Tubefilter News

As any self-respecting Doctor Whooligan knows, the Torchwood: Miracle Day companion series Web of Lies is releasing its tenth and final episode this Saturday, one day after the Torchwood: Miracle Day finale airs on Starz. The series is a unique blend of short three to five-minute motion comic episodes (a la Showtime’s Dexter: Early Cuts) that contain mini-games (puzzles, word combinations, etc.) that must be solved in order to advance the story.

It’s an interesting way to tell a side-story and certainly fleshes out the Torchwood universe, but that fleshing out will cost you. A Web of Lies preview is available on YouTube, but the entire 10-part companion series is available exclusively through an app for the iPad and iPhone, costing $2.99 for the entire catalog or $.99 for three episode bundles.

For those of you not watching Torchwood: Miracle Day, the story follows Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) and Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles), former members of the British organization Torchwood (which – again as any self-respecting Doctor Whooligan will tell you – is an anagram of “Doctor Who”), as they are pulled into a conspiracy revolving around “Miracle Day.” Miracle Day is the day when everyone, everywhere, is no longer able to die (which is explored in some disturbing ways and makes for some great inebriated/ntellectual conversations).

Web of Lies is a parallel story that revolves around Holly (Eliza Dushku) as she tries to unravel a conspiracy connected to Miracle Day after her brother is shot. Holly’s story is connected to an event in 2007 featuring the abduction of Captain Jack Harkness and Gwen Cooper’s attempt to rescue him. Flashing back and forth between the two timelines, Web of Lies follows the plot of the television series, but offers new information only available to people watching the digital series.

The New York Television Festival announced its official selections for the 2011 Independent Pilot Competition at the beginning of August. Earlier this month, the seven-year-old celebration and showcase inspired by the independent film movement with the goal to “construct a new and innovative platform for program development” released this year’s programming schedule. Be sure to [...]

You’re the online video hosting, distribution, and advertising network of choice for thousands of creators of original web series. You just launched a newly redesigned, curated destination site, intended to highlight and showcase quality online programming in an easily navigable environment for current and would-be consumers of online video content. Because you often sell out of your ad inventory, you’re hoping this new site will attract more viewers, which will create more inventory against which you can sell more ads.
You’re certain the new site will naturally accrue more users over time, but you know it doesn’t hurt to accelerate that growth by marketing the property and its premiere content. And if an advertiser that wants to target young creators and consumers of online video programming is on board to craft a branded campaign that shares a few of your marketing initiatives, even better.

Such is the case with blip.tv and the Capital One Journey Student Rewards Card. Labor Day and Freddie Mercury’s birthday already came and went, but there’s still one week left for the the new media company’s and the credit card for college kids and vikings’ branded Endless Summer campaign.

The initiative is part four-week promotion for the Capital One Journey Card and part four-week promotion of quality online programming. Here’s the gist direct from blip.tv Director of Audience Development, Rick Rey:

Endless Summer is a curated festival that celebrates some of our favorite new web series, hosted by producer/actress Paula Rhodes (A Good Knight’s Quest) and sponsored by the Capital One Journey Card for students. Each week we’ll handpick a selection of awesome blip.tv episodes from different genres – like Sci-fi, Comedy, Women in Web Series, and Gaming – and we’ll release an interview with one of the web’s most popular producers from that genre (including Tony Valenzuela, Sandeep Parikh, Taryn Southern, and Sean Plott).

Produced by Big Fantastic, the weekly interviews give viewers a chance to meet the talent behind some of the web’s best content and learn about their journeys to becoming successful web series producers. After the interview, Rhodes also goes on a fun summertime journey of her own with, accompanied by that week’s interviewee.

If you’re wondering how the Capital One Journey Card is integrated into the campaign, those italics in the paragraph above should give you a hint. “Capital One wanted a content experience that drove home the brand essence of the Journey card,” explained blip.tv SVP of Advertising Sales & Creative Services, Evan Gotlib, “So each of the four content creator interviews represent the crux of the integration.”

The brand message and the Capital One presence is further reinforced by the branded Endless Summer page, content bumpers and end caps on the videos, and a sleek Facebook widget on both the blip.tv and Capital One Facebook pages.

Gotlib told me the deal came to be after a few weeks of conversation between Capital One’s agency, Horizon, and the blip.tv sales team. He also revealed the campaign carries with it a priced tag “north of quarter of a million dollars, production plus media combined.”

Series on the internet, or web series if you’re in the camp that still embraces that term, generally fall into one of a few general buckets. There’s all kinds of buckets of branded series, of high-polish dramas, sketch comedies, and at least a dozen or so types native to YouTube. But the bucket that gets the worst wrap of all, and with due cause, is the dreaded made-for-acting-reel series.

That bucket, it turns out, seems to be rampant in actor-heavy enclaves of Los Angeles and New York, and a large chunk of the inbound emails we get every day. Take Self Storage, an indie comedy series on KoldCast TV (and YouTube) that dropped us a review request at the launch of their second season last month. It’s in the bucket for sure, but it’s at least in the better half.

Julie Mann stars alongside Kimberly Trew as Dana and Shoshanna, two down-on-their-luck college grads somehow relegated to shacking up at a self storage facility. I’m still not sure what exactly they do for a living, but their loyalty to each other given the situation is applaudable. I mean even Johnny B Homeless couch surfed solo.

As an overall series, Self Storage is slightly flawed, though not from the likes of Ocean’s Eleven and Hung star Eddie Jemison, Dave Holmes and other very watchable actors here. It struck me a few episodes in that it wasn’t the acting at all that derailed this for me. Mann is every bit adorable and there’s a charm in her and Trew desperation as Dana and Shoshanna.

In June we told you how video game publisher Activision was looking for top Hollywood talent to create linear programming for Call of Duty Elite, the still-in-beta subscription-based social networking and multiplayer online addendum to the ever-popular Call of Duty: Black Ops and the yet-to-be-released Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.

Since then, Activision has found its top Hollywood talent.

Activision tapped acclaimed director Ridley Scott, his acclaimed brother Tony Scott, and their acclaimed production outpost RSA Films to produce Friday Night Fights. John Gaudiosi at The Hollywood Reporter writes the original web series will be exclusively available to those subscribers of Call of Duty Elite’s $50/year premium service package and will “focus on video game competitions between rival groups” (like Republicans and Democrats) that “will settle their differences by playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3″ (instead of by way of fisticuffs, which would be way too violent. ZING! Video game violence humor!).

Activision also tapped Will Arnett and Justin Bateman’s DumbDumb production shop to create two more original web series for Elite. The animated Cocked Hammers and the screen captured n00b tube!, which will feature comedic play-by-play commentary from Arnett and Bateman over user-submitted CoD:MW3 gameplay clips.

YouTube’s Margaret Healy once called William Hyde, better known online as TheWillofDC, “the Oracle of YouTube” for his savant-like crunching of the mountains of stats and numbers within YouTube’s top subscribed channels. He’s arguably one of the foremost expert reporters on YouTube channels, so it’s no wonder we’ve had Will has a semi-regular contributor to Tubefilter.

Originally from the East Coast—and yes, once living in Washington DC—Will built up quite the following himself with his twice-weekly main shows, Winners & Losers and YouTube News, bringing his channel to a lofty 307,688 subscribers as of this writing.

We caught up with Will for a little one-on-one time on the Tubefilter interview couch at VidCon 2011 with Dana Ward, watch the full interview here:

This year Tubefilter has been exploring how YouTube and its partner program have opened a clear path to online video monetization.

And as we’ve learned from our last panel Beyond YouTube, ad revenue share on YouTube is just the tip of the iceberg: producers are maximizing their online video business on platforms like blip.tv and with their own websites, smartphone apps, merchandising, licensing, and more.

It’s clear that being a successful online video producer is about being both a creator and a marketer. But how do you engage and drive audiences?

Join us at Social Media Week Los Angeles as we explore how to get social in online video—and discover what tools and techniques help market your online video business, and help you measure your success.

Thanks to our Meetup Sponsor theStream.tv for hosting the panel and the networking mixer!

Monday, September 5, 2011 wasn’t only the last day women can wear white in the presence of Anna Wintour without feeling less than until the Spring equinox, it was also the birthday of one of the greatest musicians to ever live and second-most famous Zoroastrian (behind Zoroaster) of all-time.

Freddie Mercury would’ve been 65 years young this year. Google celebrated the occasion with a particularly pretty, cool-toned, pastel-colored collage of a Google Doodle with soft drawings of Mercury in larger than life poses throughout various stages in his career. An animated video accompanied the image, conceived by Google Doodler Jennifer Hom and featuring a sometimes 8-bit Mercury, Queen, and screaming fans flashily enacting a rendition of Don’t Stop Me Now, a greatest hit of Queen that Mercury wrote.

The video’s fantastic, but it has something in common with previous video accompaniments of Google Doodles celebrating famous celebrities’ birthdays. There’s no view count. Kinda strange, right?

Google’s uploaded at least 1,380 videos to its official YouTube account. That includes everything form tutorials on how to add a picture to Google Images (currently at 14,484 views) to lessons on how to search the stars in Google Earth 4.2 (currently at 21,046,486 views). Out of all those videos, only Charlie Chaplin’s and Freddie Mercury’s B-Day celebrations don’t list the view counts.