund will be placing bets all over the map. But a content fund that size that doesn’t aim spend its cash on film or television, has quite the tank of gas to make moves online.