Tubefilter News

YouTube pushed forward today in its measured approach to live streaming video, launching YouTube.com/live with hundreds of its content partners including Revision3, Streamin’ Garage, The Vlog Brothers, Pop17 and WheezyWaiter.

Technically the service is still in beta, even though public testing of live streaming partner channels goes back to September of last year when a handful of shows went live with little chance to alert fans. This left channels like HowCast, The Key of Awesome and Rocketboom unable to mobilize any serious audience to tune in on short notice. Then in January, testing continued with Revision3’s Diggnation going live on YouTube and capturing about 17,000 live viewers according to Revision3.

Today with the launch of the new live streaming page on the site, it’s still just a handful of channels that are already scheduling live sessions, many of which are coming from Revision3 which has the infrastructure to handle live streaming and mixing on the fly at their San Francisco studio. Today they have Hak5, Bytejacker, The Totally Rad Show and GeekBeatTV going live in the afternoon.

YouTube itself will go live as well, broadcasting a kick off of The DigiTour at 7:00 PM (PT) today, and other partners like WheezyWaiter, JRSportBrief and WildEarthMedia. Yes, I did spend the better part of an hour today listening to The VlogBrothers’ John Green share his deep literary knowledge in his first live session.

Back in March we broke the news about The Digitour, the 6 week, 27 city national tour featuring top YouTube megastars including Dave Days, The Gregory Brothers, David Choi, DeStorm, MysteryGuitarMan, and Ricky Ficarelli. Well today the Digitour kicks off live from Google headquarters today, April 8, 2001 from 7 pm to 9 pm PT.

Broadcasting from the Official YouTube channel, the Digitour will embark on what may be the most comprehensive concert series yet featuring exclusively the stars of the YouTube music world. These performers boast one billion combined views and more than six million subscriptions.

“We are so thrilled that Google and YouTube are getting behind the Digitour and having us up here to help launch their live streaming platform. The excitement and energy of all this talent together playing in the Google Headquarters is amazing,” Sarah Evershed, producer of the Digitour and President of The Cloud Media,told Tubefilter. The performers themselves chimed in:

MysteryGuitarMan: It’s really amazing to be able to come to Google and play live because it allows us to collaborate in person but still be on YouTube.
The Gregory Brothers: Playing here is like returning to your mother’s womb and performing in her belly.
DeStorm: I’m ecstatic!
Dave Days: I never imagined I be playing live at Google! I thought I’d just be searching things on their website, it’s going to be awesome!
Ricky Ficarelli: The fact tht Google is supporting the Digitour and invited us to play at their headquarters blew my mind and I’m so excited to be part of this experience.

The Digitour live from Google HQ marks the start of YouTube’s initial roll out of YouTube Live, which will integrate live streaming capabilities and discovery tools directly into the YouTube platform for the first time.

After their first official stop in LA, the tour will hit Phoenix, Oakland, Houston, Dallas, Charlotte, Atlanta, Orlando, Miami, Washington D.C, New York City, Detroit, Chicago and many other cities, where the will return to LA for Digitour Debriefed at Tubefilter’s Hollywood Web Television Meetup

Maybe it’s because the major motion pictures were terrible, or maybe Kevin Tancharoen’s prologue and proof of concept for a Mortal Kombat reboot is just that good, or maybe this is the entertainment property based on a video game every pre and post-pubescent boy with a preference for arcade violence has been waiting for, or maybe it’s all of the above.

Regardless of what it is, Warner Premiere’s Mortal Kombat: Legacy web series is getting a helluva lot of hype. And rightly so. This one looks like it’s going to test other web series’ might. (Sorry!)

The nine-part anthology series is directed by Tancheroen and features a stellar cast of names recognizable to anyone familiar with the sci-fi and/or comic book-influenced entertainment industry. Those names include: Jeri Ryan (Star Trek: Voyager) as “Sonya Blade,” Michael Jai White (The Dark Knight) as “Major Jackson ‘Jax’ Briggs” and Darren Shahlavi (300) as “Kano.”

Each installment will highlight a particular Mortal Kombat combatant, reveal his or her reason for participating in the tournament, and provide “never-before-revealed insights into characters featured in the upcoming videogame as well as the game’s universe.”

NetherRealm Studio’s latest installment of the video game version of Mortal Kombat is set to hit stores April 19. Warner Premiere will debut the web series iteration on April 12 through a distribution deal with Machinima.com, hoping to tap into the gaming and media streaming company’s “500 million monthly video views and 50 million monthly viewers.”

Let’s say you’re the creator of a web series about a particularly irritating piece of anthropomorphic citrus with an aggravating, but addictive pension for puns. Let’s say this web series has 1.75+ million YouTube subscribers (which currently ranks 8th on YouTube the All-Time Subscribed List), 7.7+ million Facebook Fans, and an engaged online audience the likes of which even Ze Frank and Felicia Day have never seen. Let’s also say you want to come up with a product to sell that’s financially beneficial for you, fun for fans, and something other than a line of merchandise. There’s an iPhone game for that!

Entertainment management and content company, The Collective partnered with Thruster, the social, gaming, and entertainment division of Bottle Rocket Apps) to bring to the iPhone and iPad-owning masses an interactive iteration of Dane Boedigheimer’s super-popular The Annoying Orange web series.

Annoying Orange: Kitchen Carnage is a new take on the classic Paper Toss Game, where you sling fruit across a “beautifully rendered 3D kitchen.” It’s pretty to look at and just the right amount of difficulty to keep you engaged for absurdly long periods of time. Annoying Orange fans will also appreciate the 40+ “unique voice clips and animations from your favorite series characters!”

Here’s Boedigheimer’s take from the press release:

I think this game takes the humor and carnage that you see in the Annoying Orange web series, and transitions it perfectly to a fast paced arcade style game…I’m really excited that people get to experience the carnage that I experience on a daily basis. Oh, and one more thing…KNIFE!

Online video and web series news worth clicking today…

Workshop the series debuts Season 2 today on Hulu after inking a distribution deal with the network earlier this spring. Creator Nate Golon is calling it the first half-hour web comedy to premiere on the site, and looking back over our records, he may be right. “As an added bonus, we’ve also posted episode 2, since people were patient enough to wait an extra week,” said Golon on the launch. That means you’ll need to earmark about 44 minutes for this comedic look inside the world of struggling LA actors. 20 minutes in, we’d have to say it’s worth it. Six episodes total are due out this season, adding up to a whopping 132 minutes of comedy. [Workshop on Hulu]

ElfQuest came to life last night with the SAG screening and release of the “fan imagined” trailer for a would-be series based on the popular comic book series. While it sadly is just a trailer (below), producer-actors Stephanie Thorpe and Paula Rhodes did manage to pull together some of the most beautiful ladies of web series all in one project—Jessica Rose, Taryn Southern, Taryn O’Neill, Cathy Baron, Shannon Nelson, Melanie Merkosky, Casey Mckinnon, Traycee King, Jamie Blair, Angie Cole and Shanrah Wakefield. Oh, and on the other side of the coin are Sam Proof, Charlie Bodin and Beau Ryan. While the movie rights are tied up a Warner Bros., which just renewed its option on ElfQuest, it’s unlikely this will go much further without some serious blessing from the WB marketing team. [ElfQuest on YouTube]

The NCAA 2011 Men’s Division 1 Basketball March Madness On Demand platform isn’t the only online and mobile destination seeing an uptick in viewers on the go.

Tom Pickett, YouTube’s Director of Global Content Operations, revealed roughly 10% of the views on the world’s largest video sharing site now come from mobile. Going by the latest available ComScore numbers, that means YouTube approximately streams 14 million videos to mobile devices per month.

Andy Plesser at Beet.TV scored the interview with Pickett, where he disclosed the numbers in addition to a couple other interesting YouTube stats. Those include:

The YouTube Partner Program currently includes at least 22,000 creators, “hundreds” of which are making six figures a year.
In the case of at least one prominent YouTube partner, YouTube ad sales was able to increase his revenue per view 2.5 times in the past year.

The LeBrons first appeared in a series of Nike commercials that look more like failed audition tapes for The Klumps than a multi-million dollar advertising campaign. That may be the reason why the campaign didn’t last, but the Lebrons, for better or worse, did.

The family of four – each embodying and named after a different character trait of the 26-year-old NBA two-time MVP Lebron James, including Kid, Wise, Business, and Athlete – stars in a shiny new, long-anticipatedanimated web series called The LeBrons. If you think life lessons conveyed in the form of wacky cartoon hijinks in five minute installments is an excellent way to “empower kids to be their best,” this program is for you.

Maybe I’m letting my dislike of LeBron cloud my judgement. Maybe 22-minute episodes of the Brady Bunch and Full House, 60-second G.I. Joe Now You Know PSAs, and an hour and a half of The Cable Guy show you can educate children on how to be better people by way of sitcom. But I don’t think so.

Mark Malkoff is not one to back away from a challenge. This is the guy, after all, that lived for an entire month on an AirTran airplane, visited and consumed purchases at all 171 Starbucks locations in Manhattan in one day, had complete strangers carry him on their back the entire length of Manhattan, and even lived out of an IKEA for thirty days.

His work is almost a genre of its own, somewhere between comedy and feats of human endurance, as he congers up original methods of gently hacking the modern infrastructure around us. His latest video, “Big Wheel vs. Bus” (below) went live today on My Damn Channel, with Malkoff lining up to race a New York City MTA crosstown bus for one mile on 42nd Street.

“New York City buses can be very slow at times, so I decided to race a NYC bus one mile on 42nd street from 10th Ave to Madison Ave on a child’s Big Wheel,” Malkoff told us. “I was maybe 2 feet off the ground, and I had to ride in traffic, since it’s illegal to drive it on the sidewalk.”