Tubefilter News

It’s Mother’s Day! Good job, moms! I’m sure your children are celebrating your special day with appropriate gifts (especially if you live in Norway and not especially if you live in Afghanistan) and those children are not at all recovering from yesterday’s activities of drinking too many mint juleps and shouting “Pants on Fire!” at one another while wearing funny hats by now looking around the web for some last minute eCards to send to your way.

That is a totally random example that I just made up and isn’t the personal experience of the individual who is writing this post, but if you happen to have that experience there’s one website you can always count on.

JibJab has been fulfilling your last-minute eCard needs since the site debuted its Sendables section in October 2007. This the company has no less than 15 video eCards and 17 picture eCards especially made for today. Here’s a screen grab of the moving picture one I made for all the Anglophiles/un-Americans in the audience.

Jerry Seinfeld—perhaps inspired by Seinfeld character Jackie Chiles’ original web series on Funny Or Die (which received the comedian’s blessing)—has launched his own web series coinciding with the 30th anniversary of his first national broadcast appearance.

The series, Jerry Seinfeld Personal Archives, features daily clips from Seinfeld’s 30 years of stand-up performances and appearances on television. Each day features three new clips selected by Seinfeld himself. The catch? They are only available for 24 hours before they are replaced by three new clips.

Personal Archives spans Seinfeld’s entire standup career starting from the ’70s, and includes appearances on talks shows hosted by Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, David Letterman and Jay Leno, and his classic stand-up performances from Seinfeld.

Seinfeld explains:

When I was ten years old, I started watching stand up comedians on TV. I fell in love with them and I’m just as fascinated with stand up comedy today. When I started doing TV, I saved every appearance on every show I did. I thought it might be fun to go through all of it and pick out three bits each day that still amuse me for some reason or another. I’ve also included stuff I’m doing now, and I’ll be adding new stuff as I go. Somewhere out there are ten year olds just waiting to get hooked on this strange pursuit. This is for them. I’m just hoping somehow it will keep this silliness going.

To kick off the series today, Seinfeld presented three bits: “The Fattest Man In The World,” a clip from The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson from 1981 (his first appearance), “Do The Horses Know They’re Racing?” from the 1998 HBO Special I’m Telling You for the Last Time, and “No Room In The Newspaper” from The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson from

Rumors had been circling of a retreat from web originals over at Sony’s 4-year-old online video network Crackle, as the usually heavy flow of short-form web series that would be its bread and butter over the past few years had dried to a trickle. Previous short-form (sub 10-min episode) web tentpoles like The Bannen Way, Angel of Death and Jailbait had found a business a morphing themselves into whatever medium was buying. But not enough to greenlight dozens of them this year.

Then comes a bit of a bombshell yesterday afternoon in Variety, as Eric Berger, Executive VP of digital networks at Sony Pictures Television who oversees Crackle and other properties, announced the network was moving to a long-form strategy. It’s a pivot for the network, citing a shift in the marketplace and amongst its own audience who had grown fond of the site’s heavy helpings of ad-supported (aka: free) television and film content. Full episodes of Seinfeld, Married with Children and Bewtiched are featured heavily now alongside thousands of full-length feature films like Ghostbusters, 21 and The Da Vinci Code.

“As more and more long form content comes online, not just on Crackle but in general,” Berger tells us, “and you look at our portfolio of TV and movies, as well as the platform expansion, into not only mobile but onto tablets and connected TVs like Roku, Google TV and Sony Playstation, where viewing takes place on the large screen, it leads us to longer form content as the natural fit.”

That, and the international markets for TV and DVD content, a key part of Crackle’s sales strategy for its originals, is evolving. The Bannen Way, which saw a healthy DVD run as well as a some international TV pickups, was re-cut as a 90-minute feature. But now longer individual episodes, “where where the characters and story can breathe a bit,” as Berger notes, seem to be more in demand both internationally and on EST (electronic sell-through) partners like iTunes.

Three new half-hour-long projects, still in script phase at this point, were announced with plans to go into production this summer for fall releases:

• Monster Heist from Ghost Whisperer creators of Kim Moses and Ian Sander about a creature (non-human) group of thieves

• a currently untitled paranormal series, reportedly in an anthology “in the vein of The X-Files,” from Sons of Anarchy producer Chris Collins

• Strand Street, from Milo Ventimiglia, Kevin Townsley and Russ Cundiff, about “a rookie undercover cop who infiltrates a gang in his childhood town”

Kentucky’s three most notable exports are baseball bats, bourbon, and horses. The premiere event of the year venerating the latter will take place this Saturday, May 7 at Chruchill Downs in Louisville.

The 137th Kentucky Derby will feature a full field of 20 horses with names more befitting Twitter handles than multi-million dollar animals racing around a left-handed track for what’s called “the most exciting two minutes in sports.” The top contenders are Uncle Mo (this guy’s favorite), Stay Thirsty (this guy’s favorite), Twice the Appeal (this brand’s favorite), and Pants on Fire (this guy’s favorite).

That should be all the info you need to know for casual conversations about this weekend’s race, but if you’re wanting a crash course in Derby-related whatnot for conversation centerpieces at your fancy pants Derby party with Boyz II Men(?!?), these online videos should do the trick.

The Wall Street Journal’s sports reporter Reed Albergotti visits two-time Derby-winning jockey Chris McCarron’s horse rider training facility in Lexington, Kentucky. Albergotti learns the importance of wall sits and not eating, while coming away with a great insider’s tip on how to pick the Derby winner. Go for the horse with the jockey with the biggest quads.

Mint juleps are the beverage of choice for any red-blooded Derby watcher. Here, Yankee cocktail master Eben Freeman shows you how to mix one up.

At least 93 million individuals worldwide visit one of the 32 localized versions of Paris-based video sharing site Dailymotion on a monthly basis. Those aren’t YouTube numbers, but they’re certainly not insignificant, and can ideally be leveraged to get content exclusive to Dailymotion a ton of views.

The latest piece of content exclusive to Dailymotion that will ideally be the beneficiary of those views is a nerdcore zombie apocalypse web series called The Dead Must Die. It’s created by South African-born, UK-based, and Marmite-eating director Matthew Snyman and features two stereotypical gamers both named Steve (one’s played by Stephen Russel, the other by Johnny Helm) who find all their first-person shooter training left them ill-prepared to actually fight hordes of undead.

Dailymotion and Alex Barkaloff produced the seven-episode series that’s based off of a Twitter account about how to deal with a zombie-ridden end of days scenario. New installments will debut weekly every Friday at 12AM EST. No word yet on the deal points other than the series is exclusive to Dailymotion during its initial release.

Looks like Kelly and Erin are at it again. The duo from The Office’s Streamy Award-winning series Subtle Sexuality have finally released their long-awaited follow-up to their “smash hit” music video ‘Male Prima Donna.’

Today Subtle Sexuality released a new music video ‘The Girl Next Door,’ a Taylor Swift style country-pop anthem featuring Kelly Kapoor (Mindy Kaling) and Erin Hannon (Ellie Kemper), along with a Behind the Scenes video presented by characters from The Office:

The music video also features Ry Howard (The Office Co-Executive Producer B.J. Novak), who sings the hook:

Now looking back 40 years later
My one regret is choosing not to date her
The hot girl wasn’t that great
She was a bad mother, she was always late
Shoulda gone for the girl next door from the very start
But it’s too late cuz she died of a broken heart

The full lyrics and special thanks are worth checking out on the Subtle Sexuality site—Kelly thanks Kate Middleton “for bringing royalty back.” The video was directed by Kaling who also directed The 3rd Floor, another companion series from The Office.

With web spin-offs Kevin’s Loan, The Mentor, The Accountants, and Fanisode, The Office and NBC have done an excellent job engaging loyal fans during the off-season and between episodes.

Spring blooms across this fine country with all sorts of bright perennials, including the much scorned college admission rejections letters. A slight variant, the garden weed of your bouquet of paper, is the tenebrous Waitlist letter leaving over-achieving high school seniors in a maniacal state of self-cogitation. This, combined with an abundance of free time [...]

StoryCorps is an independent nonprofit organization founded in 2003 with a mission “to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of our lives.” The org accomplishes this mission by setting up interview and recording locations nationwide. Individuals reserve a time at one of many storybooth or mobilebooth locations, download the DIY storytelling instruction guide, or rent a StoryKit, tell their stories, and receive a free CD with their recorded conversation.

Over 30,000 interviews from more than 60,000 participants have been documented this way and preserved at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress for posterity. A select few of those 30,000 interviews also get animated.

StoryCorps uploaded its first animated interpretation of a story back in May of 2010. Cartooned iterations of the storytellers appear on screen and act out the sometimes sincere, sometimes anthropomorphic, and sometimes hyperbolic action. It’s like a version of Doogtoons that tugs at your heartstrings.