Tubefilter News

Well that was awesome. This past Wednesday over 400 online video enthusiasts packed the Ballroom at Busby’s in Los Angeles for the most recent Tubefilter Hollywood Meetup, Beyond YouTube.

So far this year, we’ve focused a lot of attention on the YouTube platform—from our CES Panel Secrets of YouTube Superstars Revealed, to You’re a YouTube Partner—Now What?, and The Digitiour Debriefed—and we figured now it was time to see what other ways online video creators are reaching and building audiences, and how they’re optimizing revenue.

We pulled together a diverse panel of online video experts—Jason Calacanis, angel investor and CEO of Mahalo and This Week In; Dan Weinstein, Partner at the Collective Digital Studio (who manages the creators behind iJustine, Fred, and The Annoying Orange); Barrett Garese, Director of Content Partnerships at Blip.tv; Wilson Cleveland, Founder of CJP Digital Media, and Dane Boedigheimer, creator of YouTube phenomenon The Annoying Orange—and set out to discover whether YouTube is the be-all-end-all in online video, or rather an important component in a more complete online video business strategy.

Panelists, from left to right: Jason Calacanis, Dan Weinstein, Wilson Cleveland, Dane Boedigheimer, Barrett Garese
It turned out to be popular topic—tickets sold out days before the event, and Stickam reported over 50,000 viewers tuned into the live stream. The panel got quite heated at points (you’ll have to see the video of the live stream below to find out more).

Weinstein, partner at the Collective Digital Studio, which manages YouTube superstars, kicked off the panel with insight into a holistic online video strategy. “The greatest asset you have is your audience and your ability to communicate with them directly and mobilize them when you need to in order to leverage them for more opportunity,” he remarked. “A content creator nowadays has to be equal parts content creator and equal parts marketer, and has to understand how to reach their audience and more importantly how to engage their audience.”

The key to becoming a successful online content creator, Weinstein stated, is about “figuring out a way to make all these different and sometimes disparate platforms communicate with one another in a holistic marketing campaign, tying it all into YouTube—it is extraordinarily important in terms of building audience.”

Boedigheimer, who is one of the top video producers on YouTube, explained that his first video of The Annoying Orange wan’t meant to be a series. “I had been doing talking food videos for a while,” he commented. But the audience responded and each video started getting millions and millions of views (note: daneboe and realannoyingorange have over 1.25 billion combined upload views) he hooked up with The Collective to help him secure branding deals, launch a merchandising campaign, develop a tv show, and create his own *highly addictive* video game, Kitchen Carnage. Boedigheimer cautioned that as additional opportunities come it’s important to “always make sure to keep a focus on YouTube,” echoing Weinstein’s comment that YouTube is “where most of the eyeballs are—not to be understated.”

“Video on the internet is YouTube,” stated Calacanis,

San Francisco-based new media studio Revision3 has been on a talent acquisition tear, recently signing The Young Turks, Epic Meal Time, TechnoBuffalo, and Dan Brown. But when it came to the company’s latest original web series offering, instead of finding a YouTuber tearing up the subscription charts, Revision3 tapped internal talent.

Revision3 Chairman and Founder Jay Adelson is the host of the twice weekly web show Ask Jay, a kind of advice, tips, hints, and talk show for the budding entrepreneur. The program features Adelson as a talking head in streeotypical Bay Area venture-capital-slash-business attire (read: jeans and a solid colored T-shirt), disseminating a decade’s plus worth of business, investing and CEOing knowhow to the interested but uninitiated in a casual, straightforward, conversational tone.

Not so bad, right? Ask Jay is definitely not for the seasoned investor, but if you’re a member of the online and technophilic masses with a good idea, a decent product, and little to no business experience, this is the perfect passive crash course to familiarize yourself with some of the basics. Adelson’s also a great individual from whom to be learning those basics. In 2000, Adelson helped take data center and internet exchange provider Equinix public, and in 2008 was voted one of was one of Time’s Most 100 Influential People in the World.

UTA was one fo the first major Hollywood talent agencies to recognize the need to sign the emerging crop of online stars, grabbing Fred star Lucas Cruikshank, Ask a Ninja, and the SMOSH trio years before the other tenpercenteries got hip to it.

This proactive move was driven mainly by its upstart UTA Online division and a whole class of former UTA staffers like Max Benator (now at The Collective Digital Studio), Barrett Garese (now at Blip.tv), Jason Nadler, Jon Zimelis who now have branched out all over the digital entertainment side of Hollywood. The latest to set up shop are Nadler and Zimelis who teamed up with BestWeekEver and WonderWall founding editor Alex Blagg to launch Serious Business.

There’s a playful, tongue-in-cheek nature to their new shingle, evidenced by the HedCut drawings of the three partners (above) and kitschy Venn diagram to explain just what it is an internetainment firm actually does. I talked to Nadler and Zimelis on the phone today to find out more on their announcement of an initial funding round from Brave New Ventures.

The enduring popularity of Wicked (both the Broadway musical and the book) and the genius of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead are testaments to people’s adoration for classic stories retold from the perspective of seemingly minor characters. Alloy just announced it will make an addition to the genre, which a US department store chain hopes will be as well received as its predecessors.

Wendy is the story of Peter Pan retooled for female teens and tweens and told from the vantage point of the leader of the Lost Boys’ perennial love outside of Neverland. According to Marc Graser at Variety, Meghan Martin will play the titular character of Wendy Darling, who dreams of a boy named Pete (played by Tyler Blackburn), finds him in the real world, and then “needs to decide between the boy she loves and Pete from her dreams.”

The six-episode original web series is produced by Alloy Entertainment with Macy’s on board as the premiere sponsor. Graser notes Macy’s will offer Wendy songs and videos for download on Macy’s My Style Lab and items from the company’s Material Girl and American Rag retail brands will make appearances throughout the episodes.

Wendy will debut online September 15, with a book series and major motion picture film about Wendy’s journey in Neverland already in the works.

Video is about as hot a space as it comes right now. After more than a decade of fits and starts of the evolution of video on the internet, from painfully choppy clips in the pre-YouTube days, to the shaky first uploads, to the rise of mega channels, video on the internet has come a long way. And what’s set apart the real stars from the chaff is social. Video blossoms in our social graphs.

The latest nut to crack, is synchronous social video. So when Brian Norgard, Dan Gould and their crack team of coders were deep in the hourly iterations on their budding real-time conversation site Namesake, they noticed something happening around video. Big appointment viewing events, like President Obama’s live-streamed townhall with Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook HQ back in April, sparked a fury of synchronous conversation all around the event.

That moment spurred the team into a rapid stealth development of a site dedicated to watching videos with friends, all at the same time. Today the cover is coming off on their project, Chill.com, as it is quietly launching giving beta users a first look at their playful lounges for video sharing and conversation.

If you like your daily dose of Tubefilter’s online video news supplemented with a weekly video or two featuring our very own Marc Hustvedt’s talking mug waxing knowledgeable about new media things you should know, then do we ever have the web series for you.

In this second installment of our brand spakin’ new Tubefilter Video Blog, Marc breaks down how the #apeswillrise web video and social media campaign potentially brought in millions of dollars at the box office for Rupert Wyatt’s Planet of the Apes reboot, skims over some of this year’s New York Television Festival Independent Pilot Competition selections, coins the phrase ‘Al Thompson Hustle,’ and more.

Look for future installments of the Tubefilter Video Blog every Monday on our newly redesigned Tubefilter Channel on YouTube (which you can subscribe to by clicking here). Also keep an eye out for footage from live performances (like this Freddie and Jimmy Wong brothers collaboration).

FishBowl Worldwide is a Los Angeles production shop helmed by multi-Emmy Award-winning Vin di Bona, the television producer behind such hits as MacGyver, Entertainment Tonight, and America’s Funniest Home Videos.

CuteWinFail was FishBowl’s first big foray into digital media. The weekly series is a kind of reboot of America’s Funniest Home Videos for the YouTube generation meets Tosh.0 hosted by long-time YouTube star Toby Turner and produced in association with PhillyD’s DeFranco Inc. Each installment features a trio of user-submitted videos which Turner then dubs (you guessed it!) cute, win, or fail. It’s popular, garnering 180,00+ YouTube subscribers and 27+ million views in just over a year of programming. It’s good, too. You should give it a look.

FishBowl Worldwide’s second big foray into digital media was just announced. The company has begun production on a pilot episode for the original animated web series The Potts. Illustrator Todd Goldman and How I Met Your Mother executive producer Chuck Tatham created the program, which stars Richard Kind and everyone’s favorite woodchuck impersonator Dave Coulier. According to the release, the show will have a kinda balloon boy premise and “follow a family in search of fame and fortune who will do just about anything to get on reality TV.”

And we’re LIVE from the Tubefilter Meetup in Hollywood, California. Earlier this year we brought you one helluva discussion about the ins and outs of making it on YouTube from some of the best YouTubers and former YouTubers in the business. And for the current installment of the Tubefilter Meetup we’re taking that conversation to its next logical step.

We all know building an audience on YouTube is crucial to many successful online video businesses, but what’s beyond YouTube? How do successful online video creators leverage and exploit their creations outside of the world’s largest video sharing site?

Per usual, we have a stellar lineup of online video professionals for our panel, dripping with new media experience and internet knowhow, to answer those questions. Our very own Drew Baldwin will be moderating a group of individuals who need no introduction. The Annoying Orange creator Dane Boedigheimer, Mahalo and This Week In CEO Jason Calcanis, CJP Digital Media Founder Wilson Cleveland, Blip.tv Director of Audience Development Rick Rey, and Collective Digital Studio’s Dan Weinstein.

Not in the audience in Hollywood tonight? No problem! Our good friends at Stickam have provided a live stream of the event, which you can tune into below or watch on Facebook. And if you have a question, feel free to shout it out in the chat room or hit us up on Facebook or Twitter. We’ll do our best to get at least one or two answered from the viewers at home.