Tubefilter News

I recently heard an OK Go song when I was inside a Jamba Juice (I’m sorry David Rees), a Barnes and Noble, or some other national food or retail chain that plays a corporate headquarters regulated list of tracks both “hip” and “family friendly.” I thought, “Hey…this is OK Go! They’re probably being played in all of the [insert name of whatever national food or retail chain I was in here]s across the country. I saw Damian Kulash speak at a conference. He seems like a great guy! Good for them! This song is the one with the dogs.”

Then I thought, “Hey…that’s interesting. My mind makes a near instantaneous association with the video. Have I ever done that before? I mean sure, when I listen to Thriller I can picture MJ doing that graveyard dance, but the song and the video are still two uniquely distinct and different things. I can hear Thriller or I can envision Thriller. I can’t do that with OK Go.”

But that makes sense. The band’s members might be out of Chicago and DC, but the band itself was born on YouTube. Possibly the first and most renowned of a growing number of musicians who are known as much for their music videos as their musical talent. You can’t disassociate OK Go from their online videos no more than you can listen to Nirvana without feeling the Seattle grunge. It’s not only where the band came from, it defines the band’s work.

And all that’s okay. And all that means though OK Go’s music might not necessarily be on par with talents like Andrew Bird or a My Morning Jacket, their music videos most certainly are. That’s why, if you’re a 50+ year-old enduring children’s entertainment brand that’s forever been able to maintain relevancy with adults by incorporating things hip into your marketing and programming and you’re producing a cover album of your most popular songs, OK Go is a great band to tap to create the music video for and sing your single.

Lauralee Bell is not afraid to try something different. It’s not all that surprising given the pedigree she comes from—her parents William J. Bell and Lee Phillip Bell created a younger, edgier experiment that would become the highest rated daytime soap of all time, The Young and the Restless and later The Bold and the Beautiful. Only now, she’s using the internet as her entertainment playground.

And this isn’t Bell’s first time swimming in the online entertainment pond. The longtime Y&R star’s 2009 series Family Dinner picked up attention on Funny or Die as she captured the all-too-typically dysfunctional antics of a dinner with relatives like Phyllis Diller and Cloris Leachman as her raunchy grandmas.

But this time around, she’s trying a new model for sustaining a show on the internet—one that doesn’t depend on the now pervasive pre-rolls and lower-third ads disrupting the viewers’ limited attention spans. Just Off Rodeo is a scripted comedy set in a Beverly Hills (adjacent?) boutique, where fashions from the show itself are available for viewers to purchase all within the same site.

You’re a 60+ year-old folk-rock musician who sat ringside at Ali-Frazier I, released a Greatest Hits album in 1976 that sold over 11 million copies worldwide, dabbled with and overcame a very public drug addiction, won five Grammy Awards, has somehow been able to not only maintain, but grow your fan base, and may or may not have ever been to Mexico. What are you – one incredibly talented (though not necessarily always liked) musician with nearly a half-century’s worth of professional experience – to do in your spare time at your modern cabin of a home in Berkshire County Massachusetts? You’re going to teach guitar.

James Taylor introduces his guitar lessons on JamesTaylor.com with a gentle smile, soothing voice, and the apparent technological knowhow of whatever you call someone who refers to signing up for an email list as “pulling the trigger” and disables embeds on their YouTube videos. He explains how online video demonstrations showing a little bit about what he does on the guitar have been on the top of his to-do list for some time.

But before Taylor begins with those lessons, he teaches you one of the most important things in guitar. How to put on fake nails.

The video begins like a midday infomercial for a fake nail manufacturer who spent too much on a celebrity endorsement and skimped on the production. “Human nails are not strong enough to put up with the repeated punishment fingerpicking style puts them through,” Taylor says. So, a reinforced plastic polymer that easily adheres to your own homegrown nail is preferable.

One of online video’s greatest challenges as a burgeoning entertainment industry (that’s trying to steal advertising dollars from established entertainment industries) is measurement.

Sophisticated systems and practices to facilitate strategic ad buying based on trusted(?) analytics have had time to develop over the past 80+ years of television. Industry executives and organizations are still arguing over what constitutes a view after a decade or so of watching videos online.

There’s clearly a lot of ground that needs be covered on online video’s path towards measurement standardization and universal advertiser acceptance. Today, comScore and YouTube just made a big step in the right direction.

The internet marketing research company is now able to provide “a comprehensive and granular view of the unique audience within” certain channels (or a grouping of channels under the umbrella of one network) on the world’s largest video sharing site. YouTube Partner Reporting is comScore’s latest offering under its Video Metrix measurement service. The product displays “individual audiences for partners and their channels” (like Philip DeFranco, Revision3, Machinima, and many more), which will enable “advertisers to more-easily create and optimize campaigns across specific channels to reach desired target audiences.”

It’s Monday, and that means the latest Tubefilter video blog is here served up fresh and ready. In preparing for this week’s vlog, I stumbled across one of the most disturbing, and frankly, terrifying trends I’ve seen while pouring through the bowels of YouTube videos. Apparently it’s become a thing in some circles to record yourself opening up a package of your brand spanking new reborn dolls. You just have to see this (below):

Now after contemplating with the years of missed therapy that have led to this, it’s time to move on to some online video news worth knowing. Also featured in the vlog this week is In Transit, a no bullshit travel-for-travel’s-sake docu-series from creator Peter Bragiel. We’ve been fans of his show for a while, and now he’s up to his ears in the brown Mississippi shooting his latest adventure as he and his brothers play Tom, Huck and Jim working their way down the great River into the Gulf of Mexico. They just posted an update video which gives a glimpse of what to expect when they make it back and cut it all together.

Then there was the release of effects-laden action video “Dubstep Guns” from Sam and Niko of Corridor Digital. This time they teamed up with Mike Diva and put it all to music from Miami-based musicians Klaypex. “This experience was just a blast the whole way through,” Klaypex’s Johnny Atar told us over email. “Corridor Digital & Mike Diva’s capabilities and creative talents are nothing short of amazing.” (Hint: you can download their full EP for FREE right now on their site.)

Gymkhana is a motorsport where a driver with no concept of human mortality must maneuver by way of reversals, 180 and 360 degree spins, figure 8s, a helluva lot of drifting, and other advanced stunt driving skills through a course peppered with obstacles as fast as he or she can. It’s kinda like parkour but with a car.

DC Shoes is a an American clothing manufacturer that specializes in bulky but comfortably footwear for skateboarders, extreme athletes, and those that want to dress like skateboarders or extreme athletes. Ken Block is the 43-year-old co-founder of DC Shoes, professional rally driver, three-time X Games Rally Car Racing medalist, current Chief Brand Officer of DC Shoes, Gymkhana enthusiast, and the star of one of the best brand sponsored web series on the internet.

It started on April 6, 2009 when the YouTube channel for DC Shoes uploaded a bonus video of Ken Block having fun on a Gymkhana course driving a 2,000+ pound vehicle around and around an actual living human being riding a Segway, in addition to other tricks the motocross kids are doing these days. Gymkhana Two followed on June 1, 2009, marketing Ken Block’s new Rally TeamWorks Collection by drifting around and through abandoned warehouses and construction vehicles. The two part Gymkhans Three debuted on August, 24, 2010 with a music video by Cool Kids followed by Block navigating steep banks on a 1924 Paris roadway.

Gymkhana Four debuted this week after anticipation and hype by such onlinee video hotshots like Epic Meal Time. It’s very Hollywood. Literally.

There’s a lively debate circulating around this week in online video circles, one that has been brewing for some time now. It’s all about names. Or, specifically, whether the term “web series” should still be used today. Credit to What’s Trending creator and host Shira Lazar for stoking the fire with her tweet.

With that followed a post by producer Wilson Cleveland, who for the most part agreed with Shira, writing:

Whenever possible, I avoid the term ‘web series.’ Sometimes a client will insist upon qualifying whatever we’re producing as such (typically a scripted, longer-form series) and I do my best to convince them we’re better off going with ‘original series’ and here’s why: The average media consumer judges their entertainment by the platform it’s released on. They just do. I’ve always believed one of the more obvious roadblocks online programming faces in achieving mainstream awareness (and mainstream money) lies with how the mainstream perceives the web itself.

Add to that the shifting tide at Hulu, which recently dropped its Web Originals category in favor of grouping all of its shows, both TV fare and produced-for-internet, together. Vuguru, with its recent release of The Booth at the End on Hulu, prefers to call it a “multi-platform series” and Vuguru president Larry Tanz is even proposing a panel at SXSW this year with the headline:
Stop Calling It a F@$king Web-Series.

I told you YouTube was getting way more serious about music discovery. Twice! If you don’t believe me, you can check out the world’s largest video sharing site’s newly redesigned destination for all things audio-visual. YouTube.com/music is now home to (in addition to those Billboard style top 100 charts) a few more features that will help you find new forms of aural pleasure. Those features include:
Recommended videos and artists based on the music videos you’re watching.
Local concert listings in your area matched with artist videos.
Curated daily play lists and selections from individuals at credible music publications including SPIN, Vice, and XLR8R.
Featured YouTube music vloggers, like Anthony Fantano of The Needle Drop.
And if you still don’t believe me that YouTube is getting way more serious about music discovery, check out today’s YouTube logo. It looks different, right? The customary red background of “Tube” is replaced by a kind of sea green and placed next to a sound equalizer. That’s because famous French house music producer and DJ, David Guetta is today’s YouTube.com/music’s celebrity curator. He handpicked an Electronica playlist for the internet’s enjoyment.

Music is a big deal for YouTube. And YouTube, like its parent company Google, likes to have fun with its logo in order to promote big deals. Except instead of calling the newfangled logos Doodles, YouTube calls them Yoodles (at least they do in their URL structure, e.g. http://www.youtube.com/music?feature=yoodle).

You may have noticed the YouTube logo looked different yesterday, too. That’s because the Red Hot Chili Peppers were YouTube Music’s celebrity curators. Tomorrow, Lady Gaga will take the reins and YouTube will sport a new Pop-inspired logo and on Monday YouTube will feature Eminem’s Guide to Hiphop and another new Yoodle.