Tubefilter News

Have you perfected your 6 ways to rock the Hollywood Web Television Meetup? If not, you should brush up on your skills, because our next big shindig is just around the corner.

On Wednesday, February 16 Tubefilter presents the latest installment of the event that brings together the most dynamic group of online entertainment professionals in the industry. Top creators, producers, talent, advertisers, executives, agents, distributors, and technologists will all descend upon Busby’s East for some mixing, mingling, and an engaging and edifying panel under the banner of You’re a YouTube Parnter – Now What?

Successful creators, producers and execs will discuss and reveal their best practices for making it big on the world’s largest video sharing site with more than 144 million unique monthly visitors. We’ve assembled a stellar lineup dripping with knowledge, opinions, and intimate industry knowhow:

Ben Relles, barelypolitical
#15 YouTube Most Subscribed of All Time
767,261,646 Views
Ben Relles is Vice President of Programming and Development at Next New Networks, a leader in original programming entertainment on the internet with over 1.5 billion views since its launch. In this role he works with some of the most innovative producers in online video to help build their video content and grow their loyal audiences.

Ben also founded and runs the comedy network Barely Political which has been viewed over 800 million times and is one of YouTube’s 10 most viewed channels of all time. Ben launched Barely Political in 2007 when he created the Obama Girl series of videos, and later he co-created the show The Key of Awesome which became one of 2010′s most popular series.

Rafi Fine, TheFineBros
#54 YouTube Most Subscribed of All Time
609,000+ Subscribers
Award winning filmmakers Benny & Rafi Fine are comedy writer/directors with over 100 million views on their videos online with their independent production company Fine Brothers Productions which is currently a top 50 YouTube channel with over 600,000 subscribers. The Brothers were hailed as “Genius” by TV Guide, have created content and consulted for major networks and companies (Warner Bros, Comedy Central, MTV etc.) and have been featured in nearly every major publication (Variety, Times, Huffington Post, Deadline etc.).

In a shift from its usual hyper-exclusivity, this year’s Oscars are focusing on accessibility. For the 83rd Academy Awards on February 27, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has unveiled its latest marketing campaign, You’re Invited, which for the first time welcomes the public to get behind the scenes with an all-access coverage live streaming event.

Anne Hathaway and James Franco, the hosts for this year’s show, have put together some catchy promos for the You’re Invited campaign, including a Rocky-esque training montage that features Franco saving Hathaway from a wardrobe malfunction—an apt reference considering the ABC broadcast is the second most-watched TV event after the Super Bowl.

The goal is to make the Academy Awards more inviting for younger audiences. For the first time, Oscar.com will offer a peek behind the scenes with an ambitious live streaming show spanning the red carpet to the control room to the press room where Oscar winners get 45 seconds for additional thank-yous, Mediaworks reports.

Pixar’s Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter, who is also on the Academy’s board, met with Albert Cheng, ABC’s Chief of Digital, and Disney-ABC Television President Anne Sweeney to put together what Cheng describes as “the biggest live-streaming event ever.” The live stream will feature 20 to 30 cameras—red-carpet footage will be available for free ad-supported streaming, while the other more behind-the-scenes camera

Maybe it’s her crazy sounding last name (hint: I have one too), maybe it’s the promo ‘art’ they sent us to go along with it, but either way when news came out of Ustream that they are hosting a live chat with Candice Swanepoel and two other Victoria’s Secret models, we bit. And we’ll be tuning in to the live stream at 3:00 PM (PT) today just to make sure we don’t miss anything.

The South African supermodel Swanepoel, who recently cracked the top 20 of AskMen.com’s 99 Most Desirable Women’s list, will be joined by fellow models Lily Aldridge and Erin Heatherton in the half-hour ‘Ask an Angel’ segment for fans as part of the kickoff of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in New York today. The models will be answering questions, perhaps with a Valentine’s Day theme, directly from the Ustream chat room. (Hint #2: Be careful, typing is hard to do with drool on the keyboard.)

Swanepoel is also picking up her game with her own YouTube channel, which has quite the following in South Africa. Yet to break the 1 million view mark, the channel is mostly video cam diaries and a few glances behind the scenes of her photo shoots. With a little TLC this channel could pop as the 22 year-old model gets better known in the States.

If you’re a starlet or It girl who’s out of the limelight and gained her faux-celebrity status from having 3.7 million friends on a now second-tier social networking site and by hosting a reality show where both men and women compete to be the objection of your affection, there are two ways to reclaim your relevancy:

1) Release a sex tape.
2) Go on Between two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis.

In the latest installment of the Funny or Die original series, Tila Tequila sits across from Galifianakis, hitting softball questions out of the park with a kind of composure that’s all too receptive to our bearded host’s amorous advances. Then Jennifer Aniston shows up, welcomed by half-MIDI-fied Friends theme music blaring from a Staples “Easy” button.

Aniston’s not frustrated with Tequila, but she becomes quickly agitated with a Galifianakis who’s clearly only interested in talking to social networking’s first celebrity social networker. Our host doesn’t give her the bag-on-the-head-Matt-Zaller treament, but it’s close enough.

Showtime is the new HBO. I mean that both figuratively and literally. In the past five years the premium television service has significantly upped the quality of its original programming to the point where it’s at least on par with, if not better than, the content you’ll see on Home Box Office.

In order to create that kind of quality – the kind that spans multiple seasons, attracts paying subscribers, and upon which you can build out your talent roster, create more acclaimed content, which in turn attracts more paying subscribers – Showtime tapped HBO talent.

Michael C. Hall and Edie Falco are the leading man and lady, built up to stardom by their stints on HBO series, who are big reasons why Showtime is doing so well. Hall kicked it off, transforming from a gay undertaker into a serial killer with a heart of gold. Then came Falco, who became a morally ambiguous nurse after being a morally blind mafioso’s wife. The success of the former-HBO-and-now-Showtime stars gave network executives the idea to tap other big names for talent. Enter Matt LeBlanc with Episodes. And now YouTubers with Short Stories.

Showtime reached out to some of the most talented content creators on the internet’s largest video sharing site to create a series of shorts. Trevor Noren, Showtime’s Creative Director of Digital Content, explains the initiative as a way to “bring the [Showtime] brand to a new audience, while at the same time showing the work of these amazing artists to our subscribers.”

Let’s get right into it. The Immoral Dr. Dicqer is weird. It’s just plain weird. That’s okay. Weird can be good.

But let’s put the weird aside for a moment. What I’d like to talk about for the next three sentences is the question of when to send your show out to critics for review. I think the crucial rule of thumb is when you have enough content to show off to the world that allows us a strong enough look into characters. I’m not entirely certain that The Immoral Dr. Dicqer was far enough along for review, but they sent it, so here I am. Okay, now back to the weird.

The series is set “in the distant future,” which is apparently “The Year of Our Lord 1988.” Some people are, for reasons never made clear in the pilot, hybrid human and animals. Or people really like to wear animal masks. And I think a baby has a gas mask on for some reason. I should note I watched this twice, clear-headed, and coming off a good night’s sleep, not in a Lebwoski haze.

We’re introduced to Dr. Dicqer, who is immoral, and the ladies all love him as their OBGYN. He’s clearly sleazy, and a bird man (pretty much Rorschach with a bird mask on) is stalking him. Mrs. Dicquer is from Hell’s Island (so named to scare off the pirates), and the not-so-good doctor was at one time a pilot, but gave up that life to become a family man. The bird man is apparently from Hell’s Island island and they’re going to make Mrs. Dicquer choose to come back. For some reason.

Man, I don’t know.

Online video and web series news worth clicking today: Wait, Olivia Wilde is splitting from her son-of-an-Italian-prince husband (Tao Ruspoli) after 8 years of marriage? This is big news around the celebriwebs today, and mildly fills the void that Natalie Portman’s recent knock up has caused. So as we polish up on House trivia for her, we are reminded of Ms. Wilde’s exploits into online video with this circa 2008 election video (below) for the State of Ohio featuring her liberally adorned in Ohio State garb. It’s surprisingly bad. But so are most people’s first videos, right? [Funny or Die]

My brother’s wife thinks men who don’t like cats hate women. So, she considers me the King Leonidas of misogynists.

It’s not that I dislike cats, I don’t get them. Furry little felines can be fun if they know leetspeak, but aside from an innate ability to understand how to use a litter box and the benefits of having something around that likes to constantly rub up against you, I don’t get the appeal. Especially for dudes. When I see pictures of guys with cats, I think how much happier they’d be with dogs.

Much Love Animal Rescue, LA Animal Services, and Mark Moll are starting to convince me otherwise.

In an effort to “encourage men across the country to get in touch with their feline side and to raise awareness about feline adoption,” Moll (an advertising guru formerly with CPB) conceived of a seven-day event to inform the general public of the fact there are a lot of men in the world who like cats. Cat Guy Week began on February 7 and runs through February 13. Between those dates, men can adopt felines from Much Love for $50 and will receive “special discounts, free shots and microchipping from any of the LA Animal Service shelters.”

In order to promote Cat Guy Week, Moll teamed up with director Kevin McCalester and NYC production company Ghost Robot for a quartet of shorts featuring cat-loving men doing things men do. There’s a biker, a bartender, a boxer, and a golfer, each in his element with his preferred pet of choice by his side.