Tubefilter News

How many views does a web series based on one of the most popular video game titles of all time need in order to convince executives at a major motion picture studio to revitalize an all but defunct, decade-and-a-half old film franchise based on the same video game? I have no idea, but in the case of Kevin Tancharoen, Mortal Kombat, and Warner Bros. the answer is roughly 50,000,000 views across nine episodes for an average of about 5.5 million views a piece.

New Line Cinemas announced plans to make a live-action, big screen reboot of the fatality-fueled movie franchise thanks to the wild success of Tancharoen’s nine-part Mortal Kombat: Legacy web series. The studio tapped Tancharoen to direct and Legacy writer Oren Uziel to write the feature, which is expected to be produced for well under $100 million.

Much like the web series, the flick is expected to premiere around the debut of the next installment of the Mortal Kombat video game franchise. Legacy debuted on April 18, 2011, while Mortal Kombat (aka Mortal Kombat 9) hit game store shelves a day later on April 19.

This past Thursday over 250 of online video’s top creators, producers, talent, executives, agents, distributors, and technologists packed into theStream.tv’s Hollywood Studios for Tubefilter’s Social Media Week LA panel, Social Video On Steroids.

This time around we pulled together a panel of social media experts with a focus on online video: Greg Goodfried, Founder and President of EQAL, which now builds influencer networks around celebrities and brands since its hit lonelygirl15 took YouTube by storm and and defined “viral series”; Garret Law, Co-Founder and COO of Attention Span Media, an audience development agency that created Dorm Life, the most watched series on Hulu, and supported Simon Fuller’s If I Can Dream and CJP’ Digital’s Leap Year; and Amber Buhl, Director of Sales at Klout, whose social influence metric is now included on the resumes of prospective job applicants.

Our panelists highlighted best practices in social video marketing, discussing the best places to socialize video to maximize click-throughs and increase viewership.

We kicked off the discussion with a question from a member of the audience, who asked about the tactic of hyper-distribution: should you publish your videos everywhere in multiple locations, or focus on a single network and build and audience there?

Among the panel there was consensus that marketers’ attention should be focused on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, where the biggest audiences live. Buhl noted that although Klout actually collects data from over 11 sources in computing the Klout score, the relative importance of the “Big 3″ cannot be ignored. Or as Goodfried put it, “YouTube is the beast.”

Marketing online video with the standard social media tools isn’t enough, however, and our panelists have developed new ways to maximize social media to put social video on steroids. Law announced Attention Span Media’s new product, Fanatical, that segments audiences on social networks so that marketers can target communications with greater relevance. According to Law, Fanatical enables marketers to turn down the fire hose and focus on “sub-audiences” that will be most receptive to the message, which cuts down on noise.

George Watsky’s mind moves fast, almost as fast as his mouth. So when YouTube’s breakout rapper-poet dreams up something as profound as the “Ultimate YouTube Video,” then it would behove you to take notice.

This all began with a challenge, one of Watsky’s mythical live performances, the time in question being back in April on The Ellen Show where he dared, or really provoked the video community to : to help him create the perfect YouTube video. Word for word, one very talented such video creator, Jorge Farfan took him up on it.

Farfan’s CyberToons channel had already won over fans on YouTube with his cartoonified renditions of life inside the land of the video creators. (For a crash course watch his “Secret Life” and “Shane Dawson and Friends” videos to catch up.)

Celebrities these days get roped into side projects, or really ‘joint ventures’, about as often as they get asked to do a Funny or Die video. Some transcend the noise and work out swimmingly—see: Will Ferrell and, well Funny or Die—while others make us all wonder who got fired over that brain fart—see: The Kardashian Kard.

So back in June of 2010 when teen-pop rockers The Jonas Brothers jumped head first into the original online content game, launching Cambio, there was reason to be skeptical. Licensing your name to a clothing line is one thing, but feeding the round-the-clock daily content beast against entrenched incumbents like Yahoo, MSN, Teen.com, MTV and, well YouTube, was a whole other league.

Luckily Jonas Group honcho Kevin Jonas Sr. (the father of the pop stars), had AOL jointly invested in the venture, and that brought a solid ad sales team and cross-network integration into teen-slanted network of sites like Just Jared Jr., JSYK and Celebuzz. But even AOL sites need to hold their own in terms of audience, and after a strong start, traffic dipped on Cambio to less than half of its first few months.

To break out of the just-another-teen-site rut, Cambio needed to win in original entertainment content, not just eek out margins on SEO-friendly headlines. The move was to hire Nathan Coyle out of CAA, the digital agent behind many higher profile branded entertainment deals like Ford-Snickers-Sprint backed ControlTV, Mattel in Hulu’s Genuine Ken, and even the Neutrogena integration back in lonelygirl15.

The first two new original series that will live exclusively on Cambio are the much-anticipated Aim High from exec-producer McG and Warner Brothers, and CliffsNotes Films from Mark Burnett. The latter is a series of humorous animated shorts based on the popular CliffsNotes® Literature Guides—back when I was in school you actually had to READ CliffsNotes, welcome to the future, kids.

Aim High is set to bow October 18th on Cambio and Facebook, and stars Twilight’s Jackson Rathbone and Friday Night Lights’ Aimee Teegarden

Universal Cable Productions is a growing part of the NBC Universal family best known for creating popular shows for Syfy and USA Network (including Battlestar Galactica, Eureka, Psych, Royal Pains, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, and more). This particular arm of NBCU is looking to expand into short-form content in the near future. More specifically, Universal Cable Productions is launching a digital studio which will create both original web series and digital content derivative of its pre-existing TV properties.

A television network/studio entering the digital marketplace isn’t anything new, but Comcast shuttered the NBC Universal Digital Studio (which was behind online originals like FCU: Fact Checkers Unit and CTRL) earlier this year. That makes this story particularly interesting.

In an Ad Age article from last July, an NBC Universal spokeswoman explained Comcast’s decision to close the digital studio in the following terms: “Going forward we plan to focus our digital efforts and investment on content that’s supportive of our on-air programs, providing our audience with additional content that further engages them in our shows.”

The forthcoming UCP Digital Studio will create derivative content, but according to this job posting, the new entity will also create original web series, which appears to go against the rationale for shutting down the original NBC Universal Digital Studio in the first place.

So, what gives? I’m not sure. But, given the NBC powers that be want to focus more on derivative programming, it is possible they simply tapped a division within the company with a good track record in the genre (after all, UCP was responsible for the Streamy Award-winning series Battlestar Galactica: The Face of the Enemy and has a history of creating programming with a cult following) and the development of original web series will be far less of a focus. It’s also possible NBC Universal wants to give the whole digital studio business another go with a brand new team.

The practice of broadcast, cable, and paid television networks releasing installments of series on the internet to generate marketing buzz and whet consumers’ entertainment appetites before their broadcast, cable, or paid television network premieres is nothing new. HBO was doing it with Funny or Die way back in 2008 and, at the time, it still was only something relatively new.

So, it’s nothing new but good to know if you’re looking to get a head start on your self-prescribed regimen of primetime television consumption this fall that a number of installments of a number of shows were or will be first available online.
Viewers could catch the premiere of Fox’s New Girl with Zooey Deschanel (unfortunately it’s not this Zooey Deschanel) on Hulu, iTunes, Fox On Demand and on Deschanel’s “ultimate entertainment destination for smart, independent and creative females” HelloGiggles.com. Meanwhile, ABC’s Facebook fans had an opportunity to see Revenge before the rest of the Western world and The CW released Hart of Dixie and Secret Circle on iTunes before TV.

Now, NBC will release the third installment of Christina Applegate and Will Arnett’s comedy Up All Night and the second installment of Whitney Cumming’s eponymous Whitney before their Wednesday and Thursday night broadcast premieres. Where can you watch them? Yahoo.

Instead of bowing the episodes early on a premium, on demand streaming video service in which NBC has an ownership stake, the powers that be opted to show the shows early on one of the most highly trafficked destination sites on the internet. Why? There are a couple obvious answers.

Last week, Mark Cuban posted a web series link on his Google+ page with no kind of info beyond the following: “And here is eps 2 of The Vault.” That begs the questions, how did Cuban become involved with this original web series and what exactly is The Vault?

I’ll answer the second question first. The Vault is a online original program about a fictional TV game show. Not much of the story has been revealed (there’s only two full episodes live and online, along with a handful of teasers on Youtube and the show’s website), but perhaps the level of mystery is what makes this show so appealing to Cuban and viewers.

In the pilot, we follow contestant Henry as he conference calls with the other nine players in the Vault to help them solve puzzles. However, Henry and the players quickly discover the Vault is a bigger challenge than anyone expected. By the end of the pilot, we know there are at least 150 rooms in the Vault – each with a character and a puzzle to solve.

The program is a product of co-creators Aaron Hann and Mario Miscione, who met through a mutual friend. The pair bonded over their love of LOST. When the show ended they decided to fill the void with a project of their own. “There’s a lot of comedy on the web and not much drama,” Hann said in an interview. “We want to make a show we want to watch. And we know there’s an interest.” The Vault was born.

Blip.tv, the online video platform of choice for the creators of more than 50,000 original web series, recently gave its destination site a major overhaul. The blip.tv team’s intent with the new diggs was to provide a more easily navigable home for its featured programming, encourage more viewers to watch more of that featured programming by marketing it on site with more enticing artwork and better editorial decisions, and basically modernize its previously mid-2000′s aesthetic.

Now, to go along with its new site that was a few years in the wanting, blip.tv’s added a feature the website always should’ve had since its inception. Subscriptions. Viewers will now see big blue “Subscribe” buttons “just about everywhere on blip.tv.” Click, allow blip.tv to integrate with your Facebook profile, and you’ll be notified via e-mail whenever new episodes of your subscribed-to shows are available.

It’s obviously nothing novel, but the subscriptions feature is kinda like replacing a mediocre website with one that’s most definitely way better than mediocre. You don’t need to be an online video analyst to know it can only positively effect views, consumption, and users’ overall satisfaction with the service.