Tubefilter News

14 years ago, seven-year-old Brandon Kuzma unwrapped a Nintendo 64 on Christmas morning. His parents videotaped the occasion. The amount of raw, enthusiastic, prepubescent joy Brandon elicited as he tore away the wrapping paper is both inspiring and terrifying. It makes you wish you liked anything as much as Brandon likes his Nintendo 64. At least BMW felt that way.

The German luxury and performance vehicle manufacturer purchased the rights to Brandon’s video for somewhere around $50,000 and featured clips in its broadcast commercials. Ebay should send Brandon some royalty cash, too.

A new holiday marketing initiative from the online auction and shopping website recently launched. Dubbed Love to Give, it’s a social media campaign that centers around the cultural phenomenon of kids getting way too excited about opening Christmas presents. Stuart Elliott at the New York Times estimates the budget for Love to Give between $15 to $18 million, divided between online ads, social media applications, and a web series targeting “40-year-old Ebay enthusiasts.”

The Daily Show’s Samantha Bee is the star of Unwrap Attack, a six-part weekly web series at the heart of Ebay’s Love to Give campaign. In each installment, Bee showcases freakouts submitted from Ebay users. It’s like a specialized holiday segment of America’s Funniest Home Videos, except the host is way better than Tom Bergeron.

The show’s a great idea. What parent, after seeing other people’s children open a gift and shake with frenetic delight, wouldn’t want to patronize whatever merchant delivered that message? Plus, and here’s the genius part, when your children reach adolescence and become more interested in sexting than Barbies and video games, you can use eBay to sell the old present, pass the spirit of Unwrap Attack forward, and maybe even turn a profit.

The Boxee Box is finally here, and with it already tops on our list of sexiest set-top boxes, we just had to get down and dirty with this chopped-corner design win. This is one of those Thank God For Revision3 Fridays, and their pseudo-steamy new series Unboxing Porn which takes the art of unboxing to a comical-but-still-informative level.

The Boxee Box is now shipping in 33 countries, even though it’s still without Netflix and Hulu Plus for the time being. But for internet video fans, it is loaded with hundreds of channels that Boxee diehards have been using on their computers for over a year. Plus, it comes with a dcent HDMI cable, making its $199 price tag not so bad considering what those cost at Best Buy.

Acting is hard work, but that’s why individuals respond so positively to acting done well, which is why you as an individual should watch Episode 56 of Web Therapy.

The installment of the popular internet and Showtime series from Lisa Kudrow and Lexus’ LStudio guest stars Meryl Streep as “renowned sexual orientation therapist Camilla Bowner.” She’s screencast alongside Kudrow’s Fiona Wallace, a passive aggressive psychotherapist who’s iChat savvy and insists all her abbreviated sessions take place over the web (hence the series’ name). In fifteen minutes of loosely scripted, improvised dialogue we find out Wallace’s husband is in the sexual rehabilitation care of Bowner, who informs Wallace, in sweet, yet not at all emphatic tones, her marriage is doomed.

It’s not amazing, but it’s really good. A big part of that is it’s great to see one of the world’s most respected, celebrated, and talented actors step into a role outside of the confines of a major motion picture or television show to experiment and have fun with a character. You can tell Streep is enjoying her time on the web with Bowner, and you can’t help but enjoy it, too.

There is something about Shaquille O’Neal that makes him so charming on camera. What is it? What reduces this formidable 7’1″, 325 lb giant into such a huggable teddy bear? Well, whatever it is, it is in full effect in the first episode of Double Take, a new series from sports performance technology manufacturer Power Balance.

To follow up the popular Tubefilter Pitch Camp at the Digital Hollywood Content Summit, we took the show on the road to the East Coast. Yesterday, at Digital Hollywood NYC, three independent content creators brought their best five-minute dog and pony show to a panel of established industry professionals who are in the business of buying and selling quality online entertainment every day.

David Armour (Vice President, Development, Programming & Sales, Digital Media – Endemol USA), Wilson Cleveland (SVP, Producer – CJP Digital Media), Paul Kontonis (VP, Group Director, Brand Content – The Third Act, Digitas), and Ryan Noggle (Supervising Producer – NBC Universal Digital Studio) evaluated pitches over four basic criteria:

Originality — let’s not rehash failed TV pilots, but instead let’s see something new. Originality is always a good thing.
Marketing Plan — make sure to think about not only the concept, but how you plan on reaching your audience.
Use of the Internet as a medium — Think about why your project is made for the web. If it’s multi-platform, think about how to harness the internet’s unique strengths.
Fit for Brands — Think about content that’s fit for major brands to come on board to support.
Leila Cohan-Miccio and Caitlin Tegart presented the hipster third wave, feminist web series Vag Magazine. Patrick Lawson and Christopher Born from Too Smart Guys showed the technophile favorite Beyond the Clipping Plane. And Christina Esther pitched the real-life stories of femtrepreneurs in NYC, The Lights.
If you could distill all the great feedback and perspective from the Pitch Camp into one specific takeaway that will be sure to help you succeed in selling your web series to distributors, ad agencies, viewers, and any other potential partners, it would be this: Have a fantastic one sentence pitch.

All the panelists noted how it’s one of the most important and overlooked components of a presentation. The ability to boil complex ideas or proposals down to a simple synopsis of few words or a sexy logline is an absolutely necessary skill. The people making the decisions on whether or not to put dollars behind your project look at tens and even hundreds of pitches a week. You need to make sure you have a descriptive line that can quickly and easily get their attention.

Be on the lookout for Tubefilter’s next Pitch Camp and many thanks to all the panelists, presenters, and especially the good people at the Digital Hollywood Content Summit.

Being invited into the private home of major museum directors or interviewing Sean Lennon and his new bride Newlyweds Show style, make the stories on NOWNESS both unique and often arrestingly beautiful. The people who run NOWNESS carefully curated daily features including original videos, stories, and galleries of images sharing inspirational work. Made by filmmakers around the world, original videos on NOWNESS offer a peek into amazing spaces, insights from creative innovators, and unique finds by their contributors.

While technically this isn’t a second season order just yet, Syfy is already ordering up five new episodes of Riese: Kingdom Falling to continue its run as the flagship web series on Syfy.com. The new episodes, which had already been in the works, begin releasing today with the “Prey” (above) that mark the first time fans (in the US at least) will get to see the second half of the opening season that first popped up a year ago before signing its current deal.

Since its debut October 26th on SyFy.com, the Streamy Award winning series has been a winner for the cable network’s online hub.

“We’ve had a surge of new fans, due to Syfy’s involvement,” co-creator Ryan Copple tells us. “Riese really is the best home for it. Overall, everyone’s really loving the story and the changes we made with Syfy. The quickened pace and added narrator (Amanda Tapping) really moves the story along and instills so much drive into Riese herself. The only complaints we’ve had are for longer episodes!”

When it stepped onto the scene back in September, we could tell this little web series was a scrapper. White Collar Brawler had heart.

Here was a docu-web series set in real time, or as close as it can be without live streaming, of two actual office jockeys—Kai Hasson and Nate Houghteling—who ditched their cubicles to train to become serious amateur boxers. And they were starting from scratch. Twice a week (Tuesdays and Fridays) new episodes are released showing the weight loss, the pain and the inescapable musical training montages.

What really stepped things up for the Bay Area web series was the ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ homage video that became the Giants’ fans World Series anthem last month. The video is at nearly 2 million views, and won the hearts of a city still basking in the glow of a championship.