Tubefilter News

With the success of its original web series Small Business Rules, American Express OPEN has launched a new suite of web series aimed at helping small businesses: Project RE:Brand, which debuted last week on American Express’ OpenForum.com.

Michael Eisner’s new media studio, Vuguru received a chunk of change from Canadian media giant, Rogers Communications in late 2009. The deal gave Rogers a multi-year exclusive on Canadian rights to Vuguru properties on all platforms, including web, TV, and mobile. The deal gave Vuguru enough cash to make the announcement it would triple production in 2010, releasing at least 10 to 15 new web series.

Things haven’t gone quite as planned. We’re less than eight weeks out from New Years Eve 2011 and Vuguru’s released less than a handful of series. The studio debuted the third season of the teen thriller Prom Queen in Canada, shopped Pretty Tough to international markets in Cannes, and announced an international distribution deal for The Booth with Fireworks International.

So, what happened to the dozen or so other promised web series? To watch those, you’ll probably have to wait until 2011, and you’ll probably have to go to AOL.

Brian Stelter at the New York Times broke the news that Vuguru signed a deal to produce at least half a dozen scripted web series for the newly revamped online destination. No financial terms were disclosed and no word yet on the content of the productions, but expect high-quality comedies and dramas released in installments five to 20 minutes long.

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong had this to say about the partnership:

“In joining forces with Vuguru and other premier studios and production companies, AOL is uniquely able to bridge that gap by bringing top quality, original video to the millions of users who come to our site each day. The magical combination of AOL’s impressive reach with one of the most visionary content creators will help us become a market leader in this largely untapped space.”

I told you AOL was getting series about web series (a couple times now). The site is leveraging its massive traffic to drive views to a slate of fresh, original programming. Just this week, AOL launched the Next New Networks web show production, The One as part of its new lineup of daily video offerings, including celebrity messaging platform, You’ve Got and morning talk show, AOL Daybreak.

A cocktail party so crazy you have to sign a waiver just to get in?

I was intrigued. Intrigued enough to hop on the freeway a few miles up to a dark corner of North Hollywood to find the undisclosed home base of the web’s latest live-streaming reality show. Walking up to the three-story loft building it became clear this wasn’t going to be my run-of-the-mill Saturday night drinks at a friend’s place.

Before entering the ControlTV loft, I’m hustled into a back room filled with producers and burly PA types ushering me through a waiver and some ground rules. “Try to keep this PG-13,” said one of the younger producers on duty that night. “Just basically don’t drop the f-bomb too much.” She mentions the 30-second delay on the live stream they’ve set up just in case we get out of hand.

And we head in to the loft, the super-wired 24/7 live set that the web’s Truman Show guinea pig Tristan Couvares has called home for the past five weeks. Walking into this party I can already sense the air in the room isn’t quite normal. The twenty or so guests already there stop as we enter for host Tristan to welcome me and and offer a beer. He did after all, have an etiquette coach consult him earlier that day.

Right away I notice more than half the cast of the WB’s first web series, Sorority Forever—Taryn Southern, Katy Stoll, Annemarie Pazmino and Mikaela Hoover. I also spot Brett Register, Ask a Ninja’s Kent Nichols, The Bannen Way director Jesse Warren, After Judgment’s Taryn O’Neill and Stephanie Thorpe, Compulsions‘ creator Bernie Su, Squatters‘ Cooper Harris, OzGirl’s Shanrah Wakefield and Black Box TV’s Tony Valenzuela.

Rani Aliahmad and Rob Shalhoub formed Trend Media in June 2009. The pair of entertainment industry professionals launched the production company with the familiar plan “to create high-quality content for new media audiences on a cost-effective basis by leveraging key industry relationships and resources.”

Trend Media’s first and only completed production to date was greenlit in February 2010. It’s a workplace comedy that centers on the awkward airport hijinks of a team of Transport Security Administration Agents. It’s called Homeland Insecurity. The punny tagline describes the program as, “A comedy series about airport security workers with tons of baggage.” Deadline reports CBS just picked it up.

Sony TV is slated to produce the TV adaptation, with Josh Greenbaum and Ben McMillan on board to continue writing the series.

Homeland Security was shot on a $70,000 budget. Alaiahmad and Shaloub hoped to turn a profit with the show on the web, but only as a backup plan. Here’s how they explained their production and pitch process to Nellie Andreeva at Deadline:

“We thought the best way was to develop projects that are meant for television, scale down the production and shoot a short-form presentation. It’s nice to get (the presentation) in front of TV executives instead of asking them to envision what the project is about…If a show doesn’t scale back to television, we can always try to recoup our investment through new media distribution.”

Trend Media has at least two other projects in the works aside from Homeland Insecurity, including another comedy and a sci-fi drama. If any of them are as good as TSA Gangstaz, I’ll be watching.

When NBC told Conan O’Brien he would no longer host the Tonight Show, the network didn’t fire him so much as give the comedian $40 million to leave the confines of beautiful downtown Burbank to go on tour, discover Twitter, sign a deal with TBS for his own brand new late night show, and develop a fantastic internet presence. (It’s so good TBS doesn’t even have its own site for the show. Instead, the link on TBS.com redirects to TeamCoco.com.)

Conan and Company have used that fantastic internet presence to make as many people as possible shiver with anticipation for the Monday, November 8 11PM EST premiere of Conan. First, there was the 24 hours of live programming streamed straight to YouTube from the Team Coco stairwell. Roughly 660,000 people tuned in over the course of the day’s worth of programming.

Next came Show Zero. It was the Diet Coke-sponsored premiere of Conan before the actual premiere. A streamlined version of the show made especially for the fast-paced internet age, complete with semi-forced product placement (to the tune of a reported $200,000).

So, how did Conan do in terms of audience on his show before his first show? Numbers from YouTube tell us Show Zero had 33,825 total live streams over it’s 4:51 runtime. And you can top that off with 3,990 Twitter comments. The video’s also up to 380,000+ on-demand views on YouTube. Not too shabby, especially given Team Coco announced Show Zero only four days in advance of the live stream.

But are those numbers great? I’m not sure. Live streaming on YouTube is a relatively new phenomena with no known benchmarks to help determine success, especially when it comes to short-form content. Do 33,825 total streams over the course of a five-minute video seem like decent numbers to you?

In the end, I’m not sure if it matters. Team Coco is more concerned with the numbers for TBS’ Conan. Once those come in, we’ll be able to tell what kind of impact a chunk of $40 million and nine months worth of internet shenanigans has on TV ratings.

AOL—who recently announced a partnership with Ben Silverman’s digital studio Electus and Next New Networks to produce original online programming as a part of a brand new AOL.com—debuted today The ONE, an original daily video program created in partnership with Next New that is intended to be AOL’s “signature franchise.”

Real estate agents. They are that unusual kind of breed that can powder up words so cleverly that a three-walled flat in Al Sadr is ‘charmingly rustic’. The hypocrisy of that business is so ripe for comedic exploration.

Enter Beverly Hills Adjacent, a new animated pilot from creator Jon Dabach, taking place in an upstart Los Angeles real estate agency run by ’seemingly racist’ owner—who’s kidding who, this guy is deplorably offensive. The show’s setup is somewhere between the well worn Office mockumentary and American Dad’s ultranationalist satire.

The entire YouTube home page used to be curated.

Felicia Williams, or whoever had the position of Features Editor, would sift through hundreds of thousands of YouTube uploads and keep up to speed with some of the site’s most popular and up-and-coming content creators. Every day, she’d make 10 or 20 some video selections to occupy a slice of much-valued real estate on YouTube.com. A feature on the homepage was worth tens of thousands of subscribers, hundreds of thousands of views, and marked an inflection point in many a videomakers’ careers. It heralded the start of their success.

That was before the Viacom vs. YouTube lawsuit.

Let’s say you’re an online video destination being sued for $1 billion by an international multimedia conglomerate who’s alleging you aren’t properly vetting content uploaded to your site for acts of copyright infringement. And let’s say your defense is you abide by DMCA take down policies. If you also plead you have no capabilities to monitor all the content on your site for potential acts of copyright infringement, then it’s probably not a good idea to employ individuals to monitor all the content on your site, even if it’s just to search for videos that are awesome.

Google also didn’t like the curated YouTube homepage for another reason. It’s run by humans, not computers. The $200+ billion company that acquired YouTube makes its money based on complicated search and advertising algorithms, not editorial decisions made by individuals. Human curation certainly has its place in the world, just not in the world of Google.

But now YouTube’s implemented a kind of monthly contest with the intent to bring some of its kingmaker, curation status back to the homepage and jumpstart the careers of online video’s rising stars.

On the Rise is a monthly YouTube initiative which selects a handful of YouTubers “whose susbcriber rate has quickly accelerated in the last 30 days, but who still have less than 100,000 subscribers.” YouTube then lets the community vote on one channel to be featured on its homepage and get promoted through the video-sharing site’s social media outlets. The idea is views, subscribers, and online video financial self-sufficiency will follow.

Who’s the first On the Rise Spotlight winner? With 57% of the 42,385 total votes, Emilynoel83. She’s a 26-year-old cosmetics guru whose Beauty Brodcast program “isn’t just about makeup….but also positivity, fun, and inner beauty.”

Check out Emily’s look good and feel good beauty vids and stay tuned each month to find out which YouTubers are On the Rise.