The second I think I have Burning Man figured out (a kind of counterculture week long camp for artistically oriented Gen Xers who practice radical forms of self-expression by way of wearing no clothes, consuming Schedule I – V controlled substances, building things out of wood, and lighting fires), I talk to someone who’s actually [...]
Goodnight Burbank, the critically acclaimed original web series all about awkward workplace chemistry of the cast and crew at a Southern California local area news network, just joined the likes of Childrens’ Hospital, Sanctuary, and In the Motherhood in the pantheon of web shows picked up by TV. Hopefully it will fare more like the former on its new medium than the latter.
Mark Cuban’s HDNet acquired the rights to Goodnight Burbank creator and star Hayden Black’s fourth and most recent 30-minute iteration of the five-year-old online original. Lacey Rose at The Hollywood Reporter broke the news and notes the deal came to be after Cuban reached out to Black via Facebook message. The cable television channel will broadcast Goodnight Burbank’s season one in full beginning October 12. Until then, you can still catch the episodes on Hulu.
This isn’t Cuban’s nor HDNet’s first foray into working with original web series. Cuban and Michael Eisner both made an appearance at SXSW Interactive in 2008 in order to preview and promote the The All-For-Nots, a web show from Dinosaur Diorama Productions and Eisner’s Vuguru that hates working at the Apple Genius Bar.
I think they are starting to get it: Netflix is doing House of Cards. Hulu has its own Spurlock-umentary. YouTube is even pitching multi-million dollar original series. Online networks are developing television-style original programming, leveraging their massive audiences to drive viewership and premium ad revenue. Some are playing nice, focusing on content that doesn’t compete with traditional television, while others are clearly throwing down the gauntlet.
And now it’s Yahoo’s turn (again).
In April we reported Yahoo was planning to launch a star-heavy slate of original series, and yesterday Variety’s Andrew Wallenstein reported Morgan Spurlock, Niecy Nash, and Judy Greer will be among the celebrities that will be featured in eight short-form Yahoo original series rolling out in October. Three of the shows are from Electus, run by NBC’s former Co-Chairman Ben Silverman, and one is from Vin Di Bona’s FishBowl Worldwide Media.
Regardless of their star power and production pedigree, those shows should have little trouble finding an audience. Yahoo has a massive one. It generated 47.3 million video streams in July, with original series earning 27 million. And Yahoo can leverage that audience, too. Last March, Yahoo’s most popular original series, Primetime in No Time, broke 500 million streams.
Last December, Yahoo dropped UGC video from its site, focusing solely on original programming, but if Yahoo is trying to get a taste of TV’s $85 billion advertising business, the company’s still doing so cautiously. Although the new slate is moving away from heavily branded series like Purina Animal All Stars, Yahoo’s programming lineup is all reality shows—it’s not yet taking any risks on original scripted series.
According to Yahoo’s Head of Video Erin McPherson, however, the October slate is just the beginning; 2012 will see bigger stars and longer formats—possibly even scripted series. But by that time, Yahoo may have some even heavier competition.
Big surprise! There’s another kinda uber-short-form original anthology web series that I’m in like with. This one comes from Break.com and Ted Raimi’s Spooky Voodoo Pictures and may very well scare you a little if you give it a few seconds.
Morbid Minutes is comprised of 10 or so episodes of 160 or so seconds of dramatic buildup of sorta terrifying tension followed by 20 seconds of sometimes horrific release. There are a lot of qualifiers in that last sentence because, while all the Morbid Minutes aren’t scream-out-loud scary, they either have the semblance of scariness or a at least healthy serving of early 1980s schlock.
That the production value of the installments looks to be on par with Evil Dead may be no coincidence. Ted Raimi is Evil Dead (and Spiderman) director Sam Raimi’s little bro. Surely one of big bro’s and the horror genre’s most seminal works could have had an influence on Ted, especially when he chose to step behind the camera. According to Michael Gingold at Fangoria, the younger Raimi created the series with his production partner Johnny Wickham and wrote and directed all the episodes, while Danila Koverman headed physical production.
If you’re reading this there’s no question you’ve seen Lauren Francesca before, you just might not have known her name. She’s a chameleon of parody, morphing from pop-sexy to nerdy-cute almost effortlessly. It was Lady Gaga who really put Lauren on the map in late 2009, after her Key of Awesome parody of Bad Romance broke through with a polished, fantastical interpretation, featuring the fictional “Lord Gaga” as the true impetus for the song. (The full video, which now sits at over 32.7 million views on YouTube is embedded below.)
Her follow-up performance as Ms. Gaga in March of 2010, this time re-imagining the Telephone video with Beyonce, proved she wasn’t a one-and-done performer, even scoring Entertainment Weekly’s best web moment in 2010. What’s remarkable is that the native New Yorker has become one of YouTube’s top performing stars—videos in which she’s featured have grossed over 200 million views—without herself even having her own major channel.
Lately, she’s been building up her channel, iwantmylauren, with more personal looks at one of the most recognizable figures on YouTube.
The best advice my sixth grade English teacher ever gave me was show, don’t tell. So here’s our recent video interview with Lauren when she dropped by the Tubefilter office in LA to talk about how she’s launched an impressive acting career off of YouTube. She also shares some advice on getting started and tells us about that new show—Space Girl—she’s working on with The Key of Awesome guys.
Jonathan Paula, Jory Caron, and Riley McIlwain are members of the microwave gang who’ve amassed a cult following on YouTube since May 2007, when the trio wondered what would happen to a light bulb if exposed to electromagnetic waves of 2.45 GHz for a sustained period of time. (Spoiler Alert: The thing snap crackle pops.)
Four years and 299 episodes later, Is It a Good Idea to Microwave This? has long since outgrown its initial pyrophilic fan base and become a an internet staple, amassing over 550,000 YouTube subscribers and 100 million views. Recently however, July, Paula, Caron, and MIlwain announced they would cease production on said internet staple, citing such reasons as there are not an infinite number of dissimilar things to microwave so it’s getting kinda hackneyed and it’s better to go out when you’re burning up on top instead of slowly fizzling away
We recently caught up with the M-Dubs crew (Editor’s Note: That’s my name for the microwave guys but you can feel free to steal it.) to talk to them about their run on YouTube, when the show caught fire, trollin’, and prosthetic limbs.
It’s Monday, and that means it’s time for our the latest from our weekly video blog of online video news worth knowing. This week we jump back into the ongoing parlor game of which mega-company is going to buy up Hulu. And now that Apple quietly dropped TV rentals from iTunes last week, we dug through the numbers to find out that Steve Jobs is indirectly the largest individual shareholder of Hulu stock. How so? Watch the video (below) for the run down.
We also profile Einstein the Talking Texan Parrot, who’s channel is growing on YouTube as he picks up the pace of his displays of super-cognitive language skills. Maybe he picked up Final Cut?
Strange Talk is an indie pop band out of Melbourne Australia that international advertising agency Leo Burnett tapped to play host to one of the most innovative online branded entertainment videos to date.
I imagine the campaign was conceived when some savvy creative on the Cheer laundry detergent thought, “It costs a not insignificant amount of money to produce a high quality piece of video content,” asked him or herself the question, “I wonder how we can get more people to view a single piece of high quality content multiple times,” and then came up with an easy answer. YouTube annotations.
Content creators have used YouTube annotations since their inception to create Choose Your Own Adventurey (Editor’s Aside: Did you know Choose Your Own Adventure trademarked and owned by Vermont-based Chooseco LLC? You do now.) online video stories, compelling viewers to make binary or ternary decisions which will impact the action on screen.
Burnett and Procter & Gamble use YouTube annotations in a much different way in Strange Talk’s Climbing Walls music video. The annotations appear around uncharacteristically colorful items and images on and about Strange Talk’s members and equipment in a not-so-subtle reference to the uncharacteristically colorful clothing one can obtain after washing with the newly redesigned, binary-looking Cheer 2.0.
Burnett and P&G then encourage viewers to click on said annotations by offering up real prizes (in the form of gift certificates, clothing, gear, and free trips to SXSW) to those who do. But the innovative part is that they get you to watch the video week after week by changing the annotations. New ones appear on and about the same uncharacteristically colorful objects with links and entries to new contests to win new prizes.
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