Tubefilter News

I told you AOL was going to get serious about web series. Mike Shields at Mediaweek reports the global internet services and media company is launching three new, daily original programs starting Monday, November 1. Those include:

You’ve Got
A play on AOL’s contribution to modern America’s lexicon of slogans that features a 45-second monologue “conducted by various celebrities and average citizens,” including Kelly Ripa, Elmo, and Jon Stewart’s most famous Daily Show guest, President Barack Obama.

AOL Daybreak
Wallstrip and Moblogic alum (and new mom!) Lindsay Campbell plays host on this morning talk show. Electus, Ben Silverman’s next generation studio, will produce the series, which Shields writes AOL execs describe as “like morning radio on the Internet.”

The One
Next New Networks will produce this series, set to air in the afternoons and feature “celebrities, comedians, and AOL staffers discussing the biggest story of the day in two-minute sessions.”

All three series will debut on a brand new AOL.com. AOL will highlight the series on the homepage and leverage its 104 million monthly unique visitors to ensure the programs get good views.

It’s about time. I’ve long wondered why the internet’s top destinations (mainly AOL and Yahoo) haven’t used their massive traffic to promote their own programming in meaningful ways. I suppose at any corporation the size of AOL, that type of shift in strategy could only come from someone in a position on one of the higher executive echelons. Basically, it took bringing on David Eun to effect change.

Ever since David Eun took over as president of AOL’s media and studios division, the company’s undergone major overhauls. Eun’s overseen a reorganization of AOL’s properties into 17 advertiser-friendly verticals and is scaling up original content production.

What does this all mean for AOL web series? You should still expect to see more announcements like this one.

KATR Pictures, the independent web series production company behind Life From The Inside, debuted its latest comedy web series Vampire Zombie Werewolf this past Tuesday.

Let’s say you’re Mattel, guardian of many of the world’s pop culture icons like, say, the 51 year-old multi-billion-dollar franchise that is Barbie. Generations of young girls (and boys) grew up clamoring for the latest Barbie and Ken dolls to play with—(or cut off their hair). But now a new generation of children are growing up with parents of the internet generation, complete with countless other sorts of games and diversions that Barbie and friends didn’t have to compete with a few decades back.

The challenge for Mattel then, is how do you keep the Barbie brand relevant? And, in this case, how do you reintroduce her somewhat forgotten counterpart Ken into the mix?

We caught wind of this series back in Sepetember when the Genuine Ken microsite first went up. Even then it was obvious that something big was afoot with a casting call for would-be contestants on a new 8-episode online reality show, Genuine Ken: The Search for the Great American Boyfriend. The kicker, each episode is a full 22-minutes—the same length as a half-hour TV show.

By now you’ve surely seen the videos: two avatars arguing in a robotic monotone about such random topics as who’s the biggest diva, who’s got the best phone, and why you shouldn’t go to law school.

The videos all come from Xtranormal, a text-to-video site that started to gain traction over the summer. With offices in San Francisco and Montreal, Xtranormal is a lean operation with a lot of ambitions. Right now it exists mainly as a web app for making comedic videos cheap and fast, but it has plans to upgrade its offerings and make its platform much more social, collaborative and current.

“It’s kind of cool to see our vision being realized,” chief technology officer Sylvio Drouin told me. “I’ve been working on it for a year.”

Xtranormal began as a program for movie directors to film scenes on a computer without having to stage them. About one year ago it decided the market had hit a ceiling and decided to unleash its technology on the general public. The result was its web-based application, which allows users to type out scripts, add camera angles, expressions and characters to create a short film in minutes. Directors can also download a more sophisticated application for more customizability.

This summer when the iPhone vs. HTC Evo video went viral on YouTube, Xtranormal’s traffic shot up. So far 9.4 million projects have been started, 5,000 new ones every day. The site has been adding more characters – public figures like Sarah Palin, Larry King, office workers, athletes and others – with growing degrees of sophistication. Xtranormal makes money by selling the more special characters along with interesting features.

Xtranormal has proven fairly versatile, especially given its simplicity and the limited choices writers have for their videos. But Xtranormal is aware of those limitations and plans to add more actions for characters and more customizable options, like the ability to add your own images and use your own voice, functions already available through slightly less popular desktop app. “You’re going to have all sorts of behavior that’s going to be even more funny to watch,” said Drouin, but added the site has to upgrade its infrastructure to handle the demand.

New features could be useful for web series creators, allowing them to create cheap videos without the need for a crew, actors, or video game engines. Already a few web series have used it, including Koldcast’s Super Jerks and an earlier series from last year called Howard and Leslie. And it has even hit television, through a characteristically tongue-in-cheek spot for Geico.

Xtranormal has bigger plans, hoping to go social and allow groups of people to direct movies across great distances: writing the script like a Twitter feed and dividing production and editing responsibilities. Users will be able to embed the movie maker into various websites alongside Xtranormal’s growing store for characters.

“Everything is being transformed into a game,” said Drouin, citing Zynga’s FarmVille and Mafia Wars as inspiration. “Everything is being socialized.”

Some of the site’s more ambitious initiatives include getting writers to create story templates for users with writer’s block or limited screenwriting experience, and collaborating with journalists to embed Xtranormal on news sites. The idea is to give users a chance to engage in social and political commentary, perhaps creating something like those popular current affairs cartoons from Next Media Animation or those amazing Taiwanese current events animations.

“We’ve been talking about taking this away from the animation world and transforming this into what we call ‘social storytelling.’ We want to go where people write stories together,” Drouin said.

China’s most popular video sharing site, Tudou—like so many Chinese internet services—has modeled itself after its Western counterpart. Yet unlike YouTube, which mainly distributes user-generated or licensed content, Tudou is in the business of creating its own premium content for distribution, and it is having enormous success.

The first episode of Conan won’t officially premiere on TBS until Monday, November 8. But that’s not stopping Team Coco and company from releasing an episode before then.

According to Conan’s official website, a special pre-premiere episode dubbed Show Zero will stream live on the internet on Monday, November 1 at 8PM PST / 11PM EST. Team Coco blogger, Aaron Bleyaert is scant on the details (he wants it to be a surprise!), but promises the event will star Conan O’Brien, Andy Richter, and super special guests, with Diet Coke on board as the sponsor.

Conan’s 24-hour live stream event earlier this month drew over 660,000 viewers. Highlights included dancing tacos, 80’s bear aerobics, zombie attacks, and the revelation of Conan’s first guests.

Catch Show Zero on Monday at any one of the following three online outlets: TeamCoco.co, YouTube.com/TeamCoco, and Facebook.com/TEAMCOCO.

Book publishers were among the first groups of industry professionals using web series to market their products. Way back in 2008, Michael Eisner’s new media studio, Vuguru launched Foreign Body to promote Robin Cook’s organ trafficking thriller novel of the same name. In the same year, members of Hollywood royalty and Macmillan Publishing released a four-part sparkly, self-indulgent program directed by McG showing off the glitz of the movie biz in preparation for the release of Celebutantes.

Now DVD publishers are shooting web series in hopes of helping sales.

Warner Brothers Entertainment teamed up with digital production and distribution house DBG on an online series to advertise the DVD release of Sex and the City 2. Although the fab foursome from the upper echelons of a fictitious Manhattan social scene where ladies possess “the irrational and desperate belief that a man will somehow ‘fix’ things” haven’t been relevant for the better part of this decade, the producers of the show were able to find four whitewashed ladies with no discernible sense of shame to answer the question “Which Sex and the City character are you?” The women received makeovers from hair stylist David Lopez, makeup artist Jennifer Flemming and stylist Jorge Ramon based on their answers.

There’s an installment based on Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda. My favorite is the Samantha one, because you know what that girl’s really thinking about. Am I right, guys?

The wait is over. Season 2 of The LXD premiered today on Hulu with the two new episodes taking us into the secret training academy of LXD warriors. “Secrets of the Ra” picks up where the opening season left off as the handpicked new recruits arrive together at the mysterious private school with a hidden East Wing.

I’m not going to beat around the bush here, this web series has me hooked. (And I’m not the only one.) The two new 11-minute episodes breezed by, with only a few pre and mid-roll ads breaking up the jaw-dropping drama. If anything I’d say it’s teasing us, building slowly to a face-off between the young trainees and the dark arts of their rival Organization X, or OX for short. We find out the trigger for the forthcoming battle, a kidnapping of one of the instructor’s wives, meaning these newbies are about to get fast-tracked.