Tubefilter News

So you weren’t able to score a ticket to our Hollywood Web Television Meetup before they sold out, but you still want to catch all the knowledge dropped by our talented panel of online video professionals seasoned in the arts of all things YouTube to the tune of over 912,000,000 collective views?

No worries. We’re streaming live.

Our good friends at Stickam are helping us bring tonight’s scheduled programming of You’re a Youtube Partner – Now What? to the comfortable confines of your computer screens at home. Watch our very own March Hustvedt entice Ben Relles of Next New Networks, Rafi Fine of TheFineBros, George Strompolos of Fullscreen, and Jason Schnell of Reckless Tortuga to bare their tricks of the trade and share how they’ve been so successful at the largest video sharing site on the web.

If you’re watching from home and have any questions for the panelists, be sure to shout them out on Twitter to @Tubefilter and we’ll do our best to get them answered.

Revision3 – the internet television network built on the popularity of uber-geeks with guy-next-door dispositions and auras of cool irresistible to dudes with inclinations towards things tech – is booming.

In 2010, viewership across the Rev3 network increased by 165%, the company broke into the black by Q4 (in large part due to landing a handful of Fortune 500 advertisers, including Verizon, Ford, HP, EA, Sony, and Old Spice), boasted 56% of viewers bought a product or service from one of its sponsors, upped its programming slate with 10 new shows, and brought on Mark Cuban as an advisor and investor.

Today, Revision3 leveraged its successes from last year to elevate its game again and add IGN President Roy Bahat to the board. If you don’t know Bahat, you should. He’s in possesion of a great pedigree. Before taking on presidential duties at IGN Entertainment, Bahat was on News Corp’s business development team in New York and held various positions in Office of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

I first fell in like with Reckless Tortuga after watching Psycho Girlfriend.

Lindsey Reckis plays the role of highly insecure, emotionally erratic significant other to Tommy Savas’ comforting chill dude demeanor. She takes his innocuous asides to hyperbolic proportions, asks leading questions, and sets him up for failure in a way that varies from a touch to a helluva lot more absurd than our real-life interactions with a few choice ex-loved ones.

In addition to telling tales of how crazy the ladies can be (amiright, fellas?!), Reckless Tortuga takes on obsessive gamers, killing zombies, dysfunctional theater groups, ghosthunters with attitudes, mail-order brides, douchebags you work with, and inane PSAs in a handful of web series that never fail to entertain.

What started as a Let’s-throw-this-video-up-on-YouTube lark for Reckis and her Reckless companions, Eric Pumphrey and Jason Schnell, has turned into a sustainable business of making a living by making funny moving pictures and posting them online.

Reckless broke into YouTube’s Top 100 Most Subscribed All Time list earlier this month, with 434,277 subscribers and counting. That’s helped the comedy group rack up more than 92 million views on their videos over the past three years. Reckis, Pumphrey, and Schnell also recently inked a deal to be worked into Machinima.com’s YouTube network and signed up with Starz for a few online original projects.

In anticipation of our Hollywood Web Television Meetup, I caught up with the group to ask them how they did it:

Tubefilter: How’d Reckless Tortuga come to be?

Jason: We started it originally to just shoot some videos with our friends. Eric and I had been making shorts and Lindsey was taking sketch writing classes at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. Lindsey wrote a couple of sketches to shoot for a comedy reel and so the three of us went out and shot them. We uploaded them to YouTube and Funny or Die as a way to pass them along to friends and family. We had a lot of fun and kicked around ideas of different things to shoot but it was not a serious effort, it was more like just a creative outlet since the three of us had day jobs.

A couple of months later, one of our videos got ripped off by this guy so he could put it on DIGG. He changed the title from Black Man in the Elevator to Racism in the Elevator. We were shocked to find out that his video had over 500,000 views while ours had 15,000, and because we didn’t have a logo on any of our videos nobody knew it was us. That was when we realized, A: We need to put a logo on every single video & B: That people like our stuff. So it was around then that we decided to keep making videos for the channel.

Tubefilter: How often are you creating content?

Lindsey: Well we are always creating content, I don’t think there is one day that goes by without us writing something or editing, shooting, etc. Currently, we are releasing at least one new video a week.

Lionsgate is set to bow its first original web series next month, and the early teasers for their redneck animated sendup Trailer Trash are already popping up on Hulu.

Nine of these 30-second “Family Moments” teaser clips are out so far, serving to intro viewers to Billy Bob (Stephen Kramer Glickman) and his down home hick cohorts. The whole world comes out of the altered mind of writer Todd Goldman, most known for his clothing line David & Goliath. Naturally, we’ve already confirmed that a Trailer Trash merchandising line is in the works.

We also confirmed that YouTube star Philip DeFranco has been tapped to voice a handful of yet-to-be named characters in the series. Other confirmed cast include country singer Laura Bell Bundy as Peggy Sue and Sam Riegel as Billy Bob’s brother Lite Beer. hud:sun Media’s Max Benator, who recently launched Genuine Ken on Hulu, is creatively producing.

Early glimpses at Trailer Trash seem to gyrate between King of the Hill and South Park, though it’s not clear if it aims to be as intellectually relevant as either. There’s a hint of Family Guy—the show that remains the most popular TV series on Hulu—and its middle class satire. But so far there’s now sign of a Brian character, a conduit for the higher-brow social commentary that gives Family Guy its timelessness.

YouTube’s Carnival channel is going to Brazil for Carnival.

The country’s most famous holiday, Carnival is an annual festival held in the early spring 46 days before Easter. With its roots in the pagan tradition of Saturnalia, Carnival means a last chance to indulge before the season of religious discipline known as Lent.

In other words, it is a huge, week long party. The country stops completely for almost a week and festivities are intense, day and night. According to Wikipedia, “the consumption of beer accounts for 80% of annual consumption” and “the government distributes condoms and launches awareness campaigns at this time to prevent the spread of AIDS.”

From the streets of Salvador, Bahia, one of the largest cities in Brazil (and carnival-rival only to sister-city, Rio de Janeiro), the YouTube channel will offer live feeds of Carnival from Thursday, March 3 to Thursday, March 8. According to the YouTube blog, as part of the transmission line-up, you’ll be able to:

Watch many of the city’s most popular carnival bands (called trio elétricos) including Ivete Sangalo and other Carnaval artists performing to the rhythms of African-influenced axé music in the midst of the enormous block parties unique to Salvador’s version of the Brazilian carnival
Feel the energy of the celebration through street-site coverage from different parts of the city throughout the six-day festival
Access video-clips of music, greatest hits, practices and performances from the festival uploaded to YouTube in high-definition

And on Saturday, February 19

For two days a year, the spectacle known as the Westminster Dog Show invades the popular consciousness with what is effectively Sundance for dog people. And I’m not talking the dress your your maltipoo in a striped wool sweater so he can saunter down the slushy streets of Manhattan. I’m talking the Best in Show type dog people. A spectacle all on their own.

Thankfully for those of us with heavy addiction to online video, there Westminster Kennel Club embraced the internet full stride this year with a healthy serving of almost every minute of footage shot over the two days. Who needs the USA Network’s three-hour coverage when you can cut right to the good stuff. The WKC All Access show is pretty astounding, even for cat people.

Have you seen the bearded collie?

I told you to expect to see more news from video game publishers announcing their entrees into the web series world.

The $60 billion global video game industry is comprised of tech-savvy, early-adopting consumers who already spend vast amounts of time looking at brightly lit screens. Why not create marketing materials for new game titles that double as compelling content for an audience that’s fanatic about being entertained by non-traditional entertainment?

Plus, video game publishers own or have access to key components that lie at the foundation of any good series. A great mythology or backstory, well-conceived characters, killer artwork, a built-in audience, and intellectual property. All the groundwork is there. You simply have to build a compelling story on top of it.

Ubisoft did it with Assassin’s Creed: Lineage. Capcom made an online original with Machinima.com for Dead Rising 2. And now BioWare is set to debut a live action web series to promote the upcoming March 8 release of Dragon Age 2. It’s called Dragon Age: Redemption, it’s based on the video game title, and it’s written, co-produced by, and stars Felicia Day.

Mike Snider at USA Today broke the news the creator and focal point of the independent web series uber-hit The Guild will play the role of Tallis, an elvin assassin who’s headstrong, fights dirty, and is equipped with a sarcastic sense of humor. We’ll see Tallis’ quest to capture a renegade magician and gather her own fellowship along the way across six episodes set to premiere later this year.

Self-Centered is a British mini-web series (web mini-series?) with an arresting, if a bit outlandish, sci-fi premise. Actress Lydia (Kellie Shirley) seemed destined to be the next big thing before spiraling out on drinking and drugs. She goes to sleep drunk in a bathtub after the latest in what we presume are a string of one-night stands and wakes up in a hospital called “The Clinic.” There, The Custodian (Simon Tcherniak) tells her that it’s the future, and the fate of the world depends on her landing the lead role in a new film called For All Our Tomorrows.

The premise sounds really silly, and it is, but the show manages to make it intriguing, mainly because the short length and frequent cuts back and forth allow them to keep things vague. Writer Steven Keevil does a great job of giving you just enough information to be curious, but not enough to be able to figure out what the hell is going on.