Tubefilter News

Last week, the New York Times reported YouTube was in talks to acquire new media studio Next New Networks (who produced two of YouTubes top 10 videos of the past year, Bed Intruder Song and the Tik Tok Ke$ha parody, Glitter Puke).

The news left at least one online video pundit scratching his head. Another played the role of super sleuth, attempting to identify suspects from Next New Neworks who could’ve leaked information to the Times. Many more tech and entertainment journalists commented on the likelihood of YouTube going through with acquisition and entering the content production game.

Over the weekend, I found some interesting (not at all substantial) evidence that (in no way, shape, or form) proves the YouTube acquisition of Next New Networks is (quite possibly, but may or may not be) imminent. All you have to do is click over to Facebook.

YouTube’s Facebook Fan Page is liked by more people than music. 25,121,787 and counting.

Out of all those millions of people with their millions of Facebook Fan pages, YouTube is only a fan of five organizations. Two are Google properties (Google and Google TV). One is a non-profit (Project for Awesome). And the two remaining are privately held content companies with large YouTube communities that also generate a good portion of their revenue from the internet’s largest video sharing site (Howcast and Next New Networks).

It’s Sunday before Christmas. Less than a week left to get your shopping done. And regardless of whether you actually celebrate retailers favorite holiday, you still no doubt will need to pick up something to remind your friends and co-workers how much you appreciate them. These will score you big points with your budding web video star friends—instead of re-gifting that Toilet Bowl Coffee Mug you got stuck with at your White Elephant party.

We started our Tubefilter Holiday Gift Guide for Web Video Junkies last year. It was quite popular and you fine readers told us you wanted to see back. So here is our 2010 version, designed to be a painless, last-minute list of gadgets and must-haves for web video creators. Bonus: they can all be ordered online in time for Xmas.

If the Most Interesting Man in the World were an anthropomorphic jalapeño dispensing advice on how to stay suave to a bowl of full of fruit and one particularly irritating piece of citrus, he would be voiced by Academy Award nominee James Caan. And that, as a matter of fact, is exactly who was cast to star in the latest installment of the uber-popular web series The Annoying Orange.

Lindsay Powers at The Hollywood Reporter broke the news the 70-year-old actor (most famous for playing a hotheaded Corleone) would voice an animated character by the name of “Jalepeno” in an episode of one of the most popular shows online. Caan is the first established actor to guest star on The Annoying Orange since the series was created by Dane Boedigheimer in October 2009.

No word on why Caan took the gig, but it may have something to do with him being the chairman of Openfilm.com. According to the about us page, Openfilm “is a technology company and online community of film lovers and filmmakers working together to change the way independent film is discovered, financed and distributed.” Certainly having Caan appear in a web series with one of the internet’s most engaged audiences (including over over 6.8 million fans on Facebook) couldn’t hurt in bringing some traffic and exposure Openfilm’s way.

Capitalizing on the hype of Disney’s relaunch of 80′s sci-fi classic Tron, Break just launched its own original parody video starring adult film star Ron Jeremy, entitled Tron: Jeremy.

The video is reminiscent of Jack Black’s parody of Lord of the Rings for the MTV Movie Awards. The spoof seamlessly inserts Jeremy into the real trailer for Tron: Legacy, the highly anticipated remake of the 1983 classic which comes out in theaters today.

Jeremy certainly has a sense of humor about himself. The vid is chock full gags alluding to Jeremy’s career as a porn star. The preview culminates in Jeremy meeting his younger self—a scene which splices actual video of Jeremy from decades ago onto a character’s body from the real trailer.

Online movie parodies, which play up on the marketing and search traffic of movie releases, have become a tradition for online producers, like Key of Awesome and theStream.tv, so much that the studios themselves

Last night, at the Big Screen Little Screen Meetup held at Digitas’ New York City HQ, Vice President of Paramount Digital Entertainment, Wendy Klenk screened a super exclusive trailer of the upcoming Ben Stiller web series, Billy Glimmer.

Ben Stiller’s been working on Billy Glimmer with writer Jason Woliner. He stars in the series as Glimmer, a Las Vegas celebrity entertainer. Glimmer is insanely popular and packs 400-seat theaters on the Vegas Strip on the regular. He does a million impersonations. Unfortunately, he does none of them very well.

Glimmer’s act is full of the celebrity impersonator must-haves (like Michael Jackson), but his specialty is finding a way to link two disparate impersonations through a common name. It’s like a live-action version of that Jeopardy category (A: This seventh President of the United States was a major figure in the abstract expressionist art movement. Q: Who is Andrew Jackson Pollock? Trebek: Correct!).

The impersonations straddle the line of so-bad-they’re-good, but what pushes them over into the realm of hysterical is the audience’s reaction. Everyone within earshot of Glimmer laughs like he exhales Nitrous Oxide. When you see them enjoying the show, it’s hard for you not to enjoy it, too.

Hulu once again destroyed the competition in video ads viewed for the month of November, leaving runner-up Tremor Media trailing 675 million views in the dust, according to data released today from the comScore Video Metrix service.

comScore’s November 2010 U.S. Online Video Rankings showed that 172 million U.S. internet users watched online video in November, and engaged in nearly 5.2 billion viewing sessions.

It was no surprise that Google Sites, driven primarily by viewers on YouTube, ranked as the top video content property by a large margin, with 145.8 million unique viewers and nearly 2 billion viewing sessions. Top ten sites in descending order were Google, Yahoo!, VEVO, AOL, Viacom Digital, Facebook, Microsoft, Fox Interactive Media, NBC Universal, and Turner Digital.

More than 5.4 billion ads were watched, with Hulu at 1.1 billion, followed by Tremor Media at 477 million, ADAP.TV at 446 million, and Microsoft at 427 million views. Video ads were defined as “streaming-video advertising only and do not include other types of video monetization, such as overlays, branded players, matching banner ads, homepage ads, etc.”

Video ads reached nearly 50 percent of the total U.S. population an average of 36.8 times during the month, with CWTV.com delivering the highest frequency after recently starting to run full ad-loads like they do on television.

Shira Lazar is no stranger to hosted online interview shows, she practically wrote the book on them with gigs at CBS News (The Tomorrow Show), Yahoo (What’s So Funny), Mahalo (This Week in YouTube) and MSN (The Tastemaker). Even with the blue-chip track record in web series, Lazar still didn’t have her own independently owned web show to call home. That is, until today.

Now the online video personality is heading to YouTube, via Next New Networks, with the launch of a bi-weekly interview show called The Partners Project that turns her camera onto the top creators of the world’s most popular online video site. The series launched today on their brand spanking new YouTube channel (partnersproject) with an interview with The Annoying Orange creator Dane Boe.

Canada’s Independent Production Fund (IPF), the funding organization that greenlit eleven new Canadian web series for $1.2M in November (including Toronto-based tween detective series Ruby Skye P.I. from Story2.OH), has renewed its web series funding program for 2011.

The IPF Board of Directors decided to extend funding for its Web Series Pilot Program, which was created to “explore this innovative, story-driven dramatic form” and its potential business models.

“The creativity of the web series format is exciting and inspiring, but there are a few mysteries yet to solve in this experimental format” noted IPF Chair, Charles Ohayon. “Time is needed to develop appropriate marketing, distribution and business models.”

Last year the IPF invested $1.2M in the production of 11 original drama series, both in English and French, with budgets ranging from $300 to $5,000 a minute. These series can be viewed at IPF’s custom web series dashboard, Wip.

The deadline for submissions for the 2011 IPF Web Series Program is March 1, 2011. A short-list of finalists will be announced March 28 and complete production applications will be due May 2. Funding decisions will be announced mid-June.