Tubefilter News

One good thing about the relative infancy of the web series world is that we haven’t experienced a great deal of personal loss yet. Sadly, today we received news that Chane’t Johnson, the star and creator of indie comedy series Nurses Who Kill passed away last Thursday of a heart attack.

Johnson, 34, was a regular at our Tubefilter Meetups here in Los Angeles, and was a delight to have met and watch her perform. A memorial service will be held Saturday, December 11, 2010 at 1:00PM at Winston Funeral Home in Los Angeles. The family asks that donations be made to the American Red Cross in her name.

At conferences I tend to sound like a broken record sometimes when I preach about how if you really want to understand the business of online video series, you have to completely rethink the very idea of what is a ‘network.’ There isn’t a lack of online networks at all, in fact the internet is flourishing with hubs that draw a sizable, focused, and in some cases, affluent audience on a daily basis. Those are the targets I would go after if I was launching a web series today.

So if it’s a fashion interview series, high on the list would be Gilt.com, a daily obsession for some of the hipper webizens—just over a million of them a month—that curates designer fashions with limited 36-hour sales that almost always sell out.

Naturally, there was no shortage of web series being pitched at the popular fashion e-tailer over the past year, all jockeying for that high-value audience. But brand-conscious Gilt Groupe was, expectedly, shy to commit to any unproven web series. That was until hud:sun media teamed up with fashion trailblazer Stefani Greenfield, who founded the trendy NYC boutique Scoop, for a half-hour fashion interview series.

Imagine if the evening news had an affair with a 90’s MTV show. The resulting love child would look a lot like Breakfast Burrito News. The series is a fast-paced news show specifically tailored to the YouTube generation. Each week creators Lauren Mayhew and Cameron Goodman along with a rotating cast of correspondents highlight the most talked about or most peculiar stories of the week. Featuring segments such as the “Bikini News Flash” and Percy Rusty’s “One Minute Movie Review,” Breakfast Burrito covers items of interest at a frenetic pace with an irreverent twist.

2010 Streamy Award-nominated news show the Young Turks is heading to Revision3. The world’s largest source of online news, The Young Turks is one of the most popular channels on YouTube with nearly 350 million views to date. The series will join Revision3′s line-up of more than 20 programs currently distributed on the network.

Hard to believe it’s already been a year since Bernie Su’s twisted character drama Compulsions bowed online. The 8-episode series, which bowed in time to qualify for awards season, netted four Streamy Award nominations and Su took home the Streamy for Best Writing.

Now as the final month of 2010 is upon us, another dark indie drama is set to walk on the web stage this month. Asylum, from creator Dan Williams and director Scott Brown (Blue Movies) has already turned heads with its trailer (below) that made it an official selection at this fall’s New York Television Festival (NYTVF) and the Anaheim International Film Festival (AIFF).

It’s always good to see a web series return for its second season, especially an independent web series. So we were thrilled to hear that eScape, the teen oriented sci-fi conspiracy thriller that launched this past summer, has returned with a new season of adventure.

Alloy Digital, a division of Alloy Media + Marketing, announced the newly redesigned Teen.com, which includes new web series featuring Glee star Charice Pempengco and platinum recording artist David Archuleta (among others), along with a new look, enhanced social applications, and expanded editorial features.

In the web series world, shows written by and starring black people are a rare but growing segment of the market. Within the sub-genre, there are surprising number of shows starring black women, a real divergence from television and film. The most well-known, Buppies, did some decent business for both BET and its sponsor CoverGirl, and a number of series in a variety of genres have attracted smaller audiences including Chick, Blue Belle, Kindred, Whoopi Goldberg’s Stream and Robert Townsend’s popular Diary of a Single Mom which just entered its third season on Pic.TV.

Debuting on Koldcast this summer and now finishing up its run, Celeste Bright, from TV writer Sonya Steele, furthers this mission of giving better roles and more complexity to black women on screen.

Celeste Bright follows the story of a banker of the same name, who becomes embroiled in a financial scandal involving millions of dollars from Wall Street. Starring Ryan Michelle Bathe, a friend of Steel and veteran of Trauma, Brothers & Sisters and numerous other series, the show makes us skeptical of our otherwise sympathetic lead. How aware is Celeste of the scandals surrounding her?