Tubefilter News

Current TV announced today that it is working with Will Wright, the world-renowned video game designer behind SimCity and The Sims (one of the most successful gaming franchised of all time), to produce an interactive web series that will give audiences the ability to create and control the storyline and plot development. Bar Karma, which the series is tentatively entitled, will be created at “Current TV’s Creation Studios,” a virtual television studio where users will participate in the development of creative and technical aspects of production, and will communicate directly with the show’s producers. The series is built upon technology that Wright gas developed exclusively for Current TV.

The last installment of College Humor’s Street Fighter: The Later Years hit the web in February 2008. Since then, the IAC-owned destination for college coeds and veritable online video hit factory has been a bit bearish on episodic programming. Yes, the site is home to a handful of web series (including the buddy comedy Jake and Amir, the workplace comedy Hardly Working, and the video game talk show Bleep Bloop), but it’s been far more focused on producing viral hits (which it’s very, very good at). Until now.

In a recent conversation with Mike Shields at MediaWeek, College Humor co-founder and CEO, Ricky Van Veen explained how he’s now more bullish on the idea of web series. Veen told Shields his College Humor team is “trying to shift from one-off viral videos to a full slate of shows,” and he’s using the online video star power of his in-house cast and crew to make it happen. “Now we’ve got a regular cast [of performers] with a following,” Veen said. “And we’re trying to be less of a site and more of a network.”

So, how does being less of a site and more of a network manifest itself on CollegeHumor.com? With the release of three new original web series. Here they are:

Full Benefits

Starring Sarah Schneider, David Siegel and the rest of the College Humor crew, Full Benefits plays like a version of Hardly Working with at least some semblance of a firm footing in reality. The 5-episode web series explores the awkward aftermath of coitus between co-workers and how-to (and how-not-to) play it cool.

Hello My Name Is

In addition having one helluva Seymour Hoffman, talented improver Josh Ruben has thousands of other characters in his repertoire. In this series, he gets to show them off. In every installment, a new makeup artist goest to town on Reuben. Once all the wigs, foundation, and mascara have been applied, Rueben gets to see what he looks like and creates a character based on his appearance. Pat Cassel then interviews him/her/it. Comedy ensues.

Very Mary-Kate

Elaine Carrol stars as a dramatic, scoliotic caricature of everybody’s favorite Olson twin in Very Mary-Kate. The series debuted over nine months ago on Vimeo and Carrol’s released at least 19 installments since then, with most receiving a very respectable 70,000+ views on Vimeo alone. Expect to add another zero to those view counts starting October 12. That’s when new episodes of Very Mary-Kate will premiere on College Humor proper.

Ford has teamed up with Hulu and the creators of The Amazing Race to launch a new reality web series to promote the new 2012 Ford Focus. Focus Rally: America, produced by Betram van Munster and Elise Doganieri of The Amazing Race, will follow six teams of two competitors as they race across the country completing challenges. The series is in the midst of casting with a production start date scheduled in February.

Isaiah Mustafa is an online video star. There’s a lot of backslapping and high-fives for the creatives behind this summer’s Old Spice Man online video campaign, especially at Wieden+Kennedy, which was the lead creatives behind the year’s biggest branded web video success. And rightfully so.

By all accounts, the Old Spice Man video series was a runaway success. On YouTube, Old Spice’s channel is both the #1 most subscribed and most viewed amongst sponsors with over 150 million views to date. That, and a sizable 106% bump in sales of Old Spice body wash for the four weeks after the campaign began.

Fast forward to the fall and every marketer around is trying to reverse engineer the campaign to isolate just what created that perfect storm of virality, levity and sex appeal. The latest is European telecom giant Orange which just launched its “Singing Tweetagrams” campaign in the UK.

American’s dairy farmers are getting into the web series fray.

The cheeseheads at Wisconsin’s Milk Marketing Board have commissioned Iron Chef and restaurateur, Michael Symon to host and star in an online original series expounding the delicious benefits of cooking with curded milk products straight from the Live Like You Mean It state.

Wisconsin Cheese Presents Favorite Foods with Chef Michael Symon debuted on September 7 and will conclude its 12-episode run on November 29. Every Monday, Symon shows viewers how to prepare a quick and easy meal where Wisconsin cheese plays a key role in the dish’s flavor profile. Conceived by Shine Advertising, the series is an integral part of a larger digital initiative, which includes “content on eatwisconsincheese.com, a blog, apps for the iPhone, a presence on Facebook and microsites devoted to cheese dishes like cheeseburgers and grilled cheese sandwiches as well as helping consumers pair cheeses with drinks like wine, beer, Champagne and brandy.”

Stuart Elliot at the New York Times asked Shine principal and account director, Curt Hanke why the agency chose to make a web series a major component of the marketing initiative. Hanke’s response? It reflects that, “people go more and more online for cooking videos and how-to videos.”

Tomorrow, at 8:00 am PT, 25 year old Tristan Couvares will be doing something crazy: he’s handing over his life to you. ControlTV, a new online reality series from Robot Chicken creator Seth Green, is a 24-hour nonstop experiment over the next six weeks during which viewers will make the daily decisions of Tristan’s life.

Dr. Blake Downs will walk through halls of Dr. Arthur Childrens’ hospital, embodying a bizarro Hippocratic oath and dispensing his special kind of Patch Adams health care, for at least 14 more episodes. Cartoon Network has renewed Childrens’ Hospital for a third season.

Created by Rob Corddry and starring a bevy of Hollywood hotshots (including former Will and Grace star Megan Mullally, Boston Legal’s Lake Bell, Ken Marino, The Office’s Ed Helms, SNL’s Jason Sudeikis, Rob Huebel from Human Giant, Malin Akerman, Henry Winkler, John Cho, and Kurtwood Smith), Childrens’ Hospital originally aired in December 2008 as a web series on TheWB.com. After a strong internet performance, Mike Lazzo, Adult Swim’s senior vice-president of programming and production, caught wind of the series. He liked what he saw. In July 2010, Childrens’ Hospital aired as part of Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim line-up.

For the first cable television season, Corddry and crew compiled Childrens Hospital’s original web run into a series of 15-minute installments. When those performed well on their new medium, Cartoon Network ordered a second season, which is currently running until November. And with ratings up double digits in some demos (and triple digits in others!), the network is planning a third season set to air in the second quarter of 2011.

Childrens Hospital isn’t the first web series to make the jump to TV, but it’s arguably the web series that’s had the most television success. The College Humor Show was picked up by MTV and not renewed after its six episode run in 2009. In the MotherHood went from MSN to ABC and was cancelled after a four month run on the broadcast network. The only web show that’s now a TV show that comes close to Childrens Hospital’s success is Sanctuary. Syfy picked up the independently produced web show in October 2008 and is currently airing its third season.

View counts in online video are still suspect, plagued with all kinds of accusations about view buying, autoplay, gaming the system, you name it. So when it comes to not so easy task of measuring just how to measure how popular a web series really is—especially if you’re an advertiser looking to reach an increasingly fragmented online audience—it all comes down to engagement.

Buzzwords like ‘engagement’ are of course as rampant and overused as they come these days, with few web series actually able to demonstrate just how directly connected they are to their audiences. Dane Boedigheimer and his wildly popular series The Annoying Orange just might have the most engaged fans of any show online.

With 286 million views and counting, and the 11th most subscribed YouTube channel at 1.25 million, it’s already head-turning how fast Orange has shot into the elite web series of all time. The channel started on YouTube less than a year ago—January 11, 2010—which also takes top honors for the fastest growing of all time as well.