Tubefilter News

A few years ago one of the biggest web series clichés was the three-episode debut. Creators would cut three videos and trust the quality of their writing and acting would build momentum for the rest of the season.

Most of those series never made it over the hump.

Avi Glijansky did not want to be one of those people. It took him a year but his comedy series, The Further Adventures of Cupid and Eros, whose fourth episode debuted on Mingle Media’s web series portal Monday, has completed a full season.

Cupid and Eros, a buddy comedy and workplace drama about the gods of romance, started as an idea Glijansky had while in NYU film school. After graduating and doing line producing for shorts and music videos, as well as working for The Apprentice, he decided to put thought to action. The economy had gone south, and he and core group of friends had some time on their hands.

“I’m not married. I don’t have kids… This is the universe saying I’ve got to pay attention to this,” he thought at the time.

About a year ago NYU held a web series competition, his got selected, and Glijansky made three episodes. But he knew it wasn’t enough. “Everything getting picked up had a first season on its own,” Glijansky said.

Cupid and Eros focuses on the relationship between the lovelorn Cupid, still reeling from his break-up with Psyche, and his saucier, more confident partner Eros. New episodes will delve deeper into their relationship and introduce viewers to new gods, including Apollo.

Even though new episodes debut this week, Cupid and Eros’ team have been releasing content for several months. While working to get the rest of the series made, Glijansky distributed a number of video diaries from the two main characters, Josh Heine (Cupid) and Jo Bozarth (Eros). Both webisodes feature the two gods answering questions, but Cupid’s vlogs are fittingly more nervous and personal than Eros’ knowing and confident advice series.

To maximize production value, Glijansky wrote the series in three, three-episode story arcs. The episodes keep viewers in a limited number of locations but make up for it with comedic hijinks – like when Cupid enlists Eros to help him compete with a mortal for the attention of a girl at a bar.

Distribution on Mingle Media TV Network gave Cupid and Eros a web location with a curatorial voice and the potential for ad revenue. “A lot of online TV networks are not curated well,” he said. “They are a trying hard to have a very clear focus about what the brand is.”

Brian Stelter at The New York Times reported late last year online video viewers may be willing to suffer through more advertising than television network executives originally anticipated. Studies conducted by Turner Broadcasting and The CW Network found a significant increase in online video ad load doesn’t relate to much of a decrease in online video viewership.

The main takeaway from the article and reports is we should expect to see more online video ads in the future. A lot more. And we are.

According to comScore’s just-released December 2010 U.S. Online Video Rankings, Hulu delivered 1,227,929,000 video ads for the month. Everyone who watched Hulu in December also spent an average of 217.1 minutes consuming content on the site and saw approximately 47.1 video ads. That means your everyday consumer of Hulu watched one video ad every 4 minutes and 37 seconds. That’s a 15% increase in the frequency of ads served by Hulu in just three months. comScore’s October 2010 U.S. Online Video Rankings showed your everyday consumer of Hulu watched one video ad every 5 minutes and 27 seconds.

The frequency at which YouTube delivers ads is up, too.

comScore reports Google Sites delivered 223,842,000 ads in December. Your average Google Sites viewer watched 274.3 minutes of online video and was exposed to 4.8 video ads. That means your everyday consumer of YouTube watched approximately one video ad every 57 minutes and 8 seconds, which is nearly a 14% increase in the frequency of video ads served by Google in just three months. comScore’s October 2010 U.S. Online Video Rankings showed your everyday consumer of YouTube watched one video ad every 66 minutes and 14 seconds.

If Hulu and YouTube keep increasing their ad frequency at the same rate, in December 2011 you’ll be watching one Hulu ad every 2 minutes and 24 seconds and one YouTube ad every 31 minutes and 16 seconds. YouTube certainly has room to increase the rate at which they serve ads, but Hulu might be getting close to a sweet spot.

Hulu’s CEO Jason Kilar has long been a strong proponent of advertising quality over quantity (at the industry conference NewTeeVee Live he said, “When it comes to the amount of advertising, lighten up.”), and Hulu’s Ad Selector advertising unit is working to make online video advertising and more targeted, user-engaged experience. But don’t expect Kilar and his crew at Hulu not to test the boundaries of what the online video viewing masses with tolerate.

Let’s face it, vloggers are nothing special (ok, not entirely true, I have some good friends who are YouTube vloggers, this is just central to the point of this article). You can walk down the street or get on a bus and hear one or more hobos expounding their opinions on everything from politics, religion, to the impending return of their alien lord Zardox.

Videos and pictures of adorable animals on the internet is nothing new. Sites like ICanHasCheezburger depend solely on pictures of cats accompanied by relevant misspelled captions (because cats can’t spell, get it?). A large majority of Internet Memes stem from these pictures of humorously posed felines. From Longcat (right) to the ever popular Ceiling Cat, I think it’s more than safe to say… The internet is for cats.

The wait is finally over. Christopher Preksta’s noir sci-fi world that envelops The Mercury Men is now ready for prime time. In the parlor game of guessing just where the highly-anticapted web series would end up, Syfy was always high on the list. Now comes the official word out of the NBCu-owned network that it is licensing the series for exclusive distribution on its Syfy.com hub, in a similar deal to the steampunk drama Riese: Kingdom Falling.

Set in an alternate version of 1975—where aliens really do inhabit the other planets of our solar system—the 10-art series picks up with pure-light beings from the planet Mercury invading earth. The story’s reluctant protagonist Edward Borman (Mark Tierno), a government office grunt finds himself in the middle of ground zero for defending the planet. Luckily he gets some help from clean-cut action hero Jack Yaeger (Curt Wootton) who knows his way around some pretty slick looking retro-tech.

Just in time for the new episodes of The Office which begin airing this week, NBC released another companion web series The Podcast.

The series follows the character Gabe Lewis’ (Zach Woods) attempts to get his new podcast for the Sabre website off the ground. Inspired by jealousy of character Oscar Martinez’s (Oscar Nuñez)’s There’s No Accounting for Style blog, Gabe attempts to impress corporate with his initiative. Of course things go awry as he records conversations that should remain off the record.

The first three episodes have been released, chronicling the creation, recording of the first entry, and the grand debut of Gabe’s podcast. Also released was a behind the scenes clip with some of The Office cast members talking about their own interests in podcasts.

With companion blogs and web series such as Subtle Sexuality, The 3rd Floor, and Kevin’s Loan, The Office has successfully created a micro universe to satisfy

Traci Lords is an ex-porn star, (in)famous for having a prolific, underage adult film career from the ages of 15 to just before her 18 birthday, which she was somehow able to transition into a more than moderately successful legitimate acting career, thereby being one of only a handful of pornographers aside from Sasha Grey to bust “one of the oldest myths in the world.”

You can catch Lords in a variety of supporting roles and cameo appearances in R and P13-rated major motion picture releases. And now you can also watch her SFW acting abilities online.

Lords is a producer and star of The Booster Club. Production company King Rich Entertainment bills the series as a Weeds meets The Wire comedy that “takes viewers into the lives of a ring of professional booster ‘theives’ dedicated to the advancement of those addicted to the high of stealing.” Maybe the promo editor was feeling morose, but the over-exposed trailer with heavy-handed deliveries of emotional dialogue and an ominous score looks more like a Crash meets Crash for petty thieves than anything having to do with funny.

Alongside Lords stars ex-NBA player Rashad McCants, who, after a tough run in professional basketball is seeing if he can make a better career as an actor than an athlete. He plays the “bisexual leader of a high-end shoplifting ring,” and is also on board as one of the The Booster Club’s executive producers, along with Dwane Barnes and Malaku Quisada-McCray.

Relationship dramas are a tricky business. You need only go to a college film festival to see where stories of (in)fidelity can go horribly, horribly awry. Each cylinder has to fire perfectly in sync – the writing, direction and acting – just to make it worthwhile. The bear trap that is melodrama is ridiculously large, and very easy to step into.

The Untitled Fiction Project, with a tagline of “Love Bites,” tries hard to keep from crossing that line, but on occasion, does so. Mostly improvised, the writing is left up to director Alonso Mayo and his lead actor and actresses. This tactic provides a bit of Friday Night Lights‘ sense of hyper-realism, with a very Soderbergh approach to the story in question, of James and Georgia happily in love until James is forced to admit an affair, with the other woman intent on keeping him.

Justine Ezarik is an LA transplant from Pittsburgh who made a name for herself by accumulating a ridiculously long iPhone bill, being the first female lifecaster on Justin.TV, loving Apple, and having one helluva prolific online video presence.

She used to do graphic, web design, and video editing work under the banner of Tasty Blog Snack, but now she’s the entertainment personality and social media powerhouse known as iJustine. And starting Thursday, January 27 you can watch her on an entertainment platform other than the internet (and I’m not talking about those Mozy commercials).

Ezarik – with her 1,000,000+ YouTube subscribers, 1,200,000+ Twitter followers, and 430,000+ Facebook Fans in tow – is one of the latest additions to the upcoming fourth season of Spike TV’s weekly half-hour program, GTTV with Geoff Keighley.

The show is the cable television iteration of the uber-popular online destination for all things gaming, GameTrailers.com. Keighley and company report on the “fast-paced world of gaming, featuring world exclusive first looks at the hottest games of the future,” while Ezarik is on board to give the show some online cred and act as a weekly correspondent, covering the tech beat. She’ll be shooting segments from the field and in-studio on “everything from robots to tablets to 3D televisions.”

I caught up with Ezarik over the phone to find out how she got the gig, what it means for her YouTube videos, how she feels okay about wearing 3D glasses, and how much she likes Call of Duty: Black Ops.

Tubefilter: How’d Spike TV find you?
iJustine: The producer of GTTV with Geoff Keighley was looking for a host. It was the day before they really needed to find someone and they happened upon my YouTube videos. I came in for an audition and a few days later I was at CES shooting a several segments for them.

Tubefilter: What will you be covering on GTTV?
iJustine: I’m doing more tech coverage. I’ll be trying a lot of products out. Not just telling you what they are, but actually testing them out in the field.

Tubefilter: So like CNET but cooler?
iJustine:Ha! I guess you could say that.

Tubefilter: Did you see anything at CES you were super excited about?
iJustine: This year felt like it had a lot of the same things as last year, just a little bit better. There wasn’t that one, must-see product everyone was raving about. But I did like seeing all the cool cameras, TVs, gadgets and meeting really great people. Oh, and the LG 3D Cineman Display TV’s looked good. I have a Samsung 3D TV at home, but I don’t really watch the 3D that much. It kinda gives me a headache.